(Extrapolated by Open Hands from her notes for a plenary workshop entitled, "The Prophetic Voice and the Consciousness of History: 500 Years of Colonialism," led by Mab Segrest during the gathering of That All May Freely Serve, Stony Point, New York, April 6, 2002. Copyright 2002 (c) Mab Segrest. All rights reserved.)

"One of the main premises is an understanding of colonization. We might have used the word oppression. But we use the language of colonization because it brings to mind a picture of one people invading another and systematically taking over, economically, culturally, racially, sexually. Using this notion of colonization, the systematic takeover of another, we have applied it to sexuality and have explored the notion that sexuality, like race and economic class, is both a tool of colonization and has been colonized itself." (From the Spirit of the Lakes newsletter, Currents, Vol. 12, #2).

In colonialism, all of the resources of the colony were/are sent to the colonizing/dominant country for use in their development. What is the result? Economically, patterns of permanent poverty and underdevelopment; emotionally/spiritually: not being able to live for or as oneself, a sense of huge constraint by systems we did not put in place; a loss of ourselves. How did this come about?

(The leader may want to chart a timeline for the group, beginning with 1500 and ending with the present year. A simple drawing of a world map may also help your group in visualizing the relationships of continents and nations described here.)

Phase One:

The Genocide of Indigenous People and the Enslavement of Africans

1492
"Columbus sailed the ocean blue," "discovering" a "new world" in a search for trade routes to India. Spain and Portugal became the first two European countries to colonize Latin America and the Caribbean. Columbus' journals reveal the colonizer's mentality that he brought to these shores: (1) he thought it remarkable that people indigenous to this new territory had no private property, and took it as a sign of their childishness; (2) he remarked on how beautiful their bodies were and concluded, "they would make good servants."

Questions
How did Columbus's initial responses indicate how colonialism would work? Issues to point out: Private ownership was crucial in the colonizing process. For colonizers to extract the most profit for the "mother" country, they needed to own the land and its resources, and have a source of exploitable labor. Indigenous people were in the way of this scheme, because they had a different, spiritual relationship to land.

1500s
The beginning of the slave trade in the Caribbean. By 1650, the indigenous population of the area Spain and Portugal controlled shrank from 66 million to 3.5 million people, due to diseases and people being worked to death in silver mines. The silver sent back to Europe would be used to finance the beginnings of industrialism. One Jesuit priest remarked, "Who could have know that so many people would have died in so short a time."

Questions
How could they have known? Did they care? What happens to body/mind/spirit when some bodies are worked to death?

Bartoleme de las Casas campaigned to protect indigenous people, arguing that they had souls, part of a debate within the Catholic church on this question. He suggested, given the huge death tolls of indigenous people, that colonizers bring in Africans as slaves instead. Slave labor did not become profitable in the "new world," however, until Europeans began putting sugar in coffee and cocoa, raising the price of commodities of sugar, coffee beans, and chocolate being grown on plantations in the Americas.

Questions
What was the relationship of addictive substances (coffee & sugar, later tobacco as the main cash crop in Virginia) to the development of slavery? What implications are there for us today in terms of our relationship to addictive substances such as tobacco, alcohol, sugar, cocaine? What is the impact on our communities when addiction is profitable?

Phase Two

Beginnings of Colonialism in the United States

1619
The first Africans are brought as slaves to Virginia (the first slaves in the English colonies). The English came to the Atlantic coast as part of their colonizing process. In the first several decades of slavery, it emerged in Virginia in its American form: lifetime servitude, inherited status, and dehumanizing attitudes and ideas about Africans as justification. Rape and sexual violence were characteristic of the treatment of Africans on plantations, with plantation owners asserting almost total control. There was no recognition of marriage or custody rights for enslaved people, whose families were often divided when members were sold to other owners.

Questions
What did such a system of domination and concentrated power do to mind/body/spirit? To definitions of the family? Is there a difference in the legal family, the theological family, the biological family, and the emotional family?

1664
The Virginia legislature debated whether Africans had souls. They decided that they did but could/should still be enslaved. For both indigenous people and Africans, the alternative to being considered "human" was to be considered "animal," including being more and wrongly sexual.

Questions
How was the church complicit in colonialism? Should any religious institution have the right to decide who is human? What does slavery, one person and group owning another, do to mind/body/spirit?

1679
Bacon's Rebellion was an uprising of slaves and poor whites in Virginia against the white plantation elite. It was repressed, and showed the danger of cross-racial class alliances. Slave owners began to stress a common European identity, and the term for Europeans in Virginia shifted from "free" or "Christian" to "white."

Questions
What was the cost to poor white people of bonding around power and oppression? What are methods today that "divide and conquer" oppressed people?

Phase Three

Manifest Destiny of the New Country

1776-89
The English colonies break from England, the "mother" country, resenting that their resources are being used for England. "No taxation without representation" was part of the issue. Keeping the benefits of colonial processes on American shores was another. The Declaration of Independence named "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" as inalienable rights. The U.S. Constitution did not abolish slavery and designated African slaves as 3/5 human for the purpose of determining propertied white male votes.

1787
Captain James Cook "discovers" Hawaii.

1803
The US purchase of the Louisiana territory opened up the South and West. Settlers pushed West, believing that it was their destiny to conquer and colonize the continent. Thus began the long series of wars with Indian nations and broken treaties that ended at Wounded Knee in 1890.

1808
The international slave trade was abolished.

1830
Abolition struggles intensified. The tension between slave labor and "free"/wage labor heightened as settlers spread west.

1832
The removal of Southern Indians began in President Andrew Jackson's administration.

1845-48
The U.S. went to war with Mexico, winning and claiming the Southwest in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

1848
In Hawaii, colonizers instituted the Mahele, or division. Land was privatized, divided up into parcels for individual ownership, dismembering the �aina and the dislocation of Kanaka Maoli people. Promoted and designed by the missionaries, white ruling families claimed 4.2 million acres of the island, and indigenous Hawaiians were forced into labor on the growing plantations. Privatization of the land paralleled privatization of the body. Heterosexual marriage was being enforced by the church and displaced more fluid expressions of sexuality and more diverse ways of partnering.

1850
The Gold Rush in California brings more settlers, including immigrants from China fleeing destabilization of China, whose markets and resources were being forced open by European powers.

Phase Four

Reasserting Control

1860-65
The slave states secede, and the Union wins the battle of slave v wage labor, industrial v agricultural system, North v South. The 13th amendment abolishes slavery; the 14th guarantees that "life, liberty and property" not be taken without due process of law, that people born in the U.S. are citizens, and that the Bill of Rights applies to the states. The 15th amendment protects the vote.

1893
The Hawaiian monarchy is overthrown by thirteen white planter elite, backed by United States troops. They imprisoned Queen Lili�uokalani in the Iolani Palace. The Blount Report, by Special Investigator James Blount sent by President Cleveland, condemns the illegality of the overthrow. Cleveland calls for a restoration of legitimate government that never happens. The indigenous resistance movement intensifies, and in 1897 95% of Kanaka Maoli sign a petition resisting annexation.

1898
Having completed its "manifest destiny" by taking over all the land between the Atlantic and Pacific, the United States wins a war with Spain and takes over Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam.

1900
After a brief period of Reconstruction in the South, whites reassert control through violence and fraud, establishing segregation ("Jim Crow") and voter disenfranchisement. The Dawes Severalty Act divides land on reservations into individual parcels of "private property" more easily bought or stolen. Asian immigrants complete the transcontinental railroad. Industrialism and finance capital create huge divisions of wealth and poverty, cycles of boom and bust. Corporations are granted the status of "bodies" under the 14th amendment, at a time when black and brown bodies/souls/spirits are losing the rights gained in the years after the Civil War.

Questions
What is the relationship of capitalism to racism during this period? Should corporations be considered bodies in legal terms?

Phase Five

Decolonizing and Recolonizing in the 20th Century

The first half of the twentieth century brought a surge of movements in European colonies for independence. Europe controlled 80% of the globe by 1913, and power conflicts among European nations caused two world wars. Gandhi's campaign for Indian independence was one such anti-colonial movement. The struggle of the Vietnamese was another. In 1919, with the Russian Revolution, Russia emerged as a large Communist counterforce to European imperialism and capitalism. The "Cold War" that erupted between capitalist and communist, or "First" and "Second," worlds, brought "Third World" countries into its conflict. The War in Vietnam was a major example of this tendency.

Newly independent countries had few economic resources and were brought back into neo-colonial relationships with the developed world through loans. The Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s challenged the Jim Crow laws and voter disenfranchisement in the South, and was fueled by the example and energy of liberation movements all over the globe. The freedom movements of "people of color" helped to ignite a "second wave" of feminism, gay/lesbian liberation movements, and the disabled at a time when US products faced increasing competition from overseas markets. Faced with falling profits, increasingly large and powerful corporations decided to cut production costs by attacking labor and lowering wages and environmental standards. This led to huge numbers of corporate mergers, "downsized" workforces, and factories automating or moving overseas for climates "friendlier" to business. A huge increase in deficit spending by the Reagan administration in the 1980s and a huge increase in the military budget were co-factors. The fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s brought the emergence of "globalization," the freedom of capital to move across borders.

Costs of Colonization: A More Intimate Look

Invite your group to spend time looking at the following particularly powerful passage that shows on many levels the cost of colonization and racism to people caught up in its systems. What happens to the body/mind/spirit as a result of colonization, the facilitator can ask again, or recap.

A summary: extreme systems of control, personal and social alienation, huge "boundary" violations, addictive patterns of consumption; splits in which privileged groups (men, the rich, white people, heterosexuals) are seen as having more "mind" or "spirit" and oppressed groups are seen as being primarily, or only bodies; extremes of wealth and poverty; economic "development" dependent on patterns of deliberate "underdevelopment."

Divide the group into pairs and give each pair a copy of the paragraph below. Explain that it is taken from Mary Boykin Chestnut's Diary from Dixie, civil war diaries written by a white upper-class woman whose husband was a Vice President of the Confederacy.

Be sure people understand the context: The scene is a slave auction, where Chestnut witnesses the grief of an African enslaved woman whose husband and children have just been sold to another slave owner, guaranteeing their separation.

Ask each pair to spend 10 minutes reading and thinking about the quote together. What does it show about the cost of racism and colonialism to the black woman? The white woman?

Have the group come back together, and discuss the responses. You can work through the paragraph one sentence at a time, or ask each group to report what it made of the quotation.

"A mad woman taken from her husband and children. Of course she was mad, or she would not have given her grief words in that public place. Her keepers were along. What she said was rational enough, pathetic, at times heart-rending. It excited me so much I quietly took opium. It enables me to retain every particle of mind or sense or brains and so quietens my nerves that I can calmly reason and take rational views of things otherwise maddening."

Questions
Why is the woman "mad" (crazy, or angry, or both?)? What view of sanity does Chestnut have? Does she associate the madness with the loss of her family, or with her public grief? (It seems to be the latter). What is Chestnut's spontaneous response? Why does her response, her sympathy and "excitement," scare her? What does she do then, why opium? What are the constraints or limits that Chestnut is under as a woman? Is there a gender element to her fear of expressing herself in public? A class element?

What happens to her under the influence of opium? Is it a failure of courage on her part? What is the difference in "mind," "sense," and "brains?" What is the effect of a rationality that is split from feeling and from sensation? What is the effect of taking rational views of situations of extreme oppression and pain? What might she have done instead of taking opium? (Draw out a range of responses, small and larger). In general, acknowledge the extreme system of domination and control that both women were operating under but assert that each of us in whatever situation still has responsibility for our own humanity, and to uphold the humanity of others.

Now bring the discussion to the present. How are we like the women in this drama? When have we had people numb themselves to our pain? When have we numbed ourselves to theirs? Ask for examples of such moments, and how participants responded. Emphasize the political importance of action in such moments, and the spiritual importance of such action. What spiritual resources do people have to keep them from turning away from pain and exploitation, to strengthen their resolve and courage to act? How might the group help each other with/in/through such moments?

Find a way appropriate to your group to close your gathering ritually, such as, standing or praying in a circle, or singing a song, or a ritual created or reinterpreted specifically for this theme.