We are not living in a postcolonial world

A few years ago I wrote a piece for the Century on land acknowledgments (“On Native land,” November 2022). It focused on their uses and frequent abuses in Christian faith communities. That piece now reads like it comes from a more innocent time, a time when people believed that colonialism was essentially over and that, in its wake, the right thing to do was to follow a call to reflection and repentance—not necessarily activism, advocacy, or further engagement. But colonialism is not over now, and it was not over then.

Lately, the persistence of colonialism—and its ideological and practical resurgence in the United States—has startled and confused people in mainline Christian circles. In the early days of this presidential administration, the reaction to two of its executive orders was to render them farcical, a distraction from the administration’s real aims rather than illustrations of them. First was the attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico, an international body of water. Although the Associated Press resisted calling it the “Gulf of America,” several news outlets and mapping companies quickly fell in line with the executive order. Second was the insistence on the use of the colonial name Mount McKinley for Mount Denali, a name from the Koyukon Athabaskan or Dena’ina people that means “the high one.”

The nervous snickers and replicated memes in my circles seemed to assume that these were incendiary but ultimately empty gestures. But my ears are always attuned to renaming as a colonial move. Colonialism dominates the landscape by erasing Indigenous names along with Indigenous presence; it enacts erasure in part through language.