Lance Henson
Bridging the Divide (A Voice from the Other)This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 So many indigenous voices have risen to the occasion to address you as human beings. Across the years before you were born. The message remains the same. For we are not human beings on a spiritual journey, we are spiritual beings on a human journey. We bring messages from the most powerful consciousness that exists, mother earth.This day as I speak to you there is no economic or political justice for the poor, the people of colour, women or workers within the framework of global corporate capitalism. Corporate capitalism uses identity politics, multiculturalism and racial justice to masquerade as politics that will never halt the rising social inequality, unchecked militarism, evisceration of civil liberties and omnipotence of the organs of security and surveillance. Corporate capitalism cannot be reformed. Despite continually rebranding itself, corporate capitalism is Supranational. It owns the banks, owes no loyalty to any nation/state. It cannibalises everything it touches to extinction, human, mineral, even the water we drink and the air we breathe.Bridging the divide. Looking from an indigenous perspective at the monstrous dehumanising objectives of corporate capitalism. It is as if we are viewing our realities destroyed by a living breathing monstrous entity. To confront this entity, I wish to share with you one of the origins of indigenous resistance. Postcolonial Theory from the (other) involves a conceptual re-orientation towards perspectives of knowledge, as well as needs, developed outside the west.A lot of Anglo theorists, including most recently the attorney general of the United States, don't like the term postcolonial. It disturbs the new world order.The third world, a postcolonial term was originally invented on the model of the third estate of the French Revolution. It was a political pamphlet written in January 1789, shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution. The world was divided according to two political systems. Capitalism and Socialism. The first and second world, the third world comprised what was left over. The third world was made up of what was left over; the non-aligned nations. The new independent nations that had formerly made up the colonies of the imperial powers. It was not until 1955, in Bandung (Indonesia) that 29 mostly independent African and Asian countries initiated what became as the non-aligned movement, which constituted an independent power bloc. It was a third world perspective on political economic and cultural priorities. It was an event of enormous proportions. It symbolised the common attempt of people of colour in the world to throw off the yoke of white western domination. However, this third world way was slow to develop and define itself, and gradually became associated with the economic and political problems these countries encountered. Poverty, famine, unrest. Mostly caused by the colonial systems that continued to impede their cu...
