Like so many others from small, colonised communities, I was raised in an abusive family, and growing up, I quickly learnt that remaining silent was an easy way to stay under the radar, but that the very same silence would ultimately drain you and leave you an empty shell.
Those of you who know me might have gathered that I’ve never been good at staying silent and though I come from two small cultures more or less stripped of their respective voices by the majority, I've slowly but surely worked myself to a point where I refuse to remain silent.
You don’t move on when your people is the victim of a cultural genocide, or when your people has had their tongues cut out of their mouths and hung on the walls of colonial oppressors, moving on from intragenerational traumas is exhausting and for the most part impossible.
Our ancestors skulls are still kept in dusty university archives and their spirits are waiting for them to come home.
I guess some people like to use the term broken homes; my last memory, and now for some reason only memory of my biological father is one of him standing bent over my mother, trying to strangle her with a door-mat, whilst kicking her repeatedly.
Thinking back, I am almost certain that it was the broken nose of my mother that marked the beginning of my own decolonisation, though I never thought of it as such back then.
Every step I took to reconnect with both of my cultures from that moment on became important steps in a journey that has brought me to the place where I am today.
Decolonisation equals respecting and honouring our women and in trying to challenge the patriarchal attitudes that have infested our communities over the last 200 years, we grow stronger as a people.
My mother was a storyteller and a keeper of languages; she in turn had got her stories from her parents, and whenever my mother couldn’t take care of me, my grandparents would.
Together they raised me to be an independent individual, and I often think back on the better days of my childhood and realise that I had a lot more freedom than most other children.
It made me stronger, it protected me when I grew up and much of my sense of self stems from the cultural beliefs passed on to me by my mother and grandparents.
Decolonisation to me is not so much about a struggle for political power or some symbolic transfer of rights from settlers to us as it is about recognition of indigenous rights and coming to terms with one’s own identity.
Decolonisation is the very act of unlearning centuries of silently accepting colonial oppression and to speak out against the theft of our lands.
Decolonisation to me is the embodiment of my people’s voice through music, poetry and art, it is the revitalisation of our language, it is a simple but powerful statement; we are still here, we are not invisible, we are the Subaltern who refuse to remain voiceless.
Decolonisation is my slow struggle to claw back the language and culture of my ancestors and by reclaiming my languages, I reclaim a bit of myself from the Swedish state that used eugenics and racist laws in order to try to permanently erase it from existence.
I have read a lot, and education has been my main focus for the greater part of my life. Despite this, I do not see decolonisation as an academic discipline, but as my life.
Decolonisation is a process in which colonised people challenge their oppressors by and for themselves. There is no need or indeed time to centre settlers in a decolonial movement.
I guess whatever settler academics may have to say about colonialism is all valid and fine on some level, but their understanding of our lives is theoretical as opposed to lived, and thus largely useless.
This does not mean that one shouldn't read settler academics, on the contrary. My mother always said that in order to challenge someone you needed to speak their language, while standing firmly rooted in your own tongue.
When you’re indigenous or a member of a minority, everything you do becomes somewhat of a political statement, but decolonisation refutes the idea that we as indigenous and/or POC have to constantly act in a way which benefits or even acknowledges the settler.
We are rebuilding ourselves, and in doing so, we are denying settlers to define what it is that makes us who we are.
Decolonisation is of course something political as well, but I picture it to first and foremost be the resurgence of our cultures, where settler politics don’t have a role to play, at all, and decolonisation can only be successful when we start to listen to our own people.
We don’t need academics or politicians to tell us who we are.
Decolonisation is an ongoing process, and to this day, I’m still unlearning the teachings of a colonial system that was forced on me by others without my consent.
