By Chantelle Ohrling, a student, practitioner and descendant of decolonial praxis

…the terms “decolonization” and “decolonizing” continue to rise into the mainstream of the nonprofit sector, yet their meaning is often diluted into a soft synonym for inclusion or diversity. As if we could simply sprinkle a bit of our colour and culture onto the white walls of charities and foundations and call it liberation.

In recent years, spurred in part by publications including Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance by Edgar Villanueva, and grassroots decentralized movements like Black Lives Matter, there has been a reckoning in the philanthropic sector—a reckoning regarding the origins of the wealth and systems of oppression that our Nonprofit Industrial Complex (NPIC) depends on.

Philanthropy is dependent on racial capitalism and, as such, also dependent on the wealth of extraction. This is seen in the many ways the NPIC regularly mirrors conditions in the economy, such as the “generosity crisis” — declining gifts in all areas except for major gifts, which looks a lot like the ever-growing wealth disparity — and the racism that capitalism relies on reflected in the treatment of staff of colour by overwhelmingly white managers, as detailed in Collecting Courage: Joy, Pain, Freedom, Love (and a plethora of research and writing in the Canadian sector alone). 

Colonialism is often touted as a “virus” that has systemically infected the “immune system” of our global economy, specifically within the realms of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. As Edgar Villanueva suggests, this pathogen thrives on a “command and control” architecture that prioritizes the preservation of institutional wealth over the actual healing of communities. 

Jonathan Meagher-Zayas, in “Q: Why do nonprofits struggle to achieve their missions? A: Colonialism,” accurately identifies that nonprofits struggle to achieve their missions precisely because they are forced to operate within these colonial structures that value rigid metrics over authentic liberation.

There is also the rise of violent colonial extraction south of the border, and with it the rise of hateful rhetoric on the north side. As the western colonial governments’ masks of democracy and liberalism slip to reveal the imperial monsters that birthed our societies, the cries for an alternative grow louder. Even Prime Minister Mark Carney is naming the rupture of the old world order and calling for a new order that “encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the various states.” (Too bad he didn’t say “Indigenous Nations” instead of “states,” and later in that speech called for further capitalistic extraction.) 

With this reckoning, the terms “decolonization” and “decolonizing” continue to rise into the mainstream of the nonprofit sector, yet their meaning is often diluted into a soft synonym for inclusion or diversity. As if we could simply sprinkle a bit of our colour and culture onto the white walls of charities and foundations and call it liberation. 

However, decolonization is much more than equitable hiring practices and accessible events. While these are important aspects of inclusion and diversity, they are not decolonizing. 

A closer look at colonialism and decolonization

Colonialism is invested in us not knowing Black & Indigenous histories. Our truths are not included in a state curriculum, and, when we are present, we are a whitewashed, watered-down version of dream catchers and the under-ground railroad instead of four centuries of brilliant and radical Black & Indigenous resistance.

– Leanne Betsamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living

Decolonization is an ancient, global struggle. The Irish were engaged in decolonial resistance against English encroachment long before Europe even knew Turtle Island (North America) existed. 

This global struggle is an unbroken tradition, manifesting today in as many unique forms as there are modern iterations of colonialism. These struggles range from Palestine to Sudan to the Kuria in Tanzania dying at the hands of Canadian mining companies. These same companies have schools and rooms named after them in universities across Canada, highlighting another way our NPIC is entangled and dependent on colonial structures. The brute violence of protecting Canada’s “right” to extract resources is felt by Indigenous Peoples within its own borders, and we legitimize and normalize that violence by honouring them with naming opportunities. There is something to be said about enacting a strict gift acceptance policy as harm reduction.

For our purposes, this current reckoning in the “Americas” centres on the specific 534-year history of this hemisphere’s apocalypse of colonialism, imperialism, racial capitalism as well as the Black and Indigenous rejection of such violent forces. 

For over five centuries, an architecture has been violently imposed upon Turtle Island and Abya Yala (South America): a scaffold of extraction that views Indigenous Land as a forever renewable object to be mined (with Indigenous Peoples viewed solely as an impediment to that goal, to be eliminated through violence or assimilation) and the Black body as an object, an engine, for industrial growth.

Robyn Maynard describes colonialism birthing racial capitalism in Rehearsals for Living, writing: “The Industrial Revolution … was quite literally fuelled by the violently coerced labour of kidnapped Africans, on lands from which Indigenous populations had been murdered and forcibly removed.” She echoes Walter Rodney who, in his formative work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa writes, “Europe transferred its capitalist institutions more completely to North America than to any other part of the globe, and established a powerful form of capitalism – after eliminating the [I]ndigenous inhabitants and exploiting the labor of millions of Africans.” 

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance describes colonialism’s ongoing presence as “one that is formed and maintained by a series of processes for the purposes of dispossessing, that create a scaffolding within which my relationship to the state is contained. I certainly do not experience it as a historical incident that has unfortunate consequences for the present. I experience it as a gendered structure and a series of complex and overlapping processes that work together as a cohort to maintain the structure.” 

These complex and overlapping processes include the Doctrine of Discovery and Terra Nullius, slavery (yes, there was slavery in Canada for over 200 years), residential “schools,” and the Indian Act. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), created to enforce colonial rule, now disproportionately enforces Canadian law on Black and Indigenous bodies. 

The modern philanthropic industry is included in these processes of oppression. In a stunning example of this, the last remaining enslaved person in Lower Canada, an Indigenous woman, was donated to a Montreal hospital in 1821. To this day, there are organizations within Canada with charitable tax exemption that are supporting the genocide of Palestinians. 

We see the ongoing consequences of a gendered oppression structure through the patriarchal violence disappearing our stolen siblings, as detailed in the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. 

In an interview with Naomi Klein, Simpson explained, “Colonialism and capitalism are based on extracting and assimilating. My land is seen as a resource. My relatives in the plant and animal worlds are seen as resources. My culture and knowledge is a resource… Extraction is stealing — it is taking without consent, without thought, care or even knowledge of the impacts that extraction has on the other living things in that environment. That’s always been a part of colonialism and conquest.”

Acts of decolonizing, as Frantz Fanon would say, cannot be ignored by the state. When you’re truly removing, leaving, or destroying the colony, the colony reacts. As such, we must not let the word “decolonization” become another balm for the conscience of the powerful. 

To combat this, we can start by grounding our work in a mutual understanding. As with “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” my goal is “to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization — what is unsettling and what should be unsettling.” So, where did “decolonization” originate, and what is its history? And what does it mean to decolonize? Can we truly decolonize philanthropy? 

Origins of Decolonizing and Decolonialism 

Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content. 

 – Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963, p. 36

 Decolonization is not an “and”. It is an elsewhere. 

– Eve Tuck & K Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” 2012, p. 40

Colonialism in Turtle Island and Abya Yala began with the arrival of Cristoforo Colombo in the Caribbean and the first colonial settlement of La Navidad on Ayiti (now called Haiti) — and as such, that’s also where decolonization began. As Gord Hill describes in 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance: 

“Leaving about 35 men on Hispaniola, Colombo and his crew returned to Spain to gather the materials and men needed for the coming colonization, and to report to the crown on his journey. In September 1493, Colombo returned to Hispaniola with a fleet of 17 ships and 1,200 men. The detachment that had been left on Hispaniola had been destroyed following outrages by the Spaniards against the Taíno. The resistance had already begun.” 

This history of refusal expanded through the practice of Marronage throughout the Caribbean and Abya Yala — the radical act of escaped enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples leaving the plantation’s geography to form autonomous, self-governing societies. These acts of freedom-making and radical Black and Indigenous solidarity outside the bounds of the colonial state embody a truer definition of decolonization. 

The Haitian Revolution served as the ultimate blueprint for decolonizing by dismantling the Code Noir and defeating the Napoleonic forces to establish the first free Black republic in 1804. This act of self-liberation ignited a “domino effect” across Abya Yala and Africa, where enslaved and colonized peoples moved beyond reform to demand the total removal of European administrative, legal, and economic structures.

In the written canon, the word “decolonization” first appears in order to describe this necessary violence of freeing and freedom — the literal removal of colonial control. Frenchman Henri Fonfrède coined the term in 1836 to criticize the French occupation of Algiers. Following Fonfrède’s critique, the term “decolonization” was mostly a technical word used by French officials to describe the “planned” end of their rule. 

Walter Rodney in Decolonial Marxism: Essays from the Pan-African Revolution teaches us that colonial administrators falsely viewed it as a transition they controlled, and they often claimed it was happening too quickly due to political pressures of the colonized. In reality, the revolutions of the colonized were too expensive. Rodney writes, “Imperialism is not imperialism if it costs more to suppress the exploited than the imperialists receive in surplus.” 

However, by the 1930s, a much more radical view of decolonization was being proclaimed and reclaimed by activists and thinkers from within the colonies themselves. Movements like Négritude, led by figures such as Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, and Léon Damas, shifted the focus from a state-led administrative process to a psychological and cultural “thingification” that required a radical reclamation of identity. 

The transition of decolonization from a bureaucratic process to a revolutionary global movement intensified after 1945. As the term moved from the French décolonisation to the English decolonization within the United Nations, it was defined at the 1955 Bandung Conference as an urgent, collective demand for Third World sovereignty. There, President Sukarno of Indonesia famously warned that colonialism had donned a “modern dress,” manifesting as economic, intellectual, and internal physical control. 

By the 1960s, Frantz Fanon further codified this shift in The Wretched of the Earth, framing decolonization not as a mere policy change, but as a violent “meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature.”

This “modern dress” identified by Sukarno has since evolved into the contemporary state of neocolonialism, where the overt violence of military occupation is replaced by or paired with the “soft power” of capitalist networks. Within this paradigm, control is maintained through international financial institutions that utilize debt and structural adjustment as modern shackles, ensuring peripheral nations remain tethered to the metropole. 

One of these international systems is the NonProfit Industrial Complex, weaponizing humanitarian “assistance” for fiscal discipline and resource extraction, aiding in the institutionalization of a sophisticated scaffold of extraction. 

As Dambisa Moyo argues in Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa, this system maintains a state of managed underdevelopment; here, the “benevolence” of the wealthy functions as a contemporary substitute for the bayonet, ensuring colonial control persists long after the flags have changed.

It’s crucial to be aware of this storied past of decolonization and decolonizing, else we misuse the term. An understanding of decolonization requires the inclusion of the historical context. This Queens University article posits that: “In Canada, decolonization is usually discussed in terms of the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, and particularly associated with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s final report and Calls to Action.” Unfortunately this is a very shallow view, forgetting that this aforementioned Commission, created in 2008, was modeled on and inspired by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission which was formed in 1996. The article even shies away from truly describing the impacts of colonialism — using a passive tone and gentle verbs (“taking over,” which leaves room for implied consent) to describe the many forms of colonial violence. If we aren’t able to name genocide, then we’re too fearful to truly be decolonizing. 

These commissions are not the only examples of a shared decolonial project where Black and Indigenous movements and experiences intersect and support each other to reject colonial mirrors in favour of radical self-determination. Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson cocreated Rehearsals for Living as they built kinship and solidarity through letter writing. Glen Coulthard in Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition builds on Frantz Fanon’s critique of the politics of recognition in Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon identifies the “mask” as a tool of assimilation, whereas Coulthard identifies state-granted “rights” and symbolic apologies as modern masks that pacify resistance while upholding settler sovereignty.

Audre Lorde’s powerful cry “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own” reminds us that while Black and Indigenous Peoples on Turtle Island and Abya Yala may have different shackles, those shackles are placed by and chained together by the same colonialism. 

One cannot be freed without the other, and any definition of decolonization that does not include both Black and Indigenous peoples — as well as our nonhuman relations — is insufficient.