"As the child of violence, I am humbled before the miracle that allows for healing and tracks the intricate map leading in its direction. There is no single moment when I arrive at the destination, rather. I creep up on it from a myriad of trails and approaches. My awareness drops from the dizziness of dissociation back to the earth and into the bones and blood of this life. I find myself in the here and now, making choices about my place in the world, contemplating events and people in the context of life and death, values and meaning. I am filled with awe for the beauty of every creature. There is appreciation for difference, strength to meet adversity, joy in simply being. My dreams no longer shriek tales of rabid fathers and forcible entrapment; they take me now on journeys to the stars, to woodlands and weddings. This is not to say that life does not dish up hardship and injustice. History does not dissolve. It is only to say that I have all the resources I was meant to have. I have become fully human.
"And now, as an adult in this empire world, I am humbled again. A most crucial mindfulness is required of me. The maps I have learned are dangerously incomplete, the histories I have studied absurdly one-sided. In my schooling I have been taught that imperialism is natural, that a world made of expanding splotches of pink and mustard-yellow is progress, that the technologies required to further such development express evolution's highest offering, that people living sustainably are laughably anachronistic. More recently, via corporate science and advertising, I have been told that the human organism is nothing more than a shave of DNA, that my yearning for community can be answered by a laptop computer, that eating a burger at the airport is culture, that corporate domination is free trade and democracy. My entire education has been shaped by the defended, and banal, projections of conquest. The task now is to expand beyond the identity and experience of the empire world. It is to learn the stories so long squelched and denied: of native peoples, the vanquished, losers in war, survivors of conquest, the other side of the story. The task is to realize the culture and community that have been erased: knowledge of animals and seasons, music of the land, extended family, cooperation, celebration. The task is to remember. My people. Our history. The good and the horrendous, nothing left out, colonizer and colonized indelibly intermingled, indelibly embraced."