omniharmonicDecolonization
Decolonization is the ongoing process of dismantling colonial systems of knowledge, governance, economics, and relationship — not only the formal political structures of colonialism but the deeper epistemological and ontological frameworks that continue to shape how we think, organize, and relate to land and one another. It involves recognizing that colonialism was not merely a historical event but a living structure embedded in institutions, languages, legal systems, and modes of consciousness.
Decolonization goes beyond inclusion or representation within existing systems. It questions the systems themselves: the assumption that Western knowledge production is universal, that private property is natural, that nation-states are the inevitable unit of governance, that progress is linear, and that the natural world exists as a resource base for human extraction. These assumptions are not neutral truths but products of a specific colonial history that violently displaced alternative ways of knowing and being — ways that are often more ecologically attuned, relationally rich, and governance-effective than the systems that replaced them.
In the context of civic innovation, decolonization connects to bioregionalism through the recognition that Indigenous peoples have governed bioregionally for millennia. It relates to buen-vivir as an example of a decolonial economic philosophy, and to rights-of-nature as a legal expression of non-Western ontologies. Decolonization challenges the story-of-separation by recovering relational ontologies, and it confronts dominator-culture and wetiko as ongoing colonial patterns. True civic innovation cannot be built on colonial foundations; it requires the humility to learn from and be transformed by the knowledge traditions that colonialism attempted to destroy.