A Foundational Shift
what's it gonna take after all, to change?
In my teen years, I looked at the pain and hypocrisy of the world and her people and came to a definitive conclusion: it was going to take a foundational shift for things to change. I watched slavery turn into Jim Crow turn into incarceral so-called US. I watched child labor turn into institutional schooling. As women gained rights, gay people became the next target. I watched debtor’s prisons turn into credit card debt enstrangulation. I watched gulags and concentration camps and interment camps (and now Alligator Alcatraz). For my young mind, things hadn’t changed so much as they had changed names and ever-so-slightly in form.
This was a profound insight for a kid, and it is an insight I’ve never shaken. It’s going to take a foundational shift for things to change. Nowadays I have better language to point at about what needs to shift foundationally: capitalism is exploitation, colonialism is genocide, and individualism is atomization. This culture needs to shift away from those embedded ideas in order to be healthy, to heal, to sustain.
Let’s look closely at each of these ideas, how they got to be our fundamental principles, how they show up in our daily lives, and what their inverse incarnation might be.
The world was sold capitalism as industrialization began. So, when a lot of product was created and needed to be sold. This shift in the 1800’s is deeply connected to colonizing for resources and making gains for an individual. “Free market” societies became and remains a cultural institution in Western Societies, and has gained footholds elsewhere for the elite. At its root, capitalism relies on the extraction/exploitation of labor, time, and resources for the accumulation of wealth. Importantly: by the few, and at the expense of the many. Its success depends on undervaluing human life and overvaluing profit, normalizing hierarchies where people are either producers, consumers, or obstacles.
This logic shows up today in our lives by how we commodify our attention, turn every hobby into a side hustle, and frame rest as laziness. We are taught to measure our worth in productivity, not presence or process. A shift away from exploitation requires reorienting toward economies of care. This means finding/creating places where mutual aid, cooperative ownership, and community-centered labor dismantle the idea that survival should be transactional. What if value wasn’t measured in extraction, but in how well we tend to each other?
Colonialism has been around a lot longer. Before European expansionism in the 1500’s began, it was more often called Empire Building. For me, they are identical, foundational human actions. Colonialism is an ongoing structure that sustains itself through erasure: of people, cultures, languages, ecologies. It depends on taking land that isn't offered, renaming what already had names, and rewriting reality so the violence looks like progress. We see its legacy in the forced disconnection from ancestral roots, the destruction of languages and ritual, in displaced communities, in borders and pipelines and prisons. It masquerades as modernity, but its foundation is simply conquest. Its drive is no more complex than just TO TAKE.
Colonialism shows up in our daily lives primarily in so-called white supremacy. Everywhere there’s a white ‘savior’ there is colonization. Gentrification is colonization. Shopping is colonization. Aiding and abetting Israel is colonization. Paying our taxes funds colonization. Housing as an investment is colonization. Let’s think on this one closely: if housing is a basic human right, how can it be ethical to endlessly pursue its theoretical increase in value? Just because you “owned” that stolen land for a few years suddenly entitles you to a profit from its sale? This is colonizer thinking.
I thought a lot about ‘what is the opposite of colonization?” My answer is rematriation. (side sad laugh: substack gives me squiggly red lines beneath this word indicating it doesn’t exist! IT DOES. It suggests repatriation as a correction. big sigh) Rematriation is ‘returning to the sacred mother.” It takes the form in our daily lives as truth telling about our experiences, service work in our communities, and reconnection with the land which nourishes us. This is a topic worthy of its own library, and you can begin your research here with Lee Maracle, an indigenous woman who theorized this process in 1988 with her book, I Am Woman. She discusses how this means shifting from ownership to stewardship, from domination to relationship. Healing the colonization wound asks not for tolerance or diversity, but for return, repair, and reverence.
The last one is particularly fresh for me: individualism. I viewed myself as the ultimate individualist for a long long time. I tattooed “know thyself” on my arm as a war cry. I spent decades yelling MY story from the rooftops. I raged against the compliance with culture, preferring my own “superior” self. I saw global and historical injustice and replaced it with my position as “the oracle of justice.” (that’s what teenage me ACTUALLY wanted to be when I grew up!) I bought this feel-good response to a world I can’t abide because I was raised in capitalist colonialist US and it was the best rebellion I could come up with on my own: ME ME ME.
I thought I could know myself only through devout investigation of my inner world. That’s part of it, no doubt. But it denies the value and input of community. We come to know ourselves most deeply and honestly when we are in relationship with others. We can only have our sex wound explored and healed by trying to have sex. We can only know our place in the world by being in the world with others. How can we learn to resolve conflict, to build together, or to create families in isolation?
We’ve been sold the myth that the self exists apart from others, that autonomy is power, that needing help is weakness. But this kind of individualism isolates us, severs the very ties that make us human. It teaches us to compete instead of collaborate, to hoard rather than share, and to believe that loneliness is just the cost of independence. In reality, none of us survive alone. Our bodies, our joys, our griefs all speak the language of interdependence. Atomization fragments us into manageable, controllable, disconnected pieces. To counter this, we must remember ourselves back into the whole: practicing community, co-regulation, collective care. The inverse of individualism isn’t the loss of self, it’s the return to belonging.
It’s going to take a foundational shift for things to change.
We’re going to have to start doing things differently if we want to heal. It does start with you, with you going into the world and being with the world. These are heady thoughts today. Perhaps you notice this week where producing is valued over being, where taking happens without reciprocity, where community heals the spirit.
Maybe next week you start shaking things up a bit.
thanks for listening.
this week:
Sunday, August 24:
one year anniversary of AIMwell Yoga! 1-4 pm, more info
Available Paintings for sale: limited time only! click through
Come see me at Wood, Willow, and Whatknots at the KC Ren Fest, all other events for me are on hold while I hold down a second gig :D
every week:
Thursdays, 9 am
FREE MEDITATION, at AIMwell Yoga 5506 Troost, free!Be Held: one-on-one personalized meditation sessions. more info here
upcoming:
Sunday, August 31:
ArtHouse Open Mic, 6-9 pm, free
Sunday, September 28:
ArtHouse Open Mic, 6-9 pm, free
Sunday, October 26:
ArtHouse Open Mic, 6-9 pm, free
Saturdays, Nov 15-Dec 13:
Recreational Meditation, session 2 at the Plaza Branch of the KC Public Library, free, 10 am
check out my new website!
this is my dysfunctional blog
oh my youtube channel is full of freakish delights
Books by Nettie for purchase:
at the intersection of hopelessness and salvation: 2025 novella
a shame to point at the moon and see only the finger: 2024 book of persona poems
everything i never told you is all i have to say: 2024 book of epistolary prose poems written from the narrator Bitter Crone
Ozark Love Poems and a Song of Despair: 2023 sonnets and a song. very nice!
Sage: 2017 art book about womanhood, now resides in the Nelson-Atkins local artists collection