My Critical Awakening

Abstract

Locating oneself in colonizing and decolonizing discourses is a process of becoming critically aware, and articulating such a struggle is not an easy task. This paper strives to relate my journey through graduate studies as an Indigenous person struggling to understand colonialism. Through personal writings from my journals, blogs, and more formal academic writing from my comprehensive examination papers, it is my hope to show the journey of my critical awakening through the progression of my writing. Moving through personal reflections that expose the struggles of being colonized, to frustrations of articulating my colonization in traditional academic writing, to a multivocal text that raises issues of decolonizing praxis, this paper is my attempt to convey reoccurring notions of hope and hopelessness that have consistently appeared throughout the process of my graduate education. I assert that to create decolonizing spaces, we must not render invisible the process of critical consciousness awakening.