“We didn’t invent colonialism”

Another white innocence escape hatch

There are several things that make me angry. Many, many things… One of them is the constant excuse and deflection of the intellectual colonial Portuguese narrative: “We didn’t invent colonialism,” “all human cultures perform some type of colonial violence.” Again and again denying accountability. This posture seeps into all relational dimensions, including “puristic ideologies” instead of ongoing entangled relationality.

Of course, strictly speaking, these statements are historically accurate—empires, conquest, enslavement, and territorial domination have existed in many civilizations across history. But let’s dive into what these sentences are trying to protect.

The problem begins when these observations are used rhetorically, not to increase historical complexity but to suspend accountability—functioning as a discursive escape hatch. Instead of expanding the conversation, “yes, colonial domination has many genealogies,” it narrows and attempts closure with no accountability, “therefore we don’t need to talk about this one.”

This is a mind bend, trying to secure an innocent position. Whenever a relationship becomes uncomfortable, demanding acknowledgment of the ugly parts of our invisible structures, modernity often goes for universalization, as in “Everyone does it.” “Humans are naturally violent.” “Every culture colonized.” “Nature has always changed.” “People have always polluted.”

We should notice that each sentence dissolves situated responsibility into abstract humanity. While nobody remains accountable because everybody becomes equally responsible. Paradoxically, and most importantly, universal guilt produces practical innocence.

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This is precisely the opposite of what many Indigenous and decolonial scholars propose. Rather than asking abstract questions about “humanity,” they continually re-situate action in concrete histories, territories, and ongoing living relationships. Colonialism is understood not as a timeless human tendency but as historically specific systems whose violent consequences remain materially present.

Actually, this Portuguese colonial memory may be about the modern management of essentialist innocence. With similar patterns in other postures, phrasings are usually used as a defense against a perceived attack, like:

• “I didn’t create capitalism.”

• “I didn’t emit most of the carbon.”

• “I recycle.”

• “I’m one of the good ones.”

• “I’m not racist.”

• “I respect nature.”

Each statement may be objectively true. Yet together they maintain a psychic ecology where no one has to ask the tougher question: What relationships am I already inside?

Because responsibility is ALWAYS relational!!! (Yes, that many exclamation points are needed.) In many Indigenous kinship traditions, one does not become responsible because one is guilty—one is responsible because one already belongs. Most importantly, relationships precede innocence.

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There is also a profound thread connecting white fragility, the need for innocence, and the overall difficulty many people in the Global North have in facing ecological collapse, because of these widespread, responsibility-deflecting postures. Not because white people are uniquely incapable of confronting reality, but because colonial modernity built an identity structure that depends on a particular story about itself:

• We are the bearers of progress.

• We are civilized, rational, and enlightened.

• History is a story of improvement.

• Harm is accidental (ups.. genocide and ecocide happened again), not structural.

• Good intentions matter more than consequences.

• The future will always be better than the past.

But when colonialism is examined thoughtfully, this narrative becomes hazardous. Because even though “we didn’t invent colonialism,” the wealth of Europe and its settler colonies cannot be understood apart from enslavement, extraction, dispossession, epistemicide, and ongoing ecological devastation—omnicide like Amitav Ghosh says. Many decolonial psychologists even argue (and I wholeheartedly agree) that psychology itself emerged within colonial structures that universalized a particular European stereotype while inducing other ways of being marginal or deficient.

I know it stings. But let’s keep going, because this is where the need for innocence becomes important: “Can I remain innocent while benefiting from structures that produce harm?” For many of us, especially those whose identities are deeply infused with moral goodness, this question is almost unbearable.

In fact, Robin DiAngelo’s concept of white fragility already points toward this dynamic: the defensive reactions that emerge when racial or colonial realities threaten one’s self-image—exactly like the intellectual colonial Portuguese narrative opening this article. Some decolonial thinkers venture further (Tuck & Yang, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, and Kyle Whyte), arguing that fragility is not merely emotional discomfort but a defense of an entire ontology, guarding a world where one can remain the protagonist of a story of innocent progress.

The problem, for me, is that this isn’t simply about colonial history but a deep-seated cultural habit. Seeping into ecological relationships and the ongoingness of collapse.

All this challenges the deepest myths of modernity and industrial civilization that continuously orchestrate planetary devastation. After all, progress may not be linear, technological mastery may not equal wisdom, economic growth may not equal flourishing, humanity may not be separate from nature, and the future may not automatically improve.

This is why climate denial often persists even among highly educated people, for this is all about identity. As many climate psychologists have observed, ecological information threatens core assumptions about self, society, and the future. The resulting reactions include minimization, dissociation, numbness, defensive optimism, and displacement (I talk about this in many other articles).

The ecological crisis and the colonial crisis, therefore, intersect. With very few of us in the Global North acknowledging this, because we relentlessly try to secure the escape fantasy of innocence, trying to keep guilt at bay.

But for many Indigenous and decolonial perspectives, the issue is not guilt but relationship. This is because the opposite of innocence is not guilt, but responsibility.

Several Indigenous scholars (Kyle Powys Whyte, Max Liboiron, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Daniel Wildcat, Kim TallBear, and many others) clarify climate change not as a wholly new phenomenon but as an intensification of colonial convulsions that Indigenous peoples have been navigating for generations.

While many Indigenous and relational worldviews place emphasis not on purity but on accountability, reciprocity, kinship, truthfulness, and responsibility within a living web of relations. Seen through this web, both colonial history and ecological collapse become less a courtroom and more a kinship crisis.

So my invitation is to break the spell of this fantasy organized around innocence and progress. Seeding stories capable of holding grief through collapse, responsibility without self-annihilation, and belonging without innocence.

Knowing that, yet again, this is an invitation that many Indigenous, decolonial, ecological, and pluriversal thinkers have been formulating for some time now: not replacing one certainty with another, but recovering ways of being human where dignity does not depend on purity, and where maturity begins when innocence ends.

ꉓꂦꌗꂵꀤꉓ-ꉓꃅ꓄ꃅꂦꈤꀤꉓ ꉓꍏꋪ꓄ꂦꁅꋪꍏꉣꃅꀤꍟꌗ

Scream-Prayer . Eco-Mythic Tales . Ecopsychology . Eco-Mythology

Books & Essays

(Un)Learning Eco-Mythic Trails

{an invitation to walk together, without a fixed map, with an attentive heart}

Eco-Therapeutic Counseling

{Conversations through the Art of Listening and Silence}