By Gale Courey Toensing
“I said the Lakota have been in this colonization game for more than 100 years longer than Palestinians, and we talked about the warning signs: Watch out when your leaders become co-opted by people who are your enemies, watch out when your religion becomes outlawed, take notice when your language is disappearing, and when your children are being educated by your enemies and taught to hate themselves–that’s one of the last stages of colonization,” Tilsen said.
He had an intellectual understanding of colonization before traveling to Palestine, “but it wasn’t deep. It was while I was there that I really understood emotionally and in my heart the deep parallels between the American Indian experience of Western expansion and the experience of becoming an alien in your own homeland, which basically has happened to the Palestinians.”
