Decolonizing travel: How to get started

Look, we may be indigenous (I am indigenous to Hawaiʻi) or indigenous allies and still find it daunting to travel in a way that is respectful to the natives of other lands. When it comes to decolonizing our lifestyles, there is an affirming number of resources that even someone like me—who was displaced from my culture until college—can refer to for guidance in the areas of native education, language, and even childbirth. However, I have found it difficult to source materials by decolonial scholars or practitioners on how to travel. Therefore, as much as we may be students learning to transcend consumer based tourism, we must also be teachers sharing what we find to help others move across lands in a way that is consensual and respectful to first peoples. This post will cover how to start a decolonial travel journey and use my first week in Copenhagen, Denmark as an example.

Read about the history written/told by the natives

Native scholarship is, indeed, growing in strength, but the dominant sources of “history” tend to be told from the perspective of those dominant in power. Seeking native history may require more diligent searching on the web. Pre-colonial museums (if any) may not be found on the first page of a mainstream travel site.

While I read about the Danish resident who wrote The Little Mermaid and visited the Denmark’s most photographed tourist attraction (the neighborhood of Nyhavn), this did not help me honor the native culture. I read quite a lot about Denmark before arriving but realized how much context I was still lacking once I was in its presence. So one afternoon, I tempered my consumer fury to go out and “discover” (colonial pun) because “we only live once” to stay in and go even deeper into my research.

Recognize that native people are still here despite mainstream narratives

It is quite often the case that colonial systems will portray the people they’ve annihilated as extinct and only existent in the past. Be wary of this. Tools used (past and/or present) to disconnect people from their heritage include outlawing native languages, blood quantum requirements, and census classifications (e.g. grouping together all African ethnicities as “black” or all European ethnicities as “white”). Everywhere you go, assume that, despite such tactics, native people are present and actively resisting rather than imagining them in antiquity.

Denmark is a very interesting place because its native people are still in power today. Because the Danish people—many of whom trace their lineage to the Vikings—have established a country that is considered “developed”, they may not often be referred to as “native”. I speculate that Denmark is one of the most sustainable countries in the world because its native people are autonomous today (native cultures tend to have a strong connections to the natural resources of the place). I wonder if Anglo-American society hesitates to refer to Danish people as native because their modern success disrupts the colonial caricature of indigenous people as primitive and frozen in the past.

Conclusion

With issues such as climate change and global wealth inequality running rampant, commercial travel is especially problematic. The time is now that we value our own and others’ indigeneity for our ancestors knew how to hold equitable relationships with the land and one another. So even if I, a finance and information technology student, sometimes feel lost in what seems to be uncharted territory (another colonial pun) in this decolonial journey, I remind myself I’m only attempting to do what they’ve already done.