Becoming Metis

“To learn who I am today, on this land I live on, I’ve had to recover that heritage and realize a multicultural self.” –Melissa Nelson

I think that this statement means that to fully understand who she is and where she came from she will need to research her heritage. She needs to put all of the heritages of the different cultures she is to make herself, a multicultural self. What she does to accomplish this is decolonize her mind. This is where she transcends the self-centered, ethnocentric and exploitive patterns of Western hegemony.  Basically she wants to get rid of all the stereotypes and thoughts about the heritages and focus on herself. For her, she has started to play a Norwegian flute that is mad of birch tree that is also scared for the Ojibwe people too.  She also thinks a lot about the Manifest Destiny that everyone thinks about and she also started to work with other Native American people to save their own land in order for her to decolonize her mind. For her, and most people the best way to learn about their culture is in a way that is easy for them to understand and helpful to their surroundings like she has done. She has also stuck to tradition also. She honors the way of the native people by doing certain things that they have always done. She helped them harvest plants the right way and also world renewal services that were very important to the native Ojibwe people. Little thing you do to find about your heritage can go a long way and ca mean a lot too many people.