One of the most violent forms of cultural oppression is cultural erasure.

It happens without noise.

Often without bloodshed.

When culture is just a set of traditions, whispers, a dance, a way of doing something,

like a secret handshake,

or a code embedded in your backbone,

reverberating in your body,

inherited silently across generations.

Cultural traditions only survive when they’re passed from one generation to the next.

It takes at least one committed person to achieve mastery in a cultural art form, a language, a way of cooking, or a way of seeing,

whether it’s our relationship with nature, with each other, with time and space.

That mastery can take decades to develop, and a generation to transmit.

But sometimes, culture fades as it crosses generations:

A small ingredient no longer available.

A word lost to obscurity.

A dominant worldview casting a shadow over another way of knowing.

A dance move no longer remembered.

It’s these small acts of forgetting that add up to collective amnesia.

But forgetting is not neutral.

Erasure is not neutral.

Blocking resources.

Cutting access.

Denying space.

Gatekeeping materials.

Done in the name of safety, nicety, bureaucracy.  

These are all forms of cultural erasure.

And when the culture in question is already on its last breath,

it is not just oppressive, it is violent.

It only takes a few missed gatherings to lose momentum.

It only takes making things so difficult and resource-intensive that people simply give up.

Cultural death doesn’t announce itself, it withers into stillness because forgetting is invisible.

Sometimes it’s not even deliberate.

But most times, the impact is undeniably so.

It only takes an interruption, one generation long,

for a people’s cultural practice to halt and disappear,

for descendants to be unrooted, disconnected,

dislocated from their ancestors, histories, and identities—

cut off and lost to time.