Gemma Benton is a Spiritual Activist, Native American singer, creator of Healing Her Story Oracle Cards and the Ancestor's Journey. She is Menominee and Filipina and lives in the Sacramento area.

For the past thirty years Gemma has been involved with issues concerning intergenerational and historical trauma and traditional healing in Native American and indigenous communities.

What is a colonized person? How do we overcome the internalized oppression of colonization? How do non-indigenous people understand a connection to their original homeland without being on the land?

"If decolonization has taught us anything, it's this: part of our own healing is to no longer be the willing receptacle of these projections from the colonizer. What then becomes of us when we are emptied of colonial projections? I was reminded by a very wise woman mentor from India that my colonized self is only a sliver in the totality of my Filipino self. Yet, temporarily, it was necessary for the process of decolonization to take up time and space in the psyche in order to purge these projections so that I can come home full circle to the largeness of my own indigenous self.”

"I use the term indigenous to refer to the self that has found its place, its home in the world. Emptied of projections of "inferiority,' "third world," "undeveloped," "uncivilized," "exotic and primitive," and "modernizing," it is the self capable of conjuring one's place and growing roots through the work of imagination, re-framing history, and re-telling the Filipino story that centers our history of resistance, survival, and re-generation."

"Our primary babaylans and babaylan-inspired kapwa are still with us. In land-based tribal communities in the Philippines, they perform their roles as they have done for thousands of years. Karl Gaspar calls them "organic mystics." In the diaspora, he calls them "mystics in exile." Among Filipinos in the homeland and in the diaspora, decolonizing Filipinos claim the babaylan spirit as an inheritance that is available to all who wish to follow an indigenous Filipino spiritual path."