This is significant, as it means that the depth of colonial reorganization and destruction and any critical attempts to 'return to the source' as a form of resistance and affirmation are within closer reach than many realize. Non-Western, non-biocentric, non-racial societal formulations that parallel contemporary concepts of multiculturalism and diversity-positivity are therefore not that far removed from contemporary languages, institutions, memories, and imaginations. Nevertheless, the totality of colonial reorganization, even if 'only' between 60 and 200 years old throughout the majority of the region under discussion here, was devastating and disruptive, and should not be underestimated. One of the tasks of decolonization at this stage is to rewrite more thoroughly the colonial historiographies and their popular cultural and discursive corollaries, and to insist on more accurate historic break points in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, replacing the widespread assumption that the ruptures occurred in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this way, the scale of recovery and decolonization is properly attenuated, and we do not  
inadvertently naturalize more recent phenomena and histories and amplify their power and their hold on the present.