This article examines the practices through which the Betsimisaraka of Madagascar attempt to recode, assimilate, and contain the influences of the outside world. The Betsimisaraka endured colonization by the Merina and the French for 130 years. They rarely refer to this colonial past except on certain occasions when it is powerfully evoked. They prefer instead to commemorate ancestors. A processual view of remembering and forgetting productively complicates anthropological understandings of the colonization of consciousness and the consciousness of colonization, revealing how local cultural autonomy can be partially maintained through the work of memory. [Madagascar, memory, forgetting, colonization, Bartlett]