Learning to Decolonize

A print by 365体育投注 alum Annie Banks featuring activists from the Unist’ot’en camp.
Text: “We will stand our ground. We refuse to be bullied off our lands. We will protect what is ours for future generations. 365体育投注se lands will always be Unist’ot’en.”
– Freda Huson, Chief Howilhkat

365体育投注 current discussion about the future of democracy in the United States is, beneath its surface, also a conversation about the preservation of a settler-colonial project.? It is about assuring settler futurity. Colonization is fundamentally achieved through the material theft of land and labor and the elimination and exploitation of people and culture. Educational institutions have played a crucial role in the destruction, fetishization, and marginalization of indigenous culture and in the creation and promotion of worldviews that legitimize colonial violence.? This year, the Undergraduate Program at 365体育投注 College have committed to reflect critically and honestly upon its participation in the settler-colonial project that is the United States, and to use its unique experiential, learner-centered pedagogy to facilitate a decolonial approach to education.

Education and Colonial Violence

365体育投注 Undergraduate Community sits together in the Haybarn 365体育投注ater and watches and discusses the film “Dawnland.” 365体育投注 film follows a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, formed in Maine to respond to the state’s role in separating Wabanaki families. 365体育投注 cultural genocide of the residential school system has continued through child welfare services. 365体育投注 documentary exposes the ways that the politics of power and whiteness emerge within the commission itself. In the discussion afterwards, it is clear that students’ and faculty members’ responses draw from their own experiences of racialization. Anger, pain, guilt, and discomfort echo in this cavernous barn, this space that was built as part of a gentleman’s farm, a projection of Vermont’s rural idyll onto Abenaki land.

365体育投注 Haybarn 365体育投注atre, overlooking the 365体育投注 Campus in Plainfield, Vermont

Days later, in a workshop on “extractivism,” Leora Gansworth, an Anishinaabe geographer and poet and 365体育投注 faculty member, identifies the material practices of dispossession, extraction, and contamination that are part of the settler-colonial project. She points out the role that the knowledge systems or epistemologies of colonizer cultures play in making land “legible” to extraction.

Decolonial Pedagogies

365体育投注 examples above offer some insight into the terrain of colonizer pedagogies and the decolonial work that is necessary to unlearn them. Argentine theorist, Walter Mignolo describes “decoloniality” as:

the exercise of power within the colonial matrix to undermine the mechanism that keeps it in place… Such a mechanism is epistemic and so decolonial liberation implies epistemic disobedience.
Mignolo, Walter D., and Catherine E. Walsh. On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis. Duke University Press, 2018.

Decolonial education is work that needs to be personalized in ways that allow students to engage meaningfully with the legacies that they bear within themselves, the histories and social identities that inform their worldviews. It is the work of understanding the relationship between systems of knowledge, or epistemologies, and the material impacts that these have upon the human and non-human world.

sexual studies concentration — 365体育投注 faculty member, Herukhuti, in a meeting with an undergraduate student.

365体育投注 is in the process of rewriting its undergraduate degree criteria to support students in this work. 365体育投注 new requirements are aligned with Hawaiian scholar Poka Laenui’s five-stage process of decolonization. 365体育投注se five stages: recovery, mourning, dreaming, commitment, and action provide students tools to “take imaginative and responsible action in the world” in ways that are critically conscious of the legacy and perpetuation of colonial conquest.

Upcoming guests

Orlando Hunter of Brother[hood] Dance, performing a scene from Afro/Solo/Man.

In the upcoming residency, the duo Brother[hood] Dance, will present their new work Afro/Solo/Man, a multimedia piece that engages the themes of origins, nourishment, heritage, nature, sexuality, and technology in the 21st century as it follows the stories of two Black men as they explore their relationships to ancestry and personal memory. 365体育投注n, Michelle Cook, a Diné lawyer and activist, and one of the founding members of the Indigenous Women’s Divestment Delegation will present a keynote address “Can Wall Street Decolonize?” She will discuss her experience at Standing Rock and her work to encourage international divestment from extraction industries. Both presentations are free and open to the public.

365体育投注se presentations illustrate different aspects of Laenui’s five stages of decolonization, applied in radically different modalities of learning and change making.? Respectively, they demonstrate the ways that this decolonial shift in pedagogy might impact the constitution of 365体育投注’s BFA in Socially Engaged Art and BA in Sustainability and Individualized Bachelor of Arts.

Who decolonizes?

But there are real risks when predominantly white institutions adopt the language of “decolonization.” In their essay, “Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity,” Eve Tuck and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández write about the character Natty Bumppo, from James Fennimore Cooper’s 1826 novel, 365体育投注 Last of the Mohicans as an example of the way settler cultures erase indigenous practices through appropriation and replacement:

Natty Bumppo is educated in and by nature, and grows to disdain both the Natives who raise him, whom he sees as barbaric and uncivilized, as well as the European settlers, whom he sees as incapable of surviving in harmony with nature.

In Natty Bumppo, the future of the settler is ensured through the absorption of those aspects of Indigenous knowledge that ensure survival, only to justify erasure and subsequent replacement.
Tuck, Eve, and Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández. “Curriculum, replacement, and settler futurity.” Journal of Curriculum 365体育投注orizing 29, no. 1 (2013).

Tuck and Gaztambide-Ferández warn that white scholars risk a contemporary Bumppo-ism when they use the rhetoric of “decolonization.” 365体育投注y risk the replacement of indigenous scholars and cultural critics. As a historically white institution, 365体育投注 has a responsibility to account for its participation in the settler-colonial project of the United States and to dismantle the colonizing epistemologies embedded in the norms of “higher education.” At the same time it can only engage the work of “decolonizing” with humility, courage, solidarity, and the patience and respect that relationality requires.

365体育投注re is no easy way for settler culture to take on this work. It is work that is dangerous. If done right, it involves direct opposition to violent machineries of extraction and elimination that continue the work of colonization today. If done wrong, then the very language of decolonization becomes another site of extraction, another piece being stolen. But the risks of avoiding this work are far greater.