Muskrat theories, tobacco in the streets, and living Chicago as Indigenous land

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to contribute to ongoing work to uncover the ways in which settler colonialism is entrenched and reified in educational environments and explore lessons learned from an urban Indigenous land-based education project. In this project, we worked to re-center our perceptual habits in Indigenous cosmologies, or land-based perspectives, and came to see land re-becoming itself. Through this recentering, we unearthed some ways in which settler colonialism quietly operates in teaching and learning environments and implicitly and explicitly undermines Indigenous agency and futurity by maintaining and reifying core dimensions of settler colonial relations to land. We describe examples in which teachers and community members explicitly re-engaged land-based perspectives in the design and implementation of a land-based environmental science education that enabled epistemological and ontological centering that significantly impacted learning, agency, and resilience for urban Indigenous youth and families. In this paper, we explore the significance of naming and the ways in which knowledge systems are mobilized in teaching and learning environments in the service of settler futurity. However, we suggest working through these layers of teaching and learning by engaging in land-based pedagogies is necessary to extend and transform the possibilities and impacts of environmental education.

Keywords:

• land education
• urban Indigenous youth
• place
• place-based education
• settler colonialism

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Erratum

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all of the Chicago American Indian community members, teachers, designers, and research assistants who participated in this work and taught us so much. Special thanks to Cynthia Soto and Douglas Medin for their leadership and insight. Thanks to Lori Faber and Jasmine Alfonso who have supported us in the work and in producing this manuscript.

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation [1205758 and 1208209].

Notes

1. Chicago was one of the original cities the US government relocated Native peoples to by force, choice, and in effort to assimilate us into the American mainstream during what is known as the Termination and Relocation era of the 1940–1960’s.

2. There are more than 150 tribes from across North America represented in the Chicago community.

3. Self-determination refers to the legal, political, social, and cultural beliefs in which tribes in the United States exercise self-governance and decision-making on issues that affect our own people.

4. Gruenwald (2008) explores the dynamics of this issue (not named as an issue of settler colonialism) through the ways in which ‘diversity’ in American institutions is constructed about racial representation, not about diverse ways of knowing and engaging the world.

5. See the Exxon-Valdez decision, 1994 WL 182, 856 and 104 F.3d 1196, in which the judge did not find Native Alaskan fishing practices as different in kind from other Alaskans thus denying their claim as a prime and significantly consequential example of a kind-degree slippage.

6. While we make no definitive claim here, we do want to point out that this phrase mirrors the types of translations of heritage language meanings.