Place, Land, and the Decolonization of the Settler Soul

ABSTRACT

My aim in this essay is to wonder where in the world I am now as a scholar of place and a lover of places, and to give some shape to where I have been. I begin by reflecting on how I came to discover that “place” matters—at a historical moment (the 1990s) in which academic interest in place surged. Next, I address some of the controversies and silences that surround critical pedagogies of place. Much of this discussion is inspired by diverse perspectives toward the difficult and contested work of “decolonization,” one of the primary aims of critical place study. Finally, I delve into my own uncertainties and hopes around decolonization: what I discuss here as the lifelong, generational project of cosmological homecoming—the cultivation of the soul. I hope to show that the politics of decolonization must be spacious enough for white settlers like myself to examine and cultivate our own interior worlds. Whatever its prospects, decolonization depends on human beings who know who and where they are, who and where they come from, and how to negotiate the interplay between the soul and the polis.

KEYWORDS:

• place
• pedagogy
• decolonization
• white settler
• soul
• inner work

Notes

1 I narrated this story in Gruenewald (2002).

2 My dissertation also examined the institutionalization of environmental education. A good portion of this analysis was later published in Curriculum Inquiry as “A Foucauldian Analysis of Environmental Education: Toward the Socio-Ecological Challenge of the Earth Charter” (Gruenewald, 2004).

3 While such omissions are troubling, after much contemplation I have come to believe that the unsaid is the inevitable outcome of any utterance.

4 The reality of global migration (geologically, biologically, anthropologically, historically, and in the present) as well as the reality that places are haunted by the past in layers of story, are two themes that require focused attention from educators interested in place. For a powerful critical ethnography that explores the concept of hauntings in Northwest Argentina see Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (Gordillo, 2014).

5 The educational implications of the intersection of modern diaspora studies with the tension discussed here between land-based Indigenous-settler relationships is of monumental importance, but will need to be developed more fully elsewhere. See Coleman (2016).

6 Lilburn does not explicitly deal with the tensions between white settler colonialism and today’s global and largely non-white diasporas. But what he suggests is for everyone.

7 Each of these narratives is strongly reinforced in the neoliberal university and by an academic culture that is at once averse to the idea of the sacred while remaining unaware of its own sacred cows.

8 Many “ecological thinkers” from increasingly diverse and intersectional movements have insisted on the need to recover old and invent new stories to guide Western culture into the ecological age—or, what is now called the Anthropocene.

9 I recognize here a tension between soul work and identity politics. This tension requires a lot of attention beyond this paper’s scope. Yet, I believe that the ego-centric battles of identity politics can only benefit from eco-centric soul work. For an eco-centric model of soul development, see Plotkin (2013).

10 The same is true with the pairing “Indigenous-non-Indigenous,” an expression of formal logic equivalent to “a-not-a,” where an identity is expressed only as opposition only to something it is not. This linguistic negation, I argue, is politically problematic. First, the negation amounts to an erasure. Second, it categorically denies the ontological “indigeneity” of the non-Indigenous other.

11 See especially the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education. In the field of curriculum studies, the work of John Miller (2007) is exemplary.