Naming beyond the white settler colonial gaze in educational research

Abstract

In this article, I describe the ways educational research often calls us out our names, meaning that educational researchers often name communities not as they are but as the academy needs them to be along damaging logics of erasure and deficiency. I use Morrison’s concept of the White gaze, Tuck’s concepts of damage-centered and desire-based research, and other contemporary scholarship on settler colonialism, White supremacy, and education to offer ways of naming in educational research beyond the White settler gaze. Finally, I look to hashtag naming in current social movements (e.g. #BlackLivesMatter, #DearNativeYouth #NotYourModelMinority) to imagine educational research that understands the naming of the communities of our work as informed by movement speech, the sort of naming that can save lives and show us and others who we are and desire to be.

Keywords:

• Naming
• settler colonialism
• Indigenous education
• Black education
• research and social movements

Notes

Acknowledgments

My deep thanks to Sandy Grande (Quechua) and Rae Paris for their vital feedback as I worked on this manuscript. I am grateful to Dawn Hardison-Stevens (Omushkeg Cree/Ojibway/Cowlitz/Steilacoom Council), Nancy Jo Bob (Lummi), Tami Hohn (Puyallup), and Anthony Craig (Yakama) for sharing necessary knowledge as I attempted to acknowledge Coast Salish lands and peoples in a good way. Special thanks to Tami Hohn, Nancy Jo Bob, and Dawn Hardison-Stevens for sharing Lushootseed spellings for the place-names of these lands and for teaching me of the complex and long histories of research on Lushootseed and Coast Salish place-names. My sincere appreciation, as well, to the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and to Kathleen King Thorius for the generous invitation to submit this article. I am profoundly indebted to the Water Protectors of Standing Rock (especially Lakota educational leader Alayna Eagle Shield), the Black Lives Matter activists and organizers of the Fourth Precinct Shutdown in Minneapolis (especially Brenda Bell Brown), and to Rae Paris, who was invited into both of these movement spaces, for inviting me to join her. It is in those spaces that I began to learn what naming and being beyond the White settler colonial gaze can mean, forward. Any faults in this article are mine alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Django Paris is the inaugural James A. and Cherry A. Banks Professor of Multicultural Education and director of the Banks Center for Educational Justice in the College of Education at the University of Washington.

Notes

1 I offer this land acknowledgment as one attempt to enact naming practices beyond the White settler gaze. How can I discuss such naming practices without recognizing the Indigenous lands and the peoples of the land where I write? I make other attempts in this article to name beyond this gaze. In the Acknowledgments section, I thank the people who offered needed guidance along the way. For example, in the original manuscript I did not begin the piece with the land acknowledgment (thanks to Sandy Grande and Rae Paris for recommending this needed revision). As well, I did not include Lushootseed spellings of the local place-names and I had errors in my naming of peoples and places (thanks to Tami Hohn, Nancy Jo Bob, Dawn Hardison-Stevens, and Anthony Craig for their knowledge and recommendations). I have much learning to do as I seek to understand and enact naming beyond the White settler gaze. This learning will include meaningful ongoing consultation with the people and communities I seek to be in reciprocal relationship with in my life and work.

2 My White mother grew up in California and has settler family from Missouri and Aotearoa (New Zealand). My Black father is from Jamaica.

3 The debate over the naming of Tahoma/Tacoma as Mt. Rainier, as well as the original Native place-name(s) of the mountain has raged for well over a century. See Wickersham (1893) and Waterman (1922).

4 I am grateful to Nancy Jo Bob (personal communication) for forwarding the importance of permission in addition to acknowledgment. Who has permission to acknowledge and be on and with the lands? Have those of us who are not Indigenous to the lands sought such permission?