Land, Water, Mathematics, and Relationships: What Does Creating Decolonizing and Indigenous Curricula Ask of Us?

Abstract

Indigenous epistemologies view a person as a whole, interconnected to land, in relationship to others. Knowledge is subjective and collective. However, hegemonic western knowledge created dualism that are perpetuated through western schooling with detrimental effects on Indigenous knowledge systems and livelihood. The dualisms separate mind from body, body from nature, and spirit from matter which led to western schooling practices that support goals of settler colonialism including dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. This article presents theoretical and conceptual discussions, personal reflections, and relationship-building the authors engaged while creating decolonizing and Indigenous syllabi in the fields of environmental studies, philosophy, and mathematics education at the university level. Engaging these processes disrupts the separation created through western dualisms and move toward reconnection as an initial step in creating decolonizing curricula, shifting dominant curricula organized through the logics of settler colonialism, to curricula that envision and support Indigenous nations and sovereignty.

Notes

1 These dualisms are traced to the time when “René Descartes pronounced ‘I think, therefore I am’ and extended the role of God as the source of knowledge to the Western Man through the acquiring of scientific knowledge” (Todd & Robert, 2018, p. 61). For further description, see Todd and Robert (2018).

2 For more information, see Fox, 2020.

3 For example, the Oregon Environmental Literacy Program.

4 For example, see Brian Bannon’s comments “Nativeness’…is a historical relation to the surroundings. To be native to a place is to exist in a specific kind of relationship to it, hence how we might understand Wes Jackson’s injunction to ‘become native’ to our places” (2016, p. 59).

5 To put the absurdity of this claim into perspective we can remember Charles Alexander Eastman who graduated from medical school at Boston University, just a two-hour drive from Yale where Leopold studied forestry. Eastman published an interpretation of his Dakota culture 30 years prior to A Sand County Almanac. He wrote, “We believed that…every creature possesses a soul in some degree, though not necessarily a soul conscious of itself. The tree, the waterfall, the grizzly bear, each is an embodied Force, and as such an object of reverence” (1911, pp. 14–15). As Eastman’s work demonstrates, Leopold was not even the first to offer a land-based ethic within the tightly guarded colonial culture of American publication.

6 In fact, there is evidence to suggest “Leopold’s” land-ethic borrow ideas from his experience listening to tribal elders in the Southwest (Meine, 1988, p. 35; Shilling, 2009, p. 326).

7 I would point readers towards a recent essay by Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte challenging environmentalists who are perennially concerned with the fast-approaching “ecological tipping point,” to consider “the relational tipping point” that was crossed long ago in the escalating violence of genocide, land theft, and slavery (2019, 3). The relational tipping point is the point after which healing becomes impossible or very difficult because cascading effects negatively affect future results. While Whyte’s message is dire, asking whether or not it is “too late for some indigenous peoples to avert further injustice,” he leaves us with a guarded message of hope, that no matter what ecological scenarios play out, indigenous peoples will seek to maintain relationships with their kin and adapt to new conditions in their homelands (2019, 5).

8 For a more in-depth study on how such moves to innocence serve to erode Indigenous sovereignty I would point the reader to Darryl Leroux’s (2019) Distorted Descent.

9 Leanne Simpson (2014) further tells us that Indigenous wisdom is generated from “the ground up” but that Land, for Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, and cosmologies, is much more than inert, dead, Earth. As she explains with Coulthard and Simpson (2016), “Land” is living and breathing just like you and me. Admittedly, my Indigenous philosophy seminar cannot realize a traditional “landed” pedagogy in the fashion Simpson calls for—instead, I look to the Indigenous histories and Peoples of (so-called) “Pennsylvania” for inspiration. My aim, then, is to learn not only with, but from the land in order to up-root settler-philosophical consciousness (Simpson, 2014, p. 7).

10 Western knowledge aims towards a universality which can be “transplanted” across time and space whereas Indigenous knowledge is highly particular, time specific, place- and action-based, as well as relational—as Hollie, keenly reminded our class: “Our education is our action.” This precept evidences what Vanessa Watts (2013) elsewhere calls, “Place-Thought,” that is, an epistemology which “is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking” (p. 21). In retrospect, I am grateful for my initial error since it became a key rupture in my colonial consciousness: In my yearning for a course on “Red Marxism” I overlooked that which is most important in Indigenous philosophy: relationship with Land.

11 Pennsylvania is on the traditional territories of these Nations.

12 Admittedly, I encountered a lot of mental and affective resistance to this procedure: Years of institutional training and professionalization disciplined me into alloying “philosophy” and “the West.” Indeed, it is somewhat of a running joke that “philosophy” is more of a “European White Area Studies” sub-discipline. When courses on “Indigenous philosophy” are lucky enough to be taught, they usually deploy what Sandy Grande (2015) calls a “rhetoric of inclusion,” that is, an uncritical “assimilation” of Indigenous philosophies into a multicultural syllabus that un-critically draws “commensurabilities” between “minorities” and Indigenous Peoples (Grande, 2015, p. 65).

13 Here I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Maori scholar Dr. Hayley Marama Cavino who visited our Indigenous and Decolonizing Pedagogy seminar where she shared her brilliant “scaffolding” assignment off of which I base my own. Marsi!

14 Through analyzing the history of settlement alongside local Indigenous philosophers, activists, and leaders, I hope to evidence Grande’s (2015) thesis that a Red pedagogy will be based in “a hope that lives in contingency with the past” (p. 32).

15 “Medicine line” is a colloquial-Métis term for the “U.S.-Canadian border,” established at the 49th parallel.

16 The Canadian government sought to “extinguish Métis Indian title” through “Half-breed Scrip.” Introduced in 1870, and proceeding well into the 1920s, scrip brought individual Métis applicants into negotiation with the government. In exchange for a meek 160-acre parcel of enclosed land-scrip or redeemable certificate of $160 money-scrip, grantees relinquished all future land claims.

17 The scrip document in my filing cabinet notes the following macabre detail: “attended Henry James Bear in sickness, dressed him after death.”

18 Above all, though, “[s]urvivance is an intergenerational connection to an individual and collective sense of presence and resistance in personal experience and the word, or language, made particularly through stories” (Vizenor, Tuck, & Yang, 2014, p. 107).

19 One of the central instructional strategies was dialogue with guest speakers. We had the pleasure of learning and hearing stories from Jeff Corntassel (Tsalagi), Hayley Marama Cavino (Māori), Louise Herne (Kanien’keha:ka), and Kelsey John (Diné).