Decolonizing study: Free universities in more-than-humanist accompliceships with Indigenous movements

ABSTRACT

Educational institutions have long been terrains of struggle. Schools and universities have dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their lands, cultures, and labor, whereas alternative modes of study have been central to many resistance movements, including for decolonization. In this article, we put Indigenous study projects in conversation with free universities, which have also struggled against and beyond normal universities. Through militant co-research, we ask: on what grounds might free universities align with Indigenous struggles, and how might such convergences be fruitful or fraught? We contribute to critical political-ecological interventions in environmental education by approaching this question through a theoretical framework that combines political ecology with “more-than-humanist theory” and Indigenous scholarship. We highlight how different modes of study—“education” and its alternatives—reveal networks of more-than-human interrelatedness that either reinforce or resist colonial-capitalist enclosures. We then highlight parallels between free universities and Indigenous modes of study, before outlining some possibilities and dangers for collaborations between these two movements. Through case studies drawn from our own involvement in free universities, we suggest that more-than-humanist theories provide useful means to conceptualize the radical struggles taken up by free universities, as well as to “translate” between free universities and Indigenous movements, to facilitate accompliceships through collective study.

KEYWORDS:

• anarchism
• accompliceship
• autonomous study
• decolonization
• education politics
• Indigeneity
• social movements
• more-than-human
• universities

Notes

1. Our interviews did not require approval from an Institutional Review Board (IRB), because the interviews were phenomenologic (i.e., following the conversation wherever it went) and did not aim to test hypotheses for producing generalizable knowledge. Our view of “militant co-research” draws from Colectivo Situaciones, 2003; Frampton, Kinsman, Thompson, & Tilleczek, 2006; Juris, 2007; Nagar, 2014; Sangtin Writers & Nagar, 2006; Shukaitis, 2011; Team Colors Collective, 2009.

2. In the interests of full disclosure, we wish to make it known that Eli Meyerhoff engaged in some of this research as part of his graduate study project. Fern Thompsett conducted this research independently – i.e. without university funding or support – although she was employed in teaching and research on other topics at a normal university around the same time.

3. Interview by Fern Thompsett with Gustavo Esteva, March 19, 2014.

4. Notable examples include the American Indian Movement's (AIM) Survival Schools in 1970s Minnesota, USA; Red Crow College in Alberta, Canada; First Nations University in Saskatchewan, Canada; Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiarāngi in Aotearoa (New Zealand); Dechinta Bush University in the Northwest Territories, Canada; and numerous other tribal colleges across the U.S. and Canada.

5. Interview by Fern Thompsett with David Brazil, January 30, 2014.

6. Interview by Fern Thompsett with Gustavo Esteva, March 19, 2014.

7. Interview by Fern Thompsett with Ryan Mitchell, June 12, 2014.

8. For more on Unsettling Minnesota, including their sourcebook and “points of unity,” see https://unsettlingminnesota.org.

9. Interview by Eli Meyerhoff with Rita Davern, June 4, 2010.

10. Interview by Eli Meyerhoff with Eric Angell, June 4, 2010. For more information on Oyate Nipi Kte, see http://oyatenipikte.org.

11. The full archive of BFU sessions and speakers is available online: https://brisbanefreeuniversity.org/

12. This text was submitted by its author via email for inclusion in a BFU ‘zine, for which BFU organizers had issued a public call-out. The ‘zine was published in November 2013, and can be accessed online here: https://brisbanefreeuniversity.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/bfu-zine-nov-2013.pdf