Historical silences and the enduring power of counter storytelling

In his celebrated book Silencing the Past (1995), Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot interrogated how power operates in the production of historical narratives. Trouillot argued that unequal power structures work to create and reinforce historical narratives that contain “bundles of silences.” He contended that these silences are found not just in academic histories, but in sources, archives, and more broadly in how societies remember the past, tell stories, and establish historical significance. The articles in this issue show how schools play a central role in establishing dominant narratives and silencing others, as well as how this function of schools extends beyond the history classroom. Historical silences can be found in the stories we tell about schools, students, and teachers. The authors in this issue call on curriculum scholars to think about how silences are established around Black and Indigenous students and communities through the production of dominant narratives of colonialism, antiblackness, and neoliberal accountability. The articles explore ways that students, teachers, and communities resist these narratives and create spaces for new stories and ways of knowing through a process of counter storytelling.

Trouillot’s (1995) notion of historical silences is about more than the common expression: “History is written by the victors.” In other words, historical silences are not just a product of Western academics or politicians creating narratives that reinforce the power of dominant groups. More broadly, Trouillot argued that power influences the production of the stories we tell of the past at multiple times and places, stating: “It precedes the narrative proper, contributes to its creation and to its interpretation” (p. 29). Power also protects and reinforces the epistemic validity of Western historiography, and Western ways of knowing and using the past.

In his book, Trouillot used the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) to show how a history has been silenced in both Western historiography and public memory. He argued that this anticolonial revolution, led by self-liberated former slaves, signified an unthinkable history for the West because it challenged fundamental beliefs of the Enlightenment. In particular, it rejected the Enlightenment’s construction of “a certain idea of Man,” which was both White and male (Trouillot, 1995, p. 74). Like Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) critique of Western constructions of “Man,” Trouillot explained that Enlightenment philosophies produced degrees of humanity that were used to justify colonialism, racism, and slavery. The nature of the Haitian Revolution was “unthinkable” because it challenged the Western understanding of humanity that denied enslaved peoples the possibility of rational thought, agency, and liberty. Trouillot shows how the unthinkability of the revolution led prominent Enlightenment thinkers to silence it at the time, and generations of historians to ignore it afterwards. Yet, despite the historical silencing of the Haitian Revolution, Trouillot’s work reveals that it remains a powerful counter story to the Western vision of “Man” because of its ability to assert and affirm the humanity of racialized and colonized peoples. In thinking about the enduring relevance of Trouillot’s work in education, the articles in this issue also invite us to question how Enlightenment, antiblack, and colonial ways of thinking have produced historical silences in curriculum.

Dominant historical narratives that uphold colonial and racist ways of thinking often become common sense knowledge in schools and are constantly reinforced in curriculum and pedagogical encounters. For example, as Amanda Vickery and Cinthia Salinas explain in their article, “‘I question America…. Is this America?’ Learning to View the Civil Rights Movement Through an Intersectional Lens,” historical narratives found in US history classrooms have long been used to promote and protect White supremacy and colonialism. Simultaneously, these narratives undermine the truth claims and experiences of racialized, marginalized, and colonized peoples. Likewise, in her article titled “A De/colonizing Theory of Truth and Reconciliation Education,” Brooke Madden explores how settler colonialism in Canada has functioned to silence Indigenous ways of knowing and reduce Indigenous histories to stories of colonialism. By considering the process of historical silencing in schools and curriculum studies, these authors help us focus attention not on what history is, but on how history works, as “history reveals itself in the production of specific narratives” (Trouillot, 1995, p. 25). Together, the articles in this issue work to answer the question, what do counter narratives reveal about the ways power operates in schools and curriculum?

The use of counter storytelling as a form of resistance has a long tradition in educational scholarship informed by the tenets of Critical Race Theory. Building on the work of critical legal scholar Richard Delgado (1989; 1993), Solórzano and Yosso (2002) argued that “because ‘majoritarian’ stories generate from a legacy of racial privilege, they are stories in which racial privilege seems natural” (p. 27). Solórzano and Yosso advocate for counter storytelling as a powerful methodology for both telling the stories of people often silenced and also analyzing and challenging majoritarian narratives of privilege. Referring to the work of Ikemoto (1997), Solórzano and Yosso (2002) remind us that counter stories are always about more than directly responding to dominant narratives. By centering the experiences and histories of oppressed and marginalized groups, counter stories “can help strengthen traditions of social, political, and cultural survival and resistance” (p. 29). Much like Trouillot’s work, Solórzano and Yosso’s (2002) conception of counter storytelling as methodology continues to resonate in curriculum studies, as is seen in this issue. In particular, these authors encourage us to think beyond an “add and stir” model of multiculturalism in schools. The articles in this issue reveal the inadequacy of simply including Black, Indigenous, and people of colour stories in a multicultural curriculum. In critiquing and resisting this model, the authors reveal how such a form of multicultural inclusion supports and maintains current power structures. Instead, the authors call for a rethinking and re-storying of historical and contemporary narratives with the aim of imagining a radical restructuring of schooling.

In their article, Vickery and Salinas investigate how two preservice teachers constructed narratives of Black women in the Civil Rights Movement. Using a framework that combines Black critical patriotism and Black feminism, Vickery and Salinas provide an intersectional analysis of how social studies curriculum in the US simplifies and distorts the Civil Rights Movement. This simplification privileges a dominant narrative that silences the complexity of the Black experience and is devoid of any consideration of intersectionality. In particular, Vickery and Salinas draws our attention to how educators can use the counter narratives of Black women and communities of colour, whose experiences are often silenced, to challenge majoritarian narratives and better reflect the identities and experiences of students.

The two preservice teachers in Vickery and Salinas' research created “journey boxes” that contained photographs, artifacts, and texts to serve as the basis for counter narratives of Black women’s involvement in the Civil Right Movement. Through an examination of how the two preservice teachers understood and applied Crenshaw’s (1989) concept of political intersectionality to the Civil Rights Movement, Vickery and Salinas found that they failed to explicitly address how systems of oppression intersected for Black women activists. Vickery and Salinas' analysis also revealed how the dominant narrative of the US Civil Rights Movement, as being only a story of racism, is deeply ingrained into the narrative schema of preservice teachers. This dominant narrative enforces the idea that both Whiteness and masculinity are preconditions for full citizenship. Despite the challenges the two teachers faced in making explicit connections to intersectionality, Vickery and Salinas' article reveals the importance of reframing Black critical patriotism to include the experiences and actions of Black women. These counternarratives, Vickery and Salinas argue, can function to help students become conscious of the ways in which structural forces impact the political visibility of Black women and also act as examples of forms of resistance and critical citizenship for both students and teachers.

In her article, Madden considers the wide-reaching influences and implications of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for educators who seek to take up its Calls to Action (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015). Madden explores her own discomfort with many “education for reconciliation” projects that lack theoretical grounding. Her article is a form of theory building in which she offers a framework that responds to and upholds de/colonizing commitments. Madden develops four interrelated components to outline what a de/colonizing theory entails: (a) the TRC’s vision for reconciliation; (b) Indigenous land-based traditions for establishing respectful relationships; (c) the central role of Indigenous counter stories; and (d) critiques of the construction and enactment of reconciliation. Through these components, Madden puts forward a framework for educators and researchers engaging in community development, research, policy making, and education for reconciliation. Madden hopes to advance change that “honours Indigenous knowledges and nurtures Indigenous communities” (p. 287). However, Madden reminds us that theories of decolonization are often incongruous with the material-discursive structures, institutions, and practices of educational institutions and the goals they seek. Madden puts forward the notion of de/colonizing which seeks to continually reflect on and examine the ways in which colonial logics seep into schools and teacher education programs despite honest efforts towards reconciliation.

Similar to Vickery and Salinas' examination of the experiences of Black women in the US Civil Rights Movement, Madden asserts that Indigenous counter stories represent an important pathway to resist dominant narratives of colonialism and state envisioned reconciliation. Indigenous counter stories reject colonialism as the one story of Indigenous peoples and also challenge compartmentalized and symbolic forms of reconciliation. Madden suggests four categories of Indigenous counter stories that can be used to work towards de/colonizing efforts, including narratives of refusal, resistance, resilience, and re-storying and resurgence. In each of these counter narratives, Indigenous peoples and communities challenge historical and contemporary relationships based on colonialism while highlighting the resilience and resurgence of Indigenous ways of knowing and being. These narratives also counteract the historical bundles of silences and colonial subject positions that schools have played a prominent role in entrenching and enforcing. Ultimately, Madden’s article calls our attention to the complexity of Indigenous narratives and Indigenous education and argues that any educational movement working towards reconciliation must not flatten or obscure Indigenous agency. Likewise, Madden makes clear that a de/colonizing theory for truth and reconciliation education must also consider the ways in which Canadian public education continues to promote and uphold settler colonialism, Eurocentrism, and White supremacy. Madden’s article also demonstrates how some visions of education for reconciliation have silenced the colonial underpinning of Canada’s education system by relying upon an imagined progress-oriented narrative of celebratory multiculturalism. In other words, to use Trouillot’s expression, the history and ongoing reality of settler colonial violence remains “unthinkable” for many Canadians.

Another unthinkable and silenced history found in Canadian schools is that of antiblackness. In their article “When Dreams Take Flight: How Teachers Imagine and Implement an Environment that Nurtures Blackness at an Africentric School in Toronto,” Philip Howard and Carl James examine the approaches and visions of Black educators who resist narratives of antiblackness and center the well-being of Black children at Toronto’s Africentric Alternative School. Using the lenses of culturally sustaining pedagogies and contesting antiblackness, the authors reveal how dominant narratives have played a central role in erasing “Black people, symbolically and materially, from their place in Canada's histories and landscapes” while promoting a form of multiculturalism that does not support Black communities’ demands for justice (p. 317). Like Madden and Vickery and Salinas, Howard and James show how counter stories that resist antiblackness and reveal the humanity of all peoples are ignored in schools in favour of simplistic stories which uphold the status quo. By focusing on the context of Toronto, Howard and James examine how Black experiences have been silenced in Canadian curriculum that “sugar-coat[s] ... Black Canadian history” (p. 318). They show how this self-congratulatory story is produced through an emphasis on the single experience of the Underground Railroad. In other words, Canada is envisioned as a land of freedom from slavery, which silences the history and realities of slavery and antiblackness in Canada. In the process, the present-day marginalization and inequitable outcomes for Black students, parents, and educators continues to be obscured.

By examining interviews and focus groups with teachers, students, parents, and administrators, Howard and James focus on the aspirations and approaches of Black educators at an Africentric school. They found that educators understood the role of the school to be creating community for students and families, affirming the lives and experiences of Black students, and actively working to challenge antiblackness in all its manifestations, including multicultural approaches found in other schools. For example, the authors note that challenging antiblackness requires more than adding Black History curriculum units. Howard and James also highlight the importance of understanding the historical context of antiblackness in Canada, and they note that the legacy of these histories has created distrust in educational institutions. Using Ladson-Billings’s (2009) concept of teachers as “dreamkeepers,” the authors offer a glimpse into how the narratives of Black teachers working at the Africentric Alternative School in Toronto seek a pro-Blackness that continually affirms Black humanity. Howard and James call for a “radical restructuring and reordering” of schooling in Canada using culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris, 2012) that emphasize community and challenge antiblackness (p. 333). Their article also reminds educators to think about Trouillot’s claim that paying more attention to historical injustices must not come at the expense of ignoring or protecting ourselves from present racism.

Trouillot’s book also calls our attention to the ways in which we interpret narratives, noting that the stories we read, interpret, and tell do not belong just to the narrators or the authors. Karen Eppley, in her article “What is Reading For?: Close Reading and Critical Place Consciousness,” explores how the US Common Core State Standards’ (CCSS) promotion of close reading forecloses the hopeful and liberatory possibilities that reading can offer. Close reading, Eppley explains, emphasizes evidence extraction as the key purpose of reading in a neoliberal pursuit of preparing students for the workforce under CCSS. In the process, the act of close reading divorces meaning making from place, history, and politics while also establishing itself as what Eppley calls a “common sense pedagogy” (p. 341). Eppley offers two readings of Jane Yolen’s (1995) picture book Letting Swift River Go, which tells the story of the building of the Quabbin reservoir in Massachusetts through the eyes of a young girl. This historical event in the 1930s required the removal and flooding of communities and a radical ecological disruption. Using this story, Eppley demonstrates both the limitations of a close reading approach and the possibilities of a critical place conscious reading. A close reading has to make meaning “within the four corners of the page” (p. 341). A place conscious approach takes into account Indigenous and settler histories and connections to the land, the impacts of colonialism, and the effects of human resource extraction. Eppley argues that such an approach requires skills with texts that go beyond evidence extraction.

Eppley asserts that a critical place consciousness approach to reading requires equal understandings of ecological and cultural systems. She writes: “To know a place is to understand its competing stories” (p. 349). In thinking through how this connects to historical silences and counter stories, place consciousness can also be a form of historical consciousness. In this view, dominant and counter narratives are uncovered to better understand the different ways in which people have related to the land and what this means for them in the present and the future. Developing this consciousness requires, as Eppley argues, a literacy education that helps readers understand their world and their lives as connected to others. In Eppley’s words, “to read with critical place consciousness is to consider the interaction of history, geography, ecology, culture, and power” (p. 352). Such an approach runs counter to the dominant CCSS narrative of close reading as a necessity for students to succeed in a global workforce. Instead, a critical place conscious approach prompts teachers and students to consider the role of power in the production of stories and also the powerful role of readers as interpreters.

Historical silences and counter storytelling are not new ideas, yet as these four articles reveal, they remain remarkably relevant and powerful for curriculum scholars whose work is politically committed to anticolonialism and antiracism. The authors in this issue affirm the hopeful possibilities that counter stories provide as forms of resistance and refusal. Though, as Solórzano and Yosso (2002) remind us, counter storytelling as methodology is always more than a response to dominant power structures and groups. Counter storytelling is about re-storying, making silenced histories visible, and imagining an education that meets the needs and affirms the humanity of Black, Indigenous, and other racialized and marginalized students.

The authors included in this issue examine dominant narratives in schools, and they look to counter stories as a form of resistance and hope. The articles make clear that Trouillot’s ideas about the production of history remain relevant and useful in thinking about both curriculum and pedagogy. The tensions between dominant narratives and counter stories are found in each of the four articles. While Trouillot was interested in interrogating the ways in which truth claims about the past are made and how epistemic validity operates to reinforce certain stories and silence others, the authors in this issue contend with how counter stories might be used to challenge and resist antiblackness, colonial ways of thinking, and neoliberal educational policies. The articles here also powerfully assert that addressing historical injustices requires an attention to the present, as it is in the present that legacies of these so-called historical wrongs are renewed and reproduced. As Trouillot (1995) writes: “We also know that the present is itself no clearer than the past” (p. 153). Such a reminder calls on us to interrogate the historical silences found in narratives that dominate the present. It also calls on us as educators and researchers to find, tell, and listen to counter stories that challenge and resist those silences.

James Miles
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education