Disrupting the Settler Colonial University: Decolonial Praxis and Place-Based Education in the Okanagan Valley (British Columbia)

ABSTRACT

This article demonstrates how decolonial Placed-Based Education can disrupt a settler colonial academic status quo. We begin by situating our analysis in the unceded Syilx Territories of the Okanagan Valley (British Columbia, Canada) and proceed by illustrating how both taken-for-granted colonial epistemologies and banal exnominations of white supremacy remain orthodox within mainstream Canadian higher education. We next define “decolonial praxis” by drawing from insights offered by critical feminist, anti-racist, and Indigenous scholars and community organizers before moving into a summary of how we embraced theories and strategies of decolonization coupled with Place-Based Education in an introductory Gender and Women’s Studies course. We conclude with our response to the ongoing exclusions being reproduced by neoliberal universities that result from the primacy they grant to Western knowledges and rationales. The piece reveals how decolonial place-based methods can be leveraged against settler colonial institutions, discourses, and logics to unsettle their claims to legitimacy, land, and authority over learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonization
• settler colonialism
• white supremacy
• critical pedagogy
• Place-Based Education

Acknowledgements

We offer our most heartfelt gratitude to both Ronni Roesler and Edna Terbasket of the Ki-Low-Na Friendship Society for their support, guidance, humor, incisive political insights, and warmth.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 State repression Indigenous communities face in Canada is meted out in numerous interlocking ways. The fact that settler colonial practices of domination and logics of elimination are not a thing of the past is demonstrated through Aboriginal peoples’ experiences of intergenerational trauma, land confiscation, the reserve system, RCMP “starlight tours,” state dismissals of missing, murdered, and trafficked Aboriginal women, and the regulation of Indigenous identities (e.g. The Indian Act, Bill C31, enfranchisement policies, etc.), to name a few.

2 For a more fulsome engagement with these terms see Pulido (2015), Wolfe (2016), Moreton-Robinson (2015), Bonds and Inwood (2016), and Byrd (2011), to name a few.

3 The degree of “impossible circumstances” (e.g. oppression, alienation, xenophobia, etc.) experienced by people living in what is now called Canada varies in magnitude and duration, and is mediated by a spectrum of differing social axes of identification/subject positions. We are not suggesting that everyone faces the same degree of repression under settler colonialism, given that many are privileged and/or subjugated in contrasting, sometimes simultaneous, ways.

4 We suggest the ways in which settler colonial socio-spatial relations are practiced/sustained in the Okanagan Valley, though uniquely situated, are not dissimilar from those operating in other places across “Canada,” as well as contrasting white settler societies.

5 From Syilx, meaning: “A gathering of people for a common purpose.”

6 An introductory gender studies course with an enrolment of approximately 100 undergraduates. We offer our gratitude to Ilya Parkins for treating us (a grad student and a sessional) as equals, and for supporting our approach.

7 There is neither a pure place nor perfect form of resistance, decolonizing education, or solidarity; hence, it is likely we “faltered” along the way and unintentionally reproduced those things which we are antagonistic towards. To wrestle with these complexities, at least one of the instructors held debriefing/reflection sessions at the beginning of classes with students, and met weekly, generally on Friday evenings over supper, with the Education Coordinator from KFS, Ronni, to discuss and reflect upon content, process, assignments, methods, and actions.

8 It is not our contention that the occasional presence of Indigenous people in classrooms (which usually occurs at the behest of problematically well-intentioned and oft-oppressive professors and/or administrators) is radically transformational in the least. While these instances can be important/necessary, a far more cautious and revolutionary process/solution is needed, as such one-off events neither decolonize education nor substantively change the material conditions under which Indigenous knowledge-holders share their perspectives. By this we mean that the “invitations” Indigenous Elders/knowledge-holders are offered by universities/faculty members sometimes constitute tokenization and often amount to a solicitation of free, or grossly devalued and under-compensated, labor.

9 While we use “irrelevancy” here, we acknowledge that mainstream education is completely relevant if using neoliberal logics and capitalist notions of production/growth (e.g. on-demand efficiency, 24-hour/fashionable consumption, outsourcing, sustaining precarity, entrepreneurializing “global citizens”). Our appreciation to an anonymous reviewer on this point.

10 The KFS-DEP was a 2015 pilot project designed to increase urban Aboriginal people’s access to university education. We are deeply grateful to the KFS Executive Director, Edna Terbasket and KFS-DEP coordinator, Veronica (Ronni) Roesler, for their support, comments, and guidance on both the course and this article.

11 Our intent in mentioning Roxanne Louie is not to reduce her life into an object of academic analysis, but to recognize and remember her. Sharing her name is an explicit move to note that she is deserving of dignity and respect.