Speaking back to Manifest Destinies: a land education-based approach to critical curriculum inquiry

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which settler colonialism shapes place in the social studies curriculum, producing understandings of land and citizenship in educational settings. To do this, the author uses the emergent framework of land education to move forward the important projects of place-based education, especially its potential for centering indigeneity and confronting educational forms of settler colonialism in environmental education. To emphasize how place-based education can intersect with land education, the author outlines how a concept of place, informed by Indigenous knowledge, renders settler colonialism visible. The author then describes how current models of place-based education differ from land education in a number of ways. Finally, using a land education approach, the author demonstrates how schooling, through social studies curriculum, transmits a settler colonial land ethic that must be made explicit in order to decolonize settler colonial relations attached to current pedagogical models of place. The author insists land education – like environmental education – must take place across the curriculum (k-16). However, land education implies a commitment to begin to understand the process of decolonization that takes seriously the centrality of settler colonialism.

Keywords:

• land
• place
• education
• eco-justice
• culture

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Erratum

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Dr Clayton Pierce for his invaluable feedback on the article.

Notes

1. In order to imagine non-colonial relations, one must first understand the production of colonial ontologies within settler states (Byrd 2012; Calderon 2008, 2011). I define colonial ontology ‘as a project that promotes a hierarchy of being in which white settler state citizenship is defined as the dominant form, and the racialized “minority” other is defined as the subordinate. This hierarchy of being is mediated by a number of corollary rights defining the parameters of access to this ontology (such as integration, diversity, and equity), and promoting settler dominance over Indigenous groups (doctrine of discovery, federal supremacy, and limited sovereignty)’ (2011, 74). Moreover, within the US, Indigenous peoples are constructed as a monolithic (Byrd 2012) racial minority (Calderon 2008, 2011), which subordinates and erases the multiple tribal claims to territory that directly contest settler ownership (Wolfe 2006). Thus, colonial ontologies are intimately tied to land (See for instance Gomez’s (2005) work, which explores the construction and reproduction of colonial ontologies in the southwest).