A ghetto land pedagogy: an antidote for settler environmentalism

Abstract

A ghetto land pedagogy begins with two axioms that align it with land education more broadly, and that distinguish it from the general umbrella of environmental education. First, ghetto colonialism is a specialization of settler colonialism. Second, land justice requires decolonization, not just environmental justice. A ghetto land pedagogy thus attends to an analysis of settler colonialism, offers a critique of settler environmentalism, and forwards a decolonizing cartography as a method for land education. This article discusses ‘storied land’ as a critical cartographic method for land education, illustrated through a discussion of land in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Keywords:

• land education
• ghetto
• occupy
• settler colonialism
• environmental racism

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Erratum

Acknowledgments

Kate McCoy, Eve Tuck, and Marcia McKenzie for the push. Aries Yumul for mutually constitutive. Angie Morrill for of course the ghetto has land. Cesar Cruz for NSurGentes. C. Ree for the red button. Members of the Land Pedagogy panel at AESA 2010. Ohlone, where this is written: thank you.

Notes

1. Whiteness and blackness refer to socially (colonially) constructed racial structures beyond phenotype. People of color can be settlers, and can invest in whiteness. Native Americans can be, and have been enslaved, and are incarcerated at some of the highest rates – in other words subject to black subjection. In general, I capitalize Black, Indigenous, etc. when referring to identities, and use lowercase when referring to the colonial structuring of blackness, indigeneity, whiteness, etc.

2. Dictionary definition accessed http://www.allwords.com/word-terra + nullius.html.

3. Even if we accept the pretext that some land is uninhabited by humans, ice sheets are traversed, islands visited, mountain peaks gazed upon, even it they are not ‘occupied’ by Indigenous peoples (Fujikane 2012). Regardless of inhabitation, land nonetheless constitutes memory, time, and cosmology.

4. Genocide, though real, was not successful in making Native Americans extinct. Indians-as-extinct is ideology rather than actuality; settler guilt/remorse is part of this ideology of extinction.

5. Bay Area Rapid Transit, an expensive commuter monorail that services San Francisco, Oakland, and the suburbs surrounding Oakland.

6. For more about this difference in public transportation, see Fruitvale Station (2014), a film based on Oscar Grant’s murder by a BART police officer on 1 January 2009.

7. Cosmopolitan ‘whiteness’ here refers to spatial and embodied entitlements not limited to ‘white’ phenotype, e.g. bourgeois multiculturalism (Paperson 2010).

8. See Tuck (2009), Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.

9. Whitening refers to a process of settlement that can include people of color.

10. Mission Dolores website, http://missiondolores.org/old-mission/visitor.html.

11. Chevron website, The early years 1902–1914, http://www.chevron.com/products/sitelets/richmond/about/history_early_years.aspx.

12. Alcatraz might be more precisely called a De-occupation, symbolic of a movement to unsettle and repatriate tribal lands. ‘We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red cloth.’