Tobacco in the Streets: Understanding Chicago as Indigenous Land

• In Event: Land Curriculum: Indigenous, Postcolonial, and Decolonizing Perspectives on Place, Education, and Educational Research

Abstract

Human societies are consistently negotiating meanings, activities, and relationships to land. The term land-based education has evolved with Indigenous scholars to demarcate distinctions, and we believe some commonalities, with what Gruenewald (2003) proposed a critical-pedagogy of place. Gruenewald aptly points out that much of place-based education frequently impose a distance from urban, multi-cultural education—he says the territory most often claimed by critical pedagogies. And while we concur, we argue fundamental to place-based education approaches are deeply held cultural models of land and the natural world in which conceptions, meanings, and relationships with land are constructed in human-centric forms that at their foundation presuppose humans as entitled to the earth’s resources. In a very generalized sense, Indigenous conceptions of place define humans in relationships of deference and inter-dependency with land and the natural world. Land-based curricula and pedagogies are rooted in focusing on the relationships amongst living and non-living things over socio-historic time in a place and support and facilitate relational epistemologies (Cajete, 2000).
This paper details a community design process that resulted in an educational program that reconnected urban Indigenous youth to Chicago as Indigenous land through land-based pedagogies. Central to these efforts was the community seeing and rearticulating urban environments as altered yet still traditional Indigenous lands. With this emergent understanding youth and teachers’ worked to remake their relationships to land. This process opened opportunities for teaching and learning practices that move towards decolonization as well as social and ecological justice by investing in understanding the social, political, and scientific inter-connections and processes. The epistemological reframing that resulted from engaging from land-based perspectives for youth and community participation in this process both enhanced learning in science but developed new pedagogical knowledge – land-based pedagogies – that work towards a science learning that is revitalizing for urban Indigenous communities and we argue resists enclosure, at least in part (Richardson, 2011). Importantly this project and the resultant learning environments are not designed for nor enacted in school settings. This paper works to trace the process of reclaiming learning environments and the ways in which developing curriculum and pedagogy outside of current formal settings may be a necessary step in transforming education for Indigenous youth.
In our research, re-remembering to see Chicago as Indigenous lands was a critical dimension of our work. Integrating lived languages of land, particularly in urban environments, with our young people, required journeys through layers of colonialism that quietly operate in our daily lives. It required challenging the rhetoric of deficit, delinquency, and despair often evidenced through supposed landless identities that dominates the narratives of young urban Indigenous people – generated outside and inside our communities. This paper works towards understanding the complexities, contradictions, successes, and shortcomings of developing land-based curriculum and learning environments for and with urban Indigenous youth.

Authors

• Megan Bang, University of Washington

• Ananda Maria Marin, Northwestern University