Speaking Back to Manifest Destinies: A Land-Based Approach to Critical Curriculum Inquiry

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

Abstract

The objective of this presentation is to examine how colonial ideologies and practices are maintained in education, particularly social studies curriculum, which functions to obfuscate and de-legitimize indigenous knowledge and self-determination. Taking a land-based approach to social studies curriculum inquiry, particularly U.S. History textbooks widely adopted in U.S. schools, this presentation exposes how education is framed by these often invisible foundations of the colonial project in the west.
This paper takes a land-based approach to social studies curriculum inquiry. A land-based approach is a multifaceted mode of interdisciplinary inquiry that brings together both academic and community inquiry to examine phenomena from a land centered perspective. Specifically, a land-based approach in this presentation draws from cultural geography, critical legal studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory in conjunction with commonly referred to place-based modes of inquiry. Methodologically, it is informed by an indigenized (Tuhiwai-Smith, 1999, Wildcat, 2001), place-centered methodology that relies on cultural intuition (Delgado Bernal, 1998 ). These land-based modes of inquiry and methodologies center community knowledge, in this case indigenous knowledge in relation to land. This knowledge in turn speaks back to the academic disciplines outlined above, anchoring how they are used to the material and spiritual realities of place, better referred to as land-based approaches in the context of indigenous realities.
Through a text analysis of history-social science content standards and U.S. History textbooks, I analyze how these texts disseminate information that affirm western world views, and in turn disaffirm Native world-views. I utilize Linda Smith’s (2002) decolonizing methodologies and Strauss and Corbin’s (1998) Grounded Theory to capture how Native themes are explicitly dealt with in the texts in order to establish what types of learning students are explicitly intended to receive; how these lessons reaffirm western knowledge organization and conflict with Native world-views; analyze texts in order to recommend where Native issues should be included, in order to make curriculum organization receptive to multiple knowledge systems; and link up how current treatment of Native peoples in social studies curriculum reproduce removal and termination period ideologies.
Using this indigenized land-based approach reveals that social studies curriculum maintain what is best defined as settler perspectives of U.S. History as they relate to land. They reveal that all too often the continued colonial infrastructure of settler ideologies and institutions continue to be central forces in the manner in which American identity is constructed, narrated, and promoted in U.S. schooling. This undoubtedly leaves little room for indigenous knowledge and political realties in relation to place (and other epistemological sources) within U.S. schooling. Indeed, indigenous peoples are overwhelmingly treated as minorities within social studies curriculum, stripping them of the land based realities of sovereignty and self determination. This in turn maintains and produces misinformation in the larger non-Indian population with regards to American Indian and indigenous realities.

Author

• Dolores Calderon, University of Utah