Child-Mountain Geologic Entanglements as Refusals of Settler Colonial Erasures in Curriculum-Making

• In Event: Common Worlding Pedagogies: Unsettling Early Childhood Curriculum

Abstract

This paper focuses on childrenʼs entangled, messy and geopolitical relations as a refusal (Tuck & Yang, 2014) of the erasures of settler colonialism in with what is now known as Burnaby Mountain, on Coast Salish territories. In particular, it foregrounds unsettling pedagogical encounters with a mountain that is a part of the child care centre that children attend daily. This mountain, on unceded Coast Salish people’s territories, has become a contested site of colonial and capitalist extraction due to a proposal to build a tar sands oil pipeline that would tunnel through the mountain. The purpose of the paper is to generate pedagogical and theoretical possibilities that take seriously the necessity for early childhood education to respond to, make visible, and critically encounter settler colonial fossil-fuelled inheritances and accumulations.

Drawing inspiration from Tuck and Yang’s (2014) call for research and pedagogical approaches that center refusals of settler colonialism, this paper considers the generative possibilities of refusing ‘nature-pedagogies-as-usual’ that figure settler colonialism’s extractive “structuring [as] natural, inevitable, invisible, and immutable” (p. 813). The paper critically approaches recent colonial extractive events on a local mountain, as starting points from which to refigure both the mountain and children’s subjectivities as always already geologically entangled. In theorizing children’s subjectivities in geologic (Yusoff, 2015), terms I intentionally seek to create movements away from an emphasis on the bio-psychological development of children, which is a dominant underpinning of curriculum in early childhood education.

Following Tuck and Yang’s (2014) invitation to foreground “data that resist[s] domestication into settler stories” (p. 813), the paper puts visual, textual, and affective juxtapositions as performative acts of refiguring the presences of childrenʼs geologic subjectivities in relation to the mountain. In particular, multispecies socialities that entangle children with this mountain provide a rich space to redraw childhood as composed through the geologic. The paper examines the unsettling potentialities of material and semiotic orientations towards: mountain geomaterialities, specific extractive mountain events and protest actions, children’s geologic subjectivities, and children’s mountain encounters; as an assemblage that comes together to shape the mountain as a figure that reveals stratified and sedimented extractive settler colonial relations, yet also exceeds and refuses these relations. The audience is invited to consider what refiguring the mountain and children’s subjectivities through geologic relationalities might do as a place-attuned, critical response that interrupts dominant developmental understandings of what is seen as belonging to young children’s curricular engagements.

The scholarly and pedagogical significance of this paper is in contributing possibilities for un-hinging the humanistic learning child as the sole center of early childhood pedagogy. In resisting this anthropocentric gaze, the paper contributes possibilities for resituating children in relation to extractive place relations in ways that interrupt childhood innocence and children as separate from the world. By refiguring children’s becomings within the geomaterial and geopolitical, this paper mobilizes new curricular conversations that unsettle and refuse an undifferentiated colonizing view of the world.

Author

• Fikile Nxumalo, The University of Texas - Austin