Troubling Colonialisms in Children's "Native Animal" Literature: "Staying With the Trouble" in Multispecies Common Worlds

• In Event: 54.026 - Troubling Colonial Dualisms in Curriculum-Making: Critical and Generative Encounters With the More-Than-Human World in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Our purpose in this paper is to: (1) trouble the settler colonialist sub-texts inherent in children’s literature featuring native animal characters; and (2) propose an alternative decolonizing curriculum based upon 'staying with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016) of actual relations between setter children and native animals in colonized and damaged multispecies common worlds.

We offer anti-colonial readings of Canadian and Australian children’s literature classics - The Kissing Hand (Penn, 2007) and Possum Magic (Fox, 1983) - by drawing upon critical theories of settler colonialism (Veracini, 2010). These help us to deconstruct the ways in which ‘cute’ fictional native animals characters have been used as a means of securing settler children’s attachment to and identification with colonized lands. In contrast to these sentimentalized, colonialist fictional relations, we then move on to consider the real-life challenges and dilemmas of actual multispecies cohabitation in damaged, colonized worlds.  We draw upon feminist multispecies theorizations (Haraway, 2016) and our own 'common worlds' conceptual framework (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015) to consider how early childhood educators and children learn how to 'stay with the trouble’, when raccoons and possums move in to early childhood centres in Canada and Australia, and in the process, are involved in new kinds of multispecies curriculum-making.  

Our presentation involves anti-colonial textual analysis as well as drawing upon data generated through our multispecies ethnographic research (Eben & Helmreich, 2010) conducted in Canadian and Australian urban early childhood settings.

This paper is significant because it responds to the ethical dilemmas and challenges of cohabiting with urban wildlife in damaged settler colonized lands in a time of anthropogenic mass species extinctions. It provokes us to reimagine curriculum-making as a relational learning process that might help us to decolonize our modes of living with other species in the damaged common worlds that we have all inherited.

Authors

• Affrica Taylor, University of Canberra

• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, University of Western Ontario