The Rural Is Nowhere: Bringing Indigeneity and Urbanism Into Educational Research

• In Event: The Curriculum of Forgotten Rural Places: Identity, Indigeneity, Education, Urbanism, and Cartographies

Abstract

Although the term “urban” seems to be everywhere in educational policy and research, there is little interrogation into precisely what the term “urban” means. One thing that is apparently clear is that the urban is not the rural. Rural education is thus defined in the negative sense that it is not urban education, and yet the positive referent here—urban education—is itself ill defined, is itself a victim of undertheorized in educational literature. In this presentation, we begin addressing this double-lack in educational research. We do this by weaving together two narratives about the historical production of space. One narrative is that constructed by Marx and critical geographers, which begins with the town/country dialectic inherited by capitalism and ends with a conception of urbanism that is not bound to any particular place or spatial arrangement. The other narrative is one lived by Indigenous peoples in the U.S., and this is a history that has always worked against the division between the town and country. These narratives come into agreement concluding that there is no such ontological thing as the rural or the urban.

We begin with a brief orientation to urban educational research in the U.S., which prompts us to question what the urban in this research signifies. To answer this question, we call on Marx’s and Engels’ writing on the town/country dialectic, which gives a history of how and in what ways the urban and the rural have come to be thought of and lived as distinct entities with their own feel, their own speed, their own aura. For Marx and Engels, whom the dialectic was the operative force of history, nothing is ever fixed or permanent, including the separation of town and country. Marx, for example, wrote about the “urbanization of the countryside, through the industrialization of agriculture” (Smith, 1984/2008, p. 148). Henri Lefebvre’s book on the urban, to which we turn next, picks up where Marx left off. Lefebvre argues that the entirety of the globe has been urbanized, and that urbanism has escaped the city’s confines. At the end, this narrative gives us the insight that the urban isn’t about a place but a set of social relations and a patterning of society.

There is another narrative that troubles and resists this binary from an even earlier historical point, through the lived reality of a different worldview. Indigenous peoples and societies in the U.S. both trouble and add to the urbanization story told by critical geography. For Indigenous peoples, the very notion of dividing land and space is foreign and destructive (Goeman, 2013; Deloria, 1997). Through Indigenous studies we learn that the urban/rural binary was a colonial construct imposed on Native peoples during the conquest of the Americas. Mapping was a central tool used for the violent expropriation of the land, which Native peoples did not view as a means of production to be owned. Through the creation of reservations and forced relocation programs, the process of settler colonialism works to impose an urban/rural binary on Native peoples and spaces.

Authors

• Kelsey Dayle John, Syracuse University

• Derek R. Ford, DePauw University