Refusing Settler Grammars: Engaging Survivance to Create Possibilities

• In Event: Book Talk: Walking Away: Refusing and Resisting Reactionary Curriculum Movements

Abstract

Summary:
When discussing the topic of Indigeneity and North American Indigenous Peoples and their histories and how those have transitioned into modernity, we often find ourselves in a discourse which centers on Indigenous damage narratives (e.g., erasure, ethnocide, genocide). Many states do not mandate education about Indigenous people, let alone stories of Indigenous presence (Sabzalian et al., 2021); those that do engage with Indigenous peoples do so via a damage-center framework (Tuck, 2009). This paper will focus on disengaging with frameworks that erase Indigenous presence, thought, and futures, frameworks we will call settler grammars (Calderón, 2014). Building upon the overarching concept of decolonial refusal and proposing an ameliorative engagement with survivance frameworks, I hope that by proposing the naming of these grammars and education on survivance, Indigenous communities can create space for possibilities.
Often, communities of curriculum designers and classroom practitioners imagine the goal of curriculum to be visibility; we draw attention to the struggles of communities and assume that will lead to action. If the curriculum makes visible communities of color or underrepresented communities, then the goal has been accomplished. This visibility is many times a passing acknowledgment, anecdote, or footnote to a larger story. Passive representations that make clear the history of Native peoples’ but frequently lose sight of the presence of those same Native communities beyond narratives of the trauma endured. These practices avoid acknowledging the onslaught of ongoing erasure or centering of damage beyond a few occasional annotations found in the footnotes of obscure articles. They also give little to no attention to the vibrant, creative persistence of Indigenous culture and distinctiveness. Nevertheless, despite these silences, practitioners, and theorists still espouse this visibility as a moral victory for curriculum.
This representation (or non-representation) has become normalized/naturalized and perpetuated by a history and sedimentation of what several scholars have identified as “settler grammars”; these grammars are defined by Dolores Calderón (2014) as “[an] organizing system of thought and institutional practices. The ongoing concept of grammar speaks to the way that settler colonialism is reproduced through narratives or discourses” (p. 316). The refusal of these practices and articulations is neither passive nor mere obstinance. The refusal to engage in settler grammars requires more of us as theorists, developers, and practitioners. It requires reimagining the goals of curricula and the things we consider as educators when conceptualizing them. I offer a re-engagement with the concept of survivance, not as a simple replacement to settler grammars but as a challenge to elaborate on the presence of Indigenous voices, the beauty of Native cosmology, thought, philosophy, and art. This call seeks a metamorphosis of contemporary curriculum that accepts visibility as the goal, not simply an addition of survivance to a discourse that seems determined to treat the presence of Indigenous communities as novel; instead, we should expand upon this concept and develop a survivance curriculum, a curriculum which centers the frameworks and presence which survivance demands.

Author

• Sage Hatch, University of Oregon