Teaching Language as an Act of War: Settler Colonial Legibility in Dakota Language Pedagogy

• In Event: Transnational and Decolonizing Perspectives on Curricular Memory and Vision

Abstract

In this paper, we interrogate colonial domination in a close reading of how language curriculum is understood. Using settler colonial theory we examine the raciolinguistic project of language (Alim, Rickford & Ball, 2016; Flores, 2016) and how it is constitutive part of the logic of elimination and settler colonialism as structure in the U.S. nation state (Wolfe, 2006). We analyze two Dakota language readers from the assimilation and Indian New Dal eras. We find that these readers represent language as a civilizing and nationalizing force and additionally that they perpetuate understandings of Indigenous people as childlike and incapable of higher level cognition. Our findings demonstrate that Language pedagogy and curriculum were never ideologically neutral.

Authors

• Bayley Marquez, University of California - Berkeley

• Juliet Kunkel, Berkeley University of California