Interrogating Education Sovereignty, Language, and Epistemicide in Initial Teacher Education

• In Event: Interrogating Sovereignty: Settler Colonialism, Antiblackness, and Language Across Educational Research

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the ways in which teacher educators talk about sovereignty in initial teacher education in indigenous contexts. It builds on data collected in the south of Chile, in mapuche territory, or Wallmapu--a place of ongoing conflict over land and where mapuche communities continue to fight for their rights and territory as they face active police and land-owner violence. It is based on interviews with eight teacher educators conducted in 2019/2020 during the Chilean uprising and the current pandemic in two initial teacher education programs: one program developed and led by indigenous scholars on intercultural teacher education and another that offers a specialty in intercultural education.

I use settler colonialism as the theoretical lens to analyze the ways in which these teacher educators talk about their work, specifically examining their ideas on to whom their work is accountable. Settler colonialism proposes that we look at colonialism as the on-going occupation of indigenous land, and the goal of indigenous extermination (Veracini, 2010; Tuck & Yang, 2012). The teacher educators in this study do their work in a place that consistently contests the existence of the mapuche and has a long history of shaming indigenous ways of life and language. De Souza Santos (2015) proposes the concept of epistemicide to describe the process of extinguishing indigenous histories and language in and out of schools. In Chile mapuzungun (mapuche language) has been erased through shaming and prohibition and, consequently, generations of mapuche lost their language and family stories (Loncon, 2019). As part of a larger political process of land and rights reclamation, indigenous scholars in teacher education have proposed teaching and learning of mapuzungun as central to recovering their family and indigenous heritage. Critical indigenous pedagogy scholars propose education sovereignty to think about education as part of this process of recuperation by thinking of their work as accountable to the communities of their students (Brayboy, 2005; McCarty & Lee, 2014).

During my data collection, in the context of the Chilean uprising of 2019, the statue of a colonizer was beheaded and his head set at the feet of Caupolican, a mapuche warrior, during a mapuche-organized protest attended by indigenous teacher educators in the programs of my study. I use this moment to locate settler colonialism, epistemicide, and language in place and analyze how teacher educators position accountability and sovereignty in their work in relation to their context and their positions as indigenous or non-indigenous scholars.

Rather than present findings I follow Koro-Ljunberg & Barko´s (2012) proposal of thinking about them as openings to further conversations, instead of final answers. In place of findings, I propose my analysis as an interruption of the normalization of settler colonial violence in teacher education research. This research contributes to the dialogue on how we can imagine better--an imagining that is not based in the idea of fixing education but of recognizing that the damage is irreparable.

Author

• Andrea Lira, Teachers College, Columbia University