Learning settler colonialism in my K-12 education: A re-search counterstory

The week before Thanksgiving in 2005, I brought a peanut can to kindergarten for a lesson about “Indians.” Under the watch of my mom and other parent helpers, we glued neon feathers all around the sides of the cans. We snapped on the plastic lids. Then, our teacher led us all in a music lesson.

“Let’s! Play! In-dian drums!”

We banged on the top of the cans: Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom! Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom!

“LET’S PLAY LOUD!” BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.

“Let’s play soft.” boom-boom-boom-boom-boom.

“Let’s play fast!” Boomboomboomboomboom.

“Let’s play slow.” Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Years later, I came home from middle school to the dinner of UTF8gbsn糙米,11UTF8gbsn菜花,22 and UTF8gbsn红烧肉33 that my grandparents had prepared. My mom came to sit with us. We talked about school, about orchestra. My mom drummed on the table, and her eyes lit up. “UTF8min欸? UTF8gbsn就是你小时候唱的那首歌?”44 She sang: “Let’s! Play!” I joined in – “In-dian drums!” We banged on the wooden table together: Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. We laughed.

The “Indian drums” song was part of a program teaching me – and my Chinese immigrant mom – to participate in settler colonialism. English scholar Patrick Wolfe defined settler colonialism as a structure, an ongoing project, driven by a “logic of elimination” that dissolves existing societies in order to create a new society, “destroy[ing] to replace.” This makes the elimination of Indigenous nations an “organizing principle” of our American settler society that persists in the present, rather than a one-time historical event (Wolfe, 2006, p. 388). In Playing Indian, Philip J. Deloria (Yankton Dakota) describes how false representations of Indigenous peoples like the “Indian drum” activity teach not the “real,” but the “ideal,” a settler conception of Indigenous peoples that justifies settlers’ continued subjugation and occupation of the land, and their oppression of the peoples who stewarded it since time immemorial. My kindergarten lesson is just one example of how the dominant K-12 education system helps form and sustain “ideals” and ideologies that underpin the continued existence of settler society, a continual creation that furthers the logic of elimination.

In this essay, I will trace the ways that my K-12 education taught me to participate in settler colonialism. From a kindergarten song to a 5th grade field trip to Longhorn Cavern State Park, from the set of Little House novels my parents bought me to a high school English project, this essay will examine how I gained fluency not just in offensive speech, imagery, and stereotypes – but in ideological methods of accepting, participating in, and re-creating systems that perpetuate Indigenous dispossession and white supremacy. Importantly, in this paper I focus on knowledges and epistemologies advanced by curriculum, and not on the material structures of educational systems. True decolonizing work requires the latter as well, but they are beyond the scope of this particular paper.

First, I will discuss critical race theory and TribalCrit’s analyses of racism and colonization as endemic to society, and I will ground my paper in two points: the non-neutrality of knowledge-production, and the methodology of counter-story. After discussing my positionality, I will spend the bulk of the essay tracing the contours of my settler education, discussing how settler colonialism operates in classrooms through my own experience and across other geographic and temporal settings. I will finally discuss decolonial teaching and how it not only avoids conscripting students into settler colonial ideologies, but also gives them tools to recognize and challenge those ideologies.

CRT and TribalCrit: Education is not neutral

Critical race theory (CRT) began emerging in the 1970s and 80s as an analytical and legal activist framework moving beyond critical legal studies (CLS), which analyzed class but lacked an engagement with race, and liberal race discourse, which left racial inequity persisting even after the legal victories of the civil rights movement (Crenshaw, 2002). It analyzes racism as structural, foundational in the bones of society. One of CRT’s core tenets is that knowledge-production is not neutral, rejecting (neo)liberalism’s principle of neutrality. It asserts that research, education, law, and the way we tell stories about our world shape and are shaped by white supremacy (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Delgado & Stefancic, 2011; Crenshaw, 2011; Crenshaw et al., 2019). Bryan Brayboy (Lumbee) outlined TribalCrit in response to CRT’s omission of an analysis of settler colonialism (Brayboy, 2005). While CRT analyzes racism as endemic to society, he asserts, TribalCrit takes as its foundation that “colonization is endemic to society,” meaning that “European American thought, knowledge, and power structures dominate present-day society in the United States” (p. 430). Throughout a history of governmental policies rooted in imperialism and white supremacy, settlers have worked to eliminate Indigenous societies to the point where, he says, dominant members of American society have little awareness of the everyday experiences and lives of Indigenous peoples in the present. Research, education, and other forms of knowledge production have all aided this production of settler colonialism.

In his sixth tenet of TribalCrit, Brayboy describes how governmental policies and educational policies have linked in the aim of assimilating Indigenous people. Education (in particular, through boarding schools) has been weaponized as a tool of elimination to break apart Indigenous families, destroy home languages (requiring the use of English instead of their nations’ languages), assert the dominance of Western knowledge systems while destroying Indigenous ones, and assimilate Indigenous children into settler society (Lomawaima, 1995, 1999; Adams, 1995; Trafzer et al., 2006).

Education has not only been used as a weapon to target Indigenous people by attempting to eliminate them under settler colonialism, but also as a tool to bring settlers into the ideologies of settler colonialism and white supremacy (Sleeter, 2010; Calderon, 2014). CRT contends that education is not neutral (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1998). Ladson-Billings (1998) argues that CRT sees the official school curriculum as “designed to maintain a White supremacist master script” (p. 18). A “master script” silences multiple perspectives and instead “legitimiz[es] dominant, white, upper-class, male voicings as the ‘standard’ knowledge students need to know” (Swartz, 1992, p. 341). Majoritarian stories, master narratives, or standard stories are stories told about Indigenous peoples, people of color, and all marginalized peoples, and also about the world, that represent and reify dominant ideologies (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). My “Indian drum” lesson told a majoritarian story about Indigenous peoples as monolithic and primitive, reifying settler colonial ideologies.

In their Indigenous studies curriculum guide “Teaching Critically about Lewis and Clark,” educators Alison Schmitke, Leilani Sabzalian (Alutiiq), and Jeff Edmundson explain the ways settler dynamics and constructions are traditionally taught through the American K-12 education system. They argue that lessons tend to frame settler colonialism as a neutral-to-positive exploration of new lands and expansion of the American nation, rather than an uneven and eliminatory process of destroying and replacing existing Indigenous societies. When settlers enter Indigenous homelands with the intent of making those homelands their new home, they need to not only make a new dynamic with the existing populations, but make new narratives to justify that dynamic – including describing this new civilization as superior, removing any mention of harm, freezing Indigenous populations in the past, and portraying them as savage and ontologically lower than civilized settlers (Schmitke et al., 2020). Education serves as a vehicle for the construction and teaching of these narratives.

Far from being neutral, education remains a vital part of sustaining the process of destroying Indigenous knowledge systems, replacing them with European knowledge systems that are positioned as superior, and crafting narratives that strive to underpin and stabilize the invading settler state.

Storytelling & counterstory methodology

Another core contention of both CRT and TribalCrit, as well as Black feminist theory and ethnic studies traditions, is that storytelling and personal narrative is a valuable source of knowledge (Brayboy, 2005; Christian, 1987; Delgado & Stefancic, 2011; Archibald et al., 2019). In outlining TribalCrit, Brayboy (2005) asserts a key tenet: “Stories are not separate from theory; they make up theory and are, therefore, real and legitimate sources of data and ways of being.” Black feminist literary scholar Barbara Christian wrote in 1987, “People of color have always theorized” – oftentimes in narrative forms that have not been deemed legitimate sources of knowledge by the Western academy (p. 52).

Within a critical race theory context, this paper is rooted in the critical race methodology of counterstory, which Solórzano and Yosso (2002) define as the practice of telling marginalized stories, calling it a “tool for exposing, analyzing, and challenging the majoritarian stories of racial privilege” (32). Counterstory challenges dominant narratives and counters hegemonic frameworks: it is bound up in a critique of dominant ideology (e.g. liberalism, whiteness, color blindness, settler colonialism) and an objective of social justice (Martinez, 2020). Delgado (1989) theorized counterstorytelling as helping the oppressed heal while challenging the oppressors.

Counterstory can be one way to conduct research without replicating colonial violence onto Indigenous peoples. In her seminal work on Indigenous research, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou, Māori) problematizes a history of Western “research” that exerts ontological superiority over Indigenous peoples and extracts knowledge from them in the service of incorporating them into white Western settler systems, institutions, and epistemologies (Smith, 1999). Drawing from her work, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2017) hyphenates the word into “re-search” to highlight how “research” is not an innocent or neutral pursuit of knowledge, but an active and constantly contended process that can uphold systems like coloniality or work to decolonize knowledge-production. Counterstory as re-search can produce knowledge in a way that works against coloniality.

Thus, in this paper, I use counterstory as a re-search methodology. I reject an identitarian liberal multicultural politics that may limit me to investigating my Asian-American experiences to critique anti-Asian racism. Instead, I re-search my own experiences to unmask ways that coloniality structures the dominant education system and conscripts settlers (including settlers of color) into the settler society on Turtle Island.

Where I come from

Twenty-four generations ago, my patrilineal ancestors moved from UTF8gbsn江西55 province to the neighboring UTF8gbsn湖南66 province. For twenty-one generations, they stewarded land in UTF8gbsn益阳,77 in the north-center of UTF8gbsn湖南 province. Up until my grandpa’s generation, they were farmers who specialized in working with UTF8gbsn鸬鹚88 to catch fish in the river. My grandparents moved from UTF8gbsn益阳 to UTF8gbsn常德,99 a day’s journey by river and foot, where my dad was born. My aunts and relatives continue to steward land in both UTF8gbsn益阳 and UTF8gbsn常德 to this day.

My mom comes from farmers outside UTF8gbsn上海1010 and in UTF8gbsn辽宁.1111 Since genealogy is traditionally recorded patrilineally in China, I know less about her side: I seek to know more. My parents immigrated from China to America in 1992. They moved to Alabama, then Florida, then Texas.

When I was born, I “inherit[ed] the power to represent or enact settler colonialism” (Morgensen, 2011, p. 20). What’s more, as Saranillio’s (2013) work on Asian-American settler colonialism argues, in moving to a settler colonial state, migrants can use their political agency to either “bolster” or resist a colonial system begun by white settlers. This paper excavates how my settler education set me up to bolster the system. Taking up J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Kānaka Maoli)’s concept of “enduring Indigeneity” – Indigeneity endures, since Indigenous peoples continually “exist, resist, and persist,” and settler colonialism must continually “endure” Indigeneity (Kauanui, 2016) – as well as Smith (2012)’s conception of Indigeneity as a praxis of building relationship with land, people, and creation and disinvesting from nationhood, I work to recover my own relationship with the idea of Indigeneity, while striving to relate with the enduring Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and participate in their struggle for sovereignty.

The land that I grew up on in Austin, Texas is the ancestral lands of many Indigenous peoples, including the Jumanos, Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, Nmn  (Comanche), and Ndé Kónitsa̧a̧íí Gokíyaa (Lipan Apache) peoples. Today, the Jumanos nation now has more than 300 people registered and is trying to register for federal tribal recognition; the Tonkawa nation has more than 700 enrolled members; the Nmn  nation has about 17,000 enrolled members and projects such as language revitalization efforts; and the Ndé Kónitsa̧a̧íí Gokíyaa (Lipan Apache) nation has about 4,500 enrolled members and many ongoing projects, including creating protective infrastructure around a sacred burial grounds in what is colonially known as Presidio, Texas, a project just completed in the spring of 2024 (“Jumanos”, 2004; Olvedo, 2016; About Accomplishments; Rosenthal, 2024). The land I grew up on is not mine, and as I learn about where and whom I come from, I hope to build better relationships with it and those who have stewarded it long before I arrived.

My education as a case study

I went through a public school system that had extensive resources. The Eanes Independent School District was established in 1958 and now spans six elementary schools, two middle schools, and a high school (History). Westlake High School was established in 1969 by white people avoiding integration after Brown v. Board of Education (Spong, 2005). In the 2022–23 school year, out of 2,825 students, 63.2% were white and 0.8% were Black, in a state where 25.6% of students were white and 12.8% were Black (2022–23). 0.1% were reported as “American Indian,” a label that itself exemplifies the settler gaze on Indigenous peoples. According to Niche, the district spends an average of $24,109 per student, as opposed to a national average of $12,239. Growing up, Westlake was known as one of the best public schools in the area – and the richest, and whitest. 99% of graduating seniors go directly to a four-year college. Considering this, my education makes me a case study for how a materially well-resourced education teaches ideologies that uphold settler colonialism.

Learning settler colonialism

Decorating “Indian headbands” in kindergarten at Forest Trail Elementary School. 2005.

In this photo, I’m five years old, and we’re having another Thanksgiving week lesson about “Indians.” We’ve decorated headbands with brightly colored paints and neon feathers. Our parents are there as volunteers to help coordinate the activities (my mom took this photo, and in the corner one of my classmates clings to a parent). This means the activities have the support of our closest, most trusted authority figures. We’ve also decorated sugar cookies with sprinkles, which we’re snacking on as we put on our finished headbands. It’s a normal, everyday activity of learning about settler colonialism.

Deloria’s (1998) concept of the “ideal” – “a collection of mental images, stereotypes, and imaginings based only loosely on those material people Americans have called Indians” – forms the material with which settlers construct ideas of the “Native” and put them to use in defining the settler nation (p. 20). Our Thanksgiving week activity was a lesson in the “ideal” (an idea of primitive people in the past wearing feathers), not the “real” (what kind of spiritual and political purposes did a headdress traditionally play for Lakota peoples, for example, and what do they play now?). In turn, it allowed us to assume a position as civilized, present producers of knowledge.

Deloria traces how Indigenous peoples have been constructed as exterior to colonists, or interior to the nation, depending on what has aided settler colonialism. In 18th-century America, they were constructed as “exterior” so that the new settlers could self-define against “Indians” as British colonizers. But later, as these settlers opposed themselves to England and British identity, they constructed Indigenous peoples as “interior” to America. This allowed them to buttress their self-definition as American against the British, as well as gain access to aboriginal belonging (p. 21). As they did so, Americans constructed Indigenous peoples as “savage” – an idea the settlers could then position themselves against to self-define as civilized. This created competing desires: an “urge to idealize and desire Indians and a need to despise and dispossess them” (p. 4).

These narratives, as well as the aforementioned described by Schmitke et al. (2020) – Manifest Destiny as a positive expansion, Western superiority over Indigenous societies, erasure of harm, freezing the Indigenous peoples in the past, portraying Indigenous peoples as ontologically lower than civilized settlers – resonated throughout my education.

Settler colonialism in my education

In third grade, we played Oregon Trail, a popular video game set up on the school’s desktop computers. The player embodies a family of white settlers traveling in a covered wagon from Independence, Missouri to Oregon’s Willamette Valley in 1848. Along the way, you trade, buy goods, cross rivers, and avoid natural disasters. You can “hire an Indian to help” at a river crossing. Otherwise, Indians are considered a threat.

At the end of the school year, we completed the 3rd grade capstone activity: we built our own covered wagons with red kids’ wagons, hula hoops, and canvas cloth, dressed up as Westward-bound settlers, and paraded through the entire school. All the other grade levels came out of their classrooms to sit along the hallways and clap. In music class, we learned the song “Go West.” The opening goes: “Go west, young man. Go west, young woman. Go west and seize the day!” (Emerson & Jacobson, n.d.). The song was stuck in my head for years.

These activities taught me about the journey of American settlers westward through the lens of a survival adventure. The settlers were constructed as heroes who faced life-or-death risks to make better lives for themselves in the new land of the West, which was unoccupied and ripe for the taking. On the other hand, Indigenous people were constructed as already interior to the new nation but savage, and existed either to harm civilized people or to help the settlers safely cross the rivers they mystically knew so well. The video game and activities taught me Manifest Destiny as a positive ideology, where people were doing their duty as Americans to expand the frontier and claim new land, make a better life for themselves, and improve the nation. We embodied that as we marched the hallways of the school; we were individual heroes who would “seize the day” triumphantly, at no consequence to others.

We also learned ideologies that freeze Indigenous peoples in the past and erase their presence. On our 5th grade trip to Longhorn Cavern State Park, we read signs that described the geological history of the place, but entirely neglected to mention the existence of Nmn  (Comanche) and other Indigenous peoples in relation to the caves. “Some of the earliest visitors were the area’s prehistoric peoples, who used parts of the cave for shelter,” the pamphlet today reads. “Anglo settlers found the cavern in the mid-1800s and began mining bat guano” (Inks). The language of “visitors” implies that the land was not claimed or truly occupied by anyone prior to Anglo settlement, and the word “prehistoric” places Indigenous peoples before well before civilized time. As we looked at the beautiful, glistening natural caves now, it felt like Earth was back to its pristine, human-free, prehistoric state – just like the settlers must have found it. In reality, Nmn  people were still resisting Anglo settlement of the area throughout the 1800s. After the annexation of Texas into statehood in 1845, there was material federal support for the ongoing state efforts to subdue the Nmn  nation. Settlers made and broke treaties with them, and ultimately waged war until 1875 (Hämäläinen, 2008).

Besides geography and history, I was taught settler colonial ideas through literature as well. In kindergarten, we sat on the carpet in front of my teacher’s rocking chair as she read to us Little House In the Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I loved it – I continued reading the next book in the series: Little House on the Prairie. I was entranced by the process of boiling maple and pouring it on snow to make maple candy. I felt Laura’s fear when two “naked, wild men” approached the house and entered, making “harsh sounds” and smelling terrible – Laura hides as they eat Ma’s cornbread and take Pa’s furs (Wilder, 1935, pp. 134–141). I breathed a big sigh of relief when they left. I devoured the rest of the series, and read all the books again several times throughout my childhood.

I had no idea that it was illegal for Laura’s family to be there, on the Osage Diminished Reserve, which had been established and already drastically reduced in size by several rounds of treaties – and that the family’s presence represented a continual, messy push westward by white settlers who were breaking those treaties. As Kaye (2000) writes, the little house had been constructed on Osage land, using their lumber, without permission. The Osages would “quite naturally see Pa’s trapping as another economic raid on their way of life as well as an affront to the ceremonial relationship between the Osages and their animal kin” (p. 133).

Kaye writes that the danger isn’t just in the explicitly harmful language in the book, but in the superficial sympathy that Laura and Pa express for them. Pa explicitly rejects the common statement (popularized by war general Richard Pratt) that the “only good Indian is a dead Indian,” instead citing “one good Indian” who prevented others from attacking – a statement that can soothe the reader’s consciousness while masking a deeper layer of ideological work (p. 126). Overall Laura’s family is cast as making the most of an unfortunate, but inevitable situation, even as they illegally squat on Osage land.

In her blog analyzing North American Indigenous peoples in children’s literature, Nambé Pueblo scholar Debbie Reese identifies many more “ideal” representations in the Little House series – a “very old Indian” who tells Pa, “Heap big snow come,” and holds up fingers to say it will last for “many moons”; a passage where Pa tells Laura childhood stories of pretending to “stalk[] the wild animals and the Indians; and more. These present the stereotypes of a nameless and tribeless “wise Indian” who speaks in broken English to help the white settler, and equate Indigenous peoples with “wild animals” to be hunted for play by their ontological superior. Reese writes that the book series’ “status and place of nostalgia in the minds of so many Americans” makes these representations particularly insidious. As I read these books I loved so much, inhabiting a settler point of view, I absorbed narratives that constructed Indigenous peoples as inferior to the settler, sometimes a threat, sometimes a help, always other.

State curriculum

Arching over the individual instances that I experienced, the state curriculum standards themselves facilitate the erasure and ontological lowering of Indigenous peoples. The Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) are Texas’ curriculum standards, set by the Texas Education Agency. Although they do not dictate the precise methods of individual teachers, they set the expectations for the course content: textbooks are written to match the standards, and passing the state’s standardized tests requires these skills.

In the TEKS for 7th grade Texas History, across the historical events and issues that students are expected to know from 1519 (the first Spanish settlement) to the present day, there are only two content standards that explicitly reference Indigenous peoples: “compar[ing] the cultures of American Indians in Texas prior to European colonization,” and identifying “the effects of westward expansion on American Indians” (Chapter 113B, 2019, pp. 7, 9). This relegates Indigenous peoples to the past and makes their significance relative to, and prior to, contact with Europeans. It erases their experiences throughout ongoing processes of settlement, centering settler perspectives. The second and only other time they are mentioned, westward expansion is framed as a neutral process that had “effects” on Indigenous peoples as passive recipients, rather than a motivated process that inherently necessitated eliminating them. There is no mention of Indigenous nations or communities in contemporary times, contributing to the “freezing” of them in the past and their continued elimination. Amid 56 named European and American colonizers in the standards, only three Indigenous Americans are named: Quanah Parker (Nmn), Chief Bowles (CWY),1212 and Amado Peña Jr. (Yoeme).

In my 8th grade U.S. history classroom, my teacher drilled into us that Jamestown was founded in 1607. “Jamestown!” she yelled. “1607!” we yelled back. At various times while teaching, she would suddenly stop and yell, “Jamestown!” “1607!” we yelled back. The date was ingrained into us as the beginning of U.S. history. The first date that the 8th grade U.S. History standards require students to learn is “1607, founding of Jamestown” (p. 14), and the first “major era” students are required to learn is “colonization” (p. 13). This completely erases the histories of Indigenous peoples since time immemorial. When discussing this first major era, the standards ask students to identify the “causes of” and “reasons for” colonization, but not the violent processes towards Indigenous peoples that it inherently entailed. In the one and only explicit mention of Indigenous peoples, students are asked to “analyze the reasons for the removal and resettlement of Cherokee Indians during the Jacksonian era” – another exercise requiring students to identify with the settlers and their motivations rather than with Indigenous people (pp. 14–15). Not a single Indigenous person is named in these standards.

Texas is not alone in this. A 2015 sociological study conducted by researchers at Pennsylvania State University found that across the nation, 87 percent of social studies standards involving Indigenous peoples are about their pre-1900 history, demonstrating how the education system confines teaching about Indigenous people to the far past. 27 states did not name a single individual Indigenous person in their history standards (Shear, 2015).

Infamously, every year for decades in California, all fourth graders in the state have spent weeks making a model of a colonial mission complex out of sugar cubes, popsicle sticks, or store-bought kits. The practice only just started being explicitly discouraged by the Californian Board of Education in 2016 in their new history curriculum standards (Graff, 2017). “Building missions from sugar cubes or popsicle sticks does not help students understand the period and is offensive to many,” the new standards read (History Social Science). But the practice still continues at some schools, fueled by nostalgia, tradition, or lack of resources for teachers to develop alternatives (Imbler, 2019). For decades, this project taught Californian students about the beautiful architecture of missions without mentioning the violence they facilitated against Indigenous populations. It taught students to inhabit the perspectives of settler colonizers, and gave the impression of the missions as an idyllic sanctuary for the Anglos and Natives who lived there together in harmony. Gutfreund (2010) writes that, rather than saying anything about actual history, this idealized image of Spanish colonialism was a “conscious creation by Anglos”(p. 163). The image was crafted starting from paintings of missions by William Keith and Edward Deakin in the 1870s, and continuing with the 1920 film The Mark of Zorro, which was shot among the ruins of Mission San Juan Capistrano, reinvigorating public nostalgia for the crumbling structures (Imbler, 2019). Bringing students into these images not only teaches them incorrect history, but also reduces their ability to handle complexity in the world and in their community.

Supporting ideologies

I learned settler colonial ideologies not only through teachings of settler conceptions of “the Native,” but also through supporting, co-constituting, and intertwined white supremacist ideologies. I will briefly sketch out two of these – Eurocentrism and militarism – and describe how they taught me to devalue knowledge systems that are not European, and to construct the non-Western “other” as expendable, ultimately supporting coloniality.

Eurocentrism

Throughout my education, I, a Chinese-American, was taught to see the world through the eyes of the white West. Eurocentrism, the ontological privileging of Western knowledge and knowledge systems, is a driver and an ongoing process of colonization (Brayboy, 2005). Colonization privileges European thought systems over other thought systems, asserting their “moral and intellectual superiority” (p. 432).

W. E. B DuBois uses the term “double consciousness” to describe Black people’s experience of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” Throughout my life, I was seeing myself through my own eyes, and through the eyes of a dominant white order, and chafing in the friction of these perceptions. Everyone knew the Great Famine in Ireland; no one knew the Great Famine in China that almost killed my grandparents. Eurocentrism created fragmentation in me (between forms and layers of my knowledge, between my embodied experiences and the institutionally described world) and helped me participate in the subjugation of other knowledge systems, including my own.

At the end of my Pre-AP World Geography class in 9th grade, we did a project where we picked a book from a list and wrote a book report analyzing it according to geographical terms. I didn’t see anything on the short list that called to me, so I went to the long list of approved books on our library’s website. I saw a book with three Chinese women on the cover: Wild Swans, by Jung Chang.

As I read, I felt something click. It was my first time learning anything about Chinese history in school. It contextualized so many of the tidbits of stories I’d heard from my parents and grandparents over the years: mom repeating “UTF8gbsn万岁毛主席”1313 at the store, UTF8gbsn姥姥1414 having her braids cut off and high heels cut off in the streets because they were too Western, UTF8gbsn爷爷’s1515 siblings dying of starvation during the hard years. Through the book, I learned about the Cultural Revolution, and I learned about the Great Famine in China from 1959–1961, when there were many millions of deaths. Seeing some of my home knowledge contextualized in the world of institutional knowledge, which had been constructed as “legitimate” knowledge, I felt a new congruency – a feeling that cast the lifelong omission into sharp relief. My only time to encounter any Chinese history formally again was a brief mention in the AP World History textbook the next year.

I learned that there was one world region that mattered. Even within the AP curriculum, there was AP European History and AP US History, but no AP East Asian History or AP Latin American History – everything that wasn’t European or American was lumped under AP World History. I started to realize that there wasn’t a real pedagogical reason we didn’t have a class called AP Chinese History. This subtly taught me that Europe was the center of world power and of life experiences worth studying.

Throughout my years playing Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Mozart, and Bach in orchestra, I learned that all great music is written in the West by white men. We also learned that math and science are neutral and objective, and that the center of scientific development and progress has always been Europe (no matter that the Greek foundations of European mathematics are actually based on Black Egyptian civilization; the Pythagorean Theorem was used in ancient Babylon and proved in China at least 1300 and 500 years respectively before it was proved in Greece; and so forth) (Diop, 1991; Joseph, 1997).

These omissions and emphases ingrained Eurocentrism in me, and cumulated towards my internal development of an ontologically disdainful gaze towards non-European knowledge systems (that, for example, value the land and the nonhuman beings). Teaching that the world’s advancements were created, developed and honed by white people reinforced the idea that Western civilization has always been the most progressed, and as a result was justified in its violent conquests and in imposing its “civilized” ideas in America and in other “primitive” areas of the world. At the same time, it created fragmentation in me – it distanced me from possible sources of knowledge I had, from my family’s and Chinese-American community’s stories to the artwork in my house that wasn’t Western and the books at the local library that weren’t “classics.”

Militarism

I was taught to accept and sympathize with American imperialism and America’s colonial projects abroad, including its continued, violent occupation of Puerto Rico, Guam and other territories. I was trained to construct the “other” as inferior, yet a threat, a construction that supports the superiority and longevity of US state power.

Smith (2012) argues that war, anchored by what Edward Said theorizes as “Orientalist” constructions of “the other” as simultaneously inferior and threat and therefore in need of elimination, is one pillar of white supremacy at play with settler colonialism. Byrd (2011) argues that this Orientalist view was cast in the production of the “Indian” since the inception of the US settler colonial project, and is extended and projected onto other nations in its imperialist projects to this day. War, underpinned by ontologically lowering constructions of the “other,” is constitutive of the US settler state – and my education taught it in a way that justified it.

In my AP English Language course in junior year, we did a semester-long project called the “Vietnam Project.” We studied a book called The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien. At the same time, we were each assigned an American veteran of the Vietnam War who died in combat. We researched them, finding out as much as possible about their lives before the war, how they performed in the war, how they died, and so on. We tracked down and interviewed family members, former platoon members, and anyone we could find. We took this information and created video tributes to them. Through this project, we inhabited the suffering of American soldiers and understood it as the principal cost of the Vietnam War. The reading and the project were exercises in feeling out and internalizing the humanity of another American and witnessing the impact of a historic event on American individuals. We weren’t asked to empathize with the Vietnamese civilians and soldiers who suffered at the hands of the American military. We learned little about the historic context of the war or how larger American political decisions and attitudes about Communism created the conditions of war and worsened them.

Another pedagogical tool that taught militarism and justified American colonialism was our textbook. The widely-used US history textbook that I read was called The American Pageant – the publisher of the book, Cengage, told CBS News in 2020 that more than five million students learn from it each year (Luibrand, 2020). Loewen (2007) analyzed 18 US history textbooks as “works of history and ideology” (p. 31). Textbooks, and required textbook readings, dominate history classrooms more so than any other subject – making history class comprised of facts to be learned, bestowed by a god-like textbook narrator, rather than an opportunity to develop critical thinking and inquiry skills. (In no other field, Loewen points out, do college professors assume that students were mistaught in high school.) In AP US History, I consumed my required readings as facts, answered my multiple choice questions and never thought to question the material on which I was being tested next Friday, two periods after my physics exam.

Chapter 39 of The American Pageant, “The Stormy Sixties,” provides a very abbreviated survey of US foreign policy. It describes Laos as a “jungle kingdom” that the Eisenhower administration had “drenched …with dollars” but “failed to cleanse …of an aggressive communist element.” Laos, the textbook said, was “festering dangerously” after the end of French colonization (Bailey et al., 2015, p. 920). This creates an image of Laos and Southeast Asia as an uncivilized backwater, a dangerous breeding ground for the poisonous ideology of communism – which then supposedly justified the US’s war in Vietnam.

The chapter paints the US as heroes “pumping dollars” into and giving “handouts” to other countries. However, it laments that “American handouts had little positive impact on Latin America’s immense social problems” (p. 921), framing it as inevitable: despite the hero’s best efforts, the countries’ inherent problems persisted. It does not discuss the US’ direct role in creating political instability and social problems by interrupting democratic processes, staging coups and installing right-wing political leaders whose policies favored US business interests in places like Guatemala, Bolivia, Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua. Instead the textbook’s description seems to warrant and justify continued US militarism in Latin America.

As I went through history classes in high school, I came away with the belief that the US had never lost a war. I felt a sense of security knowing that our nation was the strongest nation on Earth, and that our efforts domestically and abroad were always moving along a teleology of progress and civilization – even if they sometimes required violence. This trained my own Orientalist gaze denigrating non-Western nations and those that fall outside the front edge of this teleology, including the “primitive” peoples of America’s “past,” as inferior.

Conclusion: What does decolonial teaching and learning look like?

Only in college, by stumbling into ethnic studies, did I begin to see the ideologies that I’d been taught. But the vast majority do not have access or support to study ethnic studies materials, nor should higher educational institutions be the first and primary site of critical study.

Since 2015, Washington state law has required all public K-12 schools to teach the tribally developed Since Time Immemorial: Tribal Sovereignty in Washington State curriculum – or an alternative tribally-developed curriculum (Elementary Curriculum). As an example, the first lesson plan in the “Honoring the Salmon” lesson track for elementary schools, meant for kindergarten to 3rd graders, starts off with an activity:

Then students read the story “Salmon Boy,” a Traditional Story told by Haida and shíshálh nations and other nations across the Pacific Northwest about a boy who disrespects the salmon and in turn is transformed into a salmon and taken in by the Salmon People. Students discuss what they learn (“What did Salmon Boy learn from the salmon people? What can we learn from the salmon people?”). This lesson has students connect their existing knowledge of and interaction with salmon with that of Indigenous peoples’ enduring knowledge, stories, traditions, and relationships with salmon. This helps build a more healthy and intentional relationship with a material aspect of students’ lives, from the basis of Indigenous knowledge.

Argentinian theorist Walter D. Mignolo describes decoloniality as an epistemological project whose goal is for colonized peoples globally to “delink in order to re-exist” – to first delink from Western structures of knowledge and relations in order to then re-establish existence on their own terms (Mignolo, 2017). As Brah (2022) writes, decoloniality “enables us to prioritize and foreground regimes of knowledge that have been sidelined, ignored, forgotten, repressed, even discredited by the forces of modernity, colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism” (p. 15). Decolonial education can be understood as foregrounding Indigenous and other marginalized modes of knowledge, and in an American context, works towards material decolonization. As Sleeter (2010) puts it, we must “critically examine that knowledge [traditional school curricula] and its relationship to power, recentering knowledge ‘in the intellectual histories of indigenous peoples”’. Just as settler colonialism and white supremacy are intertwined, so must decolonial education be with anti-racist education. Anti-racist education challenges white supremacy through both curriculum and pedagogy and avoids conscripting students into white supremacist ideologies while teaching them to recognize and challenge existing ideologies. Together, the goal is to provide students the agency to act from the power of their own knowledge – to value their own embodied and cultural knowledge, to gain tools to work through the sea of ideologies given to them by textbooks, classes, news media, and other sites of socialization, to see their relatives instead of “the other,” and work towards right relations and a just future.

Even as we challenge dominant epistemologies and majoritarian stories that support ideologies of settler colonialism and white supremacy, Tuck and Yang (2012) vitally remind us that “decolonization is not a metaphor.” The goal of decolonization in America is land back: “the repatriation of Indigenous land and life” (p. 21). Decolonial education work must be a part of that, not a substitute that enlightens settlers while preserving settler futurity and Indigenous dispossession. How decolonial education can explicitly contribute to material decolonization, and what decolonial work against and outside the formal classroom looks like, are subjects for much further study and action beyond the limits of this paper.

In the meantime, teachers can and are already working towards change, starting in their own classrooms. I will discuss examples in Connecticut and Texas – places where I’ve lived, gone to school, and reported – but there are countless more examples across the nation.

In Connecticut, Nataliya Braginsky’s African and Latinx studies class researched the significance of local sites in Black, Indigenous, and Latinx history – like a local park where Frederick Douglass spoke to Black soldiers preparing for the Civil War, and the popular hiking area now known as Sleeping Giant that has roots in a Quinnipiac Traditional Story – and created a virtual walking tour representing a “Black, Indigenous, and Latinx Peoples’ History of New Haven” (A Black). One student who researched the park, Fair Haven’s Criscuolo Park, told his teacher, “I go there all the time to play basketball, and I get shivers now, knowing that Frederick Douglass was there” (Zou, 2020).

Through the Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning Collective (an educational organizing collective where I have worked), hundreds of teachers in Connecticut are gathering to develop anti-racist curriculum and pedagogical strategies, attend webinars on topics like teaching Asian-American studies and teaching Indigenous studies, brainstorm and troubleshoot pedagogical ideas through Communities of Practice, and support each other in implementing these practices. Teachers are thinking through how to teach ballet in a way that affirms all bodies, jazz technique in a way that highlights the political implications of improvisation, and agriculture in a way that respects plants as beings and not just as objects of human consumption (Stories).

Through the “Teaching about Race and Racism Across the Disciplines” seminar at the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, teachers have developed curricular projects including reworking an AP US History course to center Indigenous peoples’ histories, presents, and future possibilities; creating literature lessons about Afro-Futurism; reteaching an international relations course from colonized people’s perspective; writing a unit on histories of segregation and law in New Haven; and developing an art unit focusing on Confederate monuments to think about art making and art reception (Teaching).

In Texas, where critical education is being actively legislated against, Luke Amphlett begins his AP US History course with a painting by Titus Kaphar depicting a painting of Thomas Jefferson being peeled back to reveal Sally Hemmings, one of the people he enslaved and the mother of six children he fathered – and discusses with his students why it is that they know Jefferson but not Hemmings. He and elementary school teacher Alejandra Lopez founded PODER, the social justice caucus of the San Antonio teachers’ union, to hold monthly teacher-led trainings and resource-sharing on critical pedagogies (Zou, 2021). An Austin area teachers’ network Educators in Solidarity connects anti-racist educators and holds a yearly conference for the exchange of ideas on topics like reimagining discipline and incorporating rest in the classroom (Fall ’22 UnConference).

Critical education can happen outside the formal classroom too. ISTEAM (Indigenous STEAM), based in Chicago and Seattle, is a collaborative that runs a free summer camp for Indigenous youth and provides open-access learning activities online for families to do together, focused on building relationships with plants, water, food, and birds. For example, one activity, called “Walking Land: Making Plant Relatives,” asks participants to go on a walk together, notice their “plant relatives,” document observations, and discuss questions like: “What role does this plant play in this place? What is our role in this place? How are these roles related? How do we know?” (Walking Land). These activities center and develop Indigenous knowledge systems, and operate outside the formal institution of the school.

All these practices can help teach students to grapple with the complexity and conflict they see all around them, training them not to constantly consent to the violence being enacted on and around them.

Coda

Caribbean feminist scholar M. Jaqui Alexander formulates colonization not only as exploitative and violent practices that shape a political reality, but also deep internal processes of fragmentation (Alexander, 2012). It is linked to “divisions among mind, body, spirit; between sacred and secular, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual; in class divisions; and in divisions between the erotic. The endless division of colonization causes “material and psychic” fragmentation and dismemberment. Because of this, she writes, the work of decolonization has to address our “deep yearning for wholeness” and belonging (p. 281). In my time learning settler colonialism and white supremacy in the US education system, I felt fragmented, distanced from my body, distanced from my knowledges, distanced from real knowledge about the land that I’m on.

At the time of writing this, I have spent the past year living in China for the first time, learning in ways that are “de-linked” from American institutions and epistemologies: slowly building deeper relationships with my language, land, rituals, ancestors, histories, and creation stories. I have been physically moving on and with the land that my family stewarded for many generations, following my aunts in burning joss paper at the bottom of my ancestors’ graves, studying Chinese cosmologies (including origin stories and ways with time) with a friend who teaches Chinese literature. As I learn more and more about the places, stories, and people that I come from, lands where I have “creation stories, not colonization stories” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 6) about how I came to be there, I feel my own investment in finding belonging within the current US settler state lessening. Knowing more about where I come from and feeling hints of “wholeness” is making it fundamentally clear to me how a basis of dispossession and elimination is a deeply unstable way to be in a place and to relate with land- and people-relatives. Decolonial and anti-racist education has the power to help us practice right relations with “humans and all creation” (Smith, 2012), including pursuing land back for Indigenous peoples and journeying towards wholeness in ourselves.