Settler Ideology as Public Pedagogy: Erasing Moral Facts with Common Core Principles (original) (raw)

This presentation examines dominant discourses driving southern Minnesota's white public pedagogy on the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 (Lybeck, 2015), focusing specifically on a regional ideology that enforces a hardline separation between facts and opinions. Supported by objectivist discourses enshrined today in the state's K-12 Common Core Standards, this separation reveals highly situated white-supremacist roots when historicized. These roots include a body of primary-source materials that frame white "victimhood" and Dakota "savagery" as objective facts in order for white citizens and descendants to suspend judgment about injustices committed during their state's founding, events interpreted as acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing today (Mann, 2005; Kiernan, 2007; Waziyatawin, 2008). The presentation proceeds then to review current historiographic work produced by members of a regional settler discourse community (Swales, 2016) that seeks to keep historic separations between "the facts" and moral "opinions" in place, the purpose being to warn the public off knowledge about regional genocide. In the course of reviewing this work, the presentation reveals the ongoing persuasive power of the primary sources' dominant discourse, the anti-Indian sublime (Silver, 2008), a discourse that, as argued, plays a significant role in reproducing public ignorance on the war.