Settler Ideology as Public Pedagogy: Erasing Moral Facts with Common Core Principles (original) (raw)
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This study examines closely related public discourses like balance, neutrality, objectivity, and fairness, analyzing the collective barrier they pose to social-justice education. Taking the recent sesquicentennial of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 as a case in point, this study gives an overview of the public pedagogy (Sandlin et al., 2011) that prevailed in southern Minnesota in 2012, encouraging educators to present perspectives on the war in ways commonly considered “balanced,” “neutral,” etc., all while urging citizen-scholars to commemorate sacrifices made by the Dakota people and white settlers equally. As I argue, this public pedagogy mediates justice as fairness (Rawls, 1993; Steele, 2005; Seth, 2010), a sense of justice that has a long colonial history in America, promoting the suspension of social contingencies like race so that the historically empowered may make sense and derive comfort from the violently unequal past. To better understand justice-as-fairness discourses as antithetical to critical social-justice education (McLaren, 1995; Grande, 2004; Giroux, 2006; Waziyatawin, 2008), this study proceeds to explore relationships between classroom pedagogy and 2012’s larger public pedagogy. Analyzing data collected from fieldnotes, informal conversational interviews, and classroom artifacts, I look carefully into dilemmas these conflicting senses of justice presented to a group of 15 college students and two instructors as they co-authored a successful traveling museum exhibit on the U.S.-Dakota War. Conducting their work at a private, liberal-arts institution located near where the fighting once took place, I investigate various ways students and instructors resisted, negotiated, and reproduced justice-as-fairness discourses that have long encouraged local citizens to suspend moral judgment about how their communities were made. What emerges is a portrait of educators and student knowledge workers setting aside critical prior knowledge about colonialism and racial oppression in order to accommodate the creation of a museum exhibit that would safely mediate a common sense of justice for them and their implied white audience. The study concludes by theorizing pedagogical support for a critical museum-exhibit project on the U.S.-Dakota War that would advocate for regional social change, an exhibit variously envisioned by students but one that ultimately went unwritten for deference to local ideological demands.
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2012 marked the 150th anniversary of the U.S.-Dakota War in Minnesota, the decisive moment when settler society drew the color line through Dakota homeland (Mni Sota Makoce) by means of exclusionary legislation, extermination campaigns, and violent removal. In What Does Justice Look Like? (2008), Dakota scholar Waziyatawin anticipated the state’s sesquicentennial period as “an ideal time to initiate a new era of truth telling in Minnesota to counter the 150 years of myth making” (p. 11), her contribution being to challenge white readers to acknowledge the crimes against humanity through which their state was made — including genocide — so that restorative justice for Mni Sota Makoce and its people could become imaginable. By analyzing ethnographic data collected as participant-observer of a college course taught in 2012 near where the fighting once took place, I identify salient barriers to Waziyatawin’s decolonial project as experienced by a group of young, white Minnesotans oriented favorably toward her vision. Interview data collected as these students co-constructed a successful traveling museum exhibit on the war, purchased by groups as varying as the Flandreau Santee Sioux Community in South Dakota and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., reveal a growing sense of ambivalence wherein students struggled to retain critical voices amidst a white social order demanding “balance” and “neutrality” in representations of its settler-colonial past. The ideological constraints exerted by this public pedagogy (Sandlin et al., 2011) will be analyzed.
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This book explores tensions between critical social justice and what the author terms white justice as fairness in public commemoration of Minnesota’s US-Dakota War of 1862. First, the book examines a regional white public pedagogy demanding “objectivity” and “balance” in teaching-and-learning activities with the purpose of promoting fairness toward white settlers and the extermination campaign they once carried out against Dakota people. The book then explores the dilemmas this public pedagogy created for a group of majority-white college students co-authoring a traveling museum exhibit on the war during its 2012 sesquicentennial. Through close analyses of interviews, field notes, and course artifacts, this volume unpacks the racial politics that drive white justice as fairness, revealing a myriad of ways this common sense of justice resists critical social justice education, foremost by teaching citizens to suspend moral judgment toward symbolic white ancestors and their role in a history of genocide.
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This chapter pursues tensions between conflicting regional- and national-insider selves constructed by historian Gary Clayton Anderson as he delivered a public lecture on Minnesota’s U.S.-Dakota War in January 2012. Positioning himself as regional insider, Anderson sought to diminish the importance of genocidal intent among white officials in Minnesota, a discursive move designed to persuade the implied white audience to suspend judgment toward symbolic white ancestors and the genocide they carried out against the Dakota people in the 1860s. Yet, as national-insider who confers with prominent Genocide Studies scholars, Anderson had to account for the importance of genocidal intent, raising contradictions that involved culpability for ancestors closer to heart. The chapter analyzes the lecture as an act of epistemic violence against both indigenous audience members and critical whites in attendance. Ultimately, this chapter provides more ways white justice as fairness diverts citizen-scholars away from critical social justice education on the U.S.-Dakota War.
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