Unschooling and Indigenous Education

This article draws from autoethnography and historical analysis to examine how racialized people pursue educational justice, consent, inclusion, and enjoyment through non-hegemonic learning. A historical analysis of U.S. colonial education systems imposed upon Diné and Philippine peoples grounds a comparative study on two forms of anti-colonial pedagogy: Indigenous education and critical unschooling. These two lines of inquiry underpin autoethnographic analyses of our own experiences in non-hegemonic learning to offer direct insights into the process of experiential, and decolonial growth intimated in relational learning environments. Indigenous education and critical unschooling literature both affirm the notion that all learners are always already educators and students, regardless of their age, ability, or status. This notion reorients the processes and aspirations of education toward an understanding that everyone holds valuable knowledge and is inherently sovereign. These relational values link together to form systems of circular knowledge exchange that honour the gifts of all learners and create learning environments where every contribution is framed as vital to the whole of the community. This study shows that because these principles resonate in multiple sites of colonial contact across Philippine and Diné knowledge systems, through Indigenous education and critical unschooling, and in our own lived experiences, it is important to examine these resonant frequencies together as a syncretic whole and to consider how they can inform further subversions of hegemonic educational frameworks.

Ten Canoes and 1066

This chapter examines the 2006 film Ten Canoes, an acclaimed Aboriginal Australian cross-cultural text in which a ‘Middle Age’ is both invoked and portrayed in an entirely defamiliarizing way. It explores the surprising potential, in the hands of indigenous agents, for invocations of a ‘Middle Age’ that displaces the Western timeline on which the idea of the medieval depends. The chapter raises the question of whether including pre-colonial-contact Aboriginal culture within the scope of world medievalism is an inescapably colonizing gesture that can only reinforce Eurocentric epistemologies, or whether this problem can be offset by bringing perceptions of the global medieval into dialogue with Aboriginal perceptions of time and history. It argues that the complexities of medievalism as a ‘world’ phenomenon are thrown into sharp relief by Ten Canoes as a text that narrates pre-contact time in a way that simultaneously addresses itself to Western and Yolŋu audiences.

Raupo Whare (c1860) and the Tale of the Missing Dog Box

In A History of New Zealand Architecture, Peter Shaw describes the European settlers of the 1840s encountering an architecturally-impoverished landscape. Skilled carpenters were still an uncommon migrant at that time and while some of the wealthier settlers brought prefabricated houses with them, for many their first accommodation in New Zealand were deserted shoreline whare. Moreover, these newest of New Zealanders were without familiar building materials and, as Shaw writes, they "emulated the style and construction methods of Maori dwellings and adapted them according to European ideas of hygiene and comfort." This explanation is characteristically ethnocentric in its confident view that European society, at that time, was architecturally superior. Sinclair has stated that it was colonial contact (principally commercial trade) which drew Māori from their sanitary patterns found in pā occupation. The grand view here is that the settlers adopted an indigenous typology to suit their own physical needs but that they maintained certain environmental and occupancy standards from "home." That is, the settlers would have preferred to have built in the model of the places they had just left but were forced, by the limits of land and labour, to adopt local materials and knowledge, and particularly those of Māori.

Indigenous Ancestry and Admixture in the Uruguayan Population

The Amerindian group known as the Charrúas inhabited Uruguay at the timing of European colonial contact. Even though they were extinguished as an ethnic group as a result of a genocide, Charrúan heritage is part of the Uruguayan identity both culturally and genetically. While mitochondrial DNA studies have shown evidence of Amerindian ancestry in living Uruguayans, here we undertake whole-genome sequencing of 10 Uruguayan individuals with self-declared Charruan heritage. We detect chromosomal segments of Amerindian ancestry supporting the presence of indigenous genetic ancestry in living descendants. Specific haplotypes were found to be enriched in “Charrúas” and rare in the rest of the Amerindian groups studied. Some of these we interpret as the result of positive selection, as we identified selection signatures and they were located mostly within genes related to the infectivity of specific viruses. Historical records describe contacts of the Charrúas with other Amerindians, such as Guaraní, and patterns of genomic similarity observed here concur with genomic similarity between these groups. Less expected, we found a high genomic similarity of the Charrúas to Diaguita from Argentinian and Chile, which could be explained by geographically proximity. Finally, by fitting admixture models of Amerindian and European ancestry for the Uruguayan population, we were able to estimate the timing of the first pulse of admixture between European and Uruguayan indigenous peoples in approximately 1658 and the second migration pulse in 1683. Both dates roughly concurring with the Franciscan missions in 1662 and the foundation of the city of Colonia in 1680 by the Spanish.

“The Advent of Civilization Amongst Them Will Not Tend to Their Betterment”: Understanding Representations of Colonial Contact in the Kitikmeot

Between 1915 and 1920, members of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police (RNWMP) wrote four major narratives of making contact with Inuit living in territory now known as the Kitikmeot region of Nunavut. The authors were the first representatives of the Canadian state to enter the region, and their narratives positioned Inuit as “better off without civilization.” Various members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) stationed in the region over the subsequent three decades reproduced such discourse. While, at first glance, this discourse seems to attribute a nobility to traditional ways of life, upon closer inspection it actually positions Inuit as incapable of adapting successfully to changing socio-economic circumstances. Methodologically, this article critically reinterprets archival documents from the early agents of colonization in the Kitikmeot. While advancing historical scholarship concerning relations between Inuit and the Canadian state, the article contributes to contemporary agendas of decolonization and reconciliation by enabling a more complete understanding of the origins and nature of colonial rule in the Arctic. By arguing that colonial discourses have roots in local and specific relations of production, the article also contributes to postcolonial theories of efforts to legitimize colonization and represent colonized Others in essentialist and paternalistic terms.

Indigenous ancestry and admixture in the Uruguayan population

The Amerindian group known as the Charrúas inhabited Uruguay at the timing of European colonial contact. Even though they were extinguished as an ethnic group as a result of a genocide, Charrúan heritage is part of the Uruguayan identity both culturally and genetically. While mitochondrial DNA studies have shown evidence of Amerindian ancestry in living Uruguayans, here we undertake whole-genome sequencing of 10 Uruguayan individuals with Charruan heritage. We detect chromosomal segments of Amerindian ancestry supporting the presence of indigenous genetic ancestry in living descendants. Specific haplotypes were found to be enriched in 'Charrúas' and rare in the rest of the Amerindian groups studied. Some of these we interpret as the result of positive selection, as we identified selection signatures and they were located mostly within genes related to the infectivity of specific viruses. Historical records describe contacts of the Charrúas with other Amerindians, such as Guaraní, and patterns of genomic similarity observed here concur with genomic similarity between these groups. Less expected, we found a high genomic similarity of the Charrúas to Diaguita from Argentinian and Chile, which could be explained by geographically proximity. Finally, by fitting admixture models of Amerindian and European ancestry for the Uruguayan population, we were able to estimate the timing of the first pulse of admixture between European and Uruguayan indigenous peoples in 1658 and the second migration pulse in 1683. Both dates roughly concurring with the Franciscan missions in 1662 and the foundation of the city of Colonia in 1680 by the Spanish.

Spatial Attractions: The Literary Aesthetics of Female Erotic Experience in the Colony

This article examines the aesthetics of representing female sexuality within colonial narratives of the West–East encounter. I consider two literary works whose female characters challenge the gendered metaphors of empire that predominated in a tradition of colonial literature and its postcolonial rewriting: the short story “La femme adultère” by the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, and the novel Wāḥat al-ghurūb by Egyptian writer Bahāʾ Ṭāhir. In each text, the standard heterosexual troping of imperial conquest as a male activity directed at or against a feminized other is inverted to place a European woman’s sexually aroused body at the center of the drama of colonial contact. Reading these two texts against the grain of the aesthetic formulas that they employ to contemplate the political stakes of cross-cultural intimacies in a colonial setting, I argue that the phenomenological immediacy of how the female protagonist in each is shown to experience the eroticism of colonial space introduces a break in these formulas. The loss of narrative plausibility in each text that follows from these erotic interludes, I propose, ultimately testifies to the irreducibility of the body to either enforcing or disputing the epistemologies of the colonial project.