This essay is part of a series entitled “From the Schoolhouse to the Field: Abolition Toward an Education for Liberation“.
Where Black and Indigenous people practice refusal, seeking out fugitive spaces, or acting in open rebellion to oppressive structures, we are able to construct and share knowledge that is meaningful, and preserve the continuity of experience between school and community. Where these pedagogies of resistance are difficult or impossible to maintain within systems of domination, Black and Indigenous people have a long history of creating sanctuaries — avoiding or subverting the panoptical gaze.
Throughout all of these practices, Black and Indigenous people actively resist enclosures of community, space, and time, by emphasizing relationality to people and place — polychronically and intergenerationally. That most people around the world naturally resist enclosure is indicative of the fact that the whole project originated in Europe, under very specific conditions.
The relatively limited amounts of natural resources [in Northern and Western Europe] and the difficulty in securing them provided a context whereby an instrumentalist view of nature, individualism, and aggressive behaviour could flourish.[1]Engel-Di Mauro, S., & Carroll, K. K. (2014). An African-centred approach to land education. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 70-81.
This worldview likely would not have taken hold anywhere else had it not been exported through imperial expansion and entrenched by settler colonial violence. There is a clear continuity between the origins of the enclosure in the disruption of Europeans’ own relationship to land, and the five century project of dispossession, extraction, and exploitation in the pursuit of endless “economic growth” — otherwise known as capitalism.
The existential consequences of capitalism, from genocide to cultural annihilation to the degradation of the natural world — manifest in the global climate crisis — make clear the need for different paradigms. What we need is not new. Nor is it merely “old” or traditional. Rather it emerges from the continuity of Black and Indigenous pedagogies of resistance which have always intervened from the margins, on behalf of people and planet.
The Shortfalls of Environmental Education
Schooling in a settler colonial capitalist state necessarily reproduces relations of domination, extraction, and exploitation. Environmental education is not exempt, in spite of its charge to teach young people about the natural world, and perhaps to cultivate a love for it. This is because of its primary conceit: that humans are separate from the rest of the natural world. This is especially pronounced within the urban context, where the built environment obscures the more-than-human world from view. Most environmental education in urban schools, therefore, takes place off-site, exacerbating the false nature-culture dichotomy.
Even when local urban gardens or urban botanical gardens feature as part of the curriculum, as is increasingly done in environmental education, nature remains separated from people and human-impacted environments.[2]Engel-Di Mauro, S., & Carroll, K. K. (2014). An African-centred approach to land education. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 70-81.
Environmental education tends to romanticize the “natural world”, studying animals and plants and ecosystems in celebration of biodiversity while carefully excising humans, which is “emblematic of the nature/culture epistemic divide in western ways of knowing”.[3]Bang, M., Curley, L., Kessel, A., Marin, A., Suzukovich III, E. S., & Strack, G. (2014). Muskrat theories, tobacco in the streets, and living Chicago as Indigenous land. Environmental Education … Continue reading
The separation of nature and culture requires the erasure of indigenous people and indigenous lifeways, which before colonization had “allowed for centuries of health and well-being”[4]Cachelin, A., Rose, J., & Paisley, K. (2015). Disrupting neoliberal discourse in critical sustainability education: a qualitative analysis of intentional language framing. Environmental Education … Continue reading. Although environmental education as a discipline tends to be sequestered within the sciences, young people are also taught about their relationship to the natural world in social studies and history classes, where they are first acclimated to the settler colonial narrative. They learn that indigenous people were once upon a time, and that for their proximity to nature, their “primitivity”, Indigenous people were also a casualty of “progress”, along with so many animals and plants — clear cut to make way for ”human“ (i.e European) infrastructure.
the constructions of land, implicitly or explicitly as no longer Indigenous, are foundationally implicated in teaching and learning about the natural world, whether that be in science education, place-based education or environmental education.[5]Bang, M., Curley, L., Kessel, A., Marin, A., Suzukovich III, E. S., & Strack, G. (2014). Muskrat theories, tobacco in the streets, and living Chicago as Indigenous land. Environmental Education … Continue reading
Although the “noble savage” is cast as a pitiable archetype, the scope and scale of the genocide — a word seldom used in school curriculum — is buffered by the false narrative of settlers coming to a mostly empty land, the “justification for the doctrine of discovery”.[6]Paperson, L. (2014). A ghetto land pedagogy: An antidote for settler environmentalism. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 115-130. If there weren’t many indigenous people to begin with, and those who were here did not ”build” anything, and if all of this happened at a fixed point in time hundreds of years ago besides, then the story is easier to swallow. What isn’t made clear, whether in history or environmental education classes, is that “no land is empty. It must be made empty forcibly and ideologically.[7]Paperson, L. (2014). A ghetto land pedagogy: An antidote for settler environmentalism. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 115-130.
Europeans mapped Africa and the Americas both as “unlivable” or “uninhabitable” and as Terra nullius, or “lands of no one.” This rendered the inhabitants of these lands as non‐humans (or primitives living as part of nature) in order to justify their subjugation and the theft of their land.[8]McClintock, N. (2018). Urban agriculture, racial capitalism, and resistance in the settler‐colonial city. Geography Compass, 12(6), e12373.
In settler colonial schools, “history“ begins at the point of contact between settlers and indigenous people, erasing centuries of indigenous life, culture, and relationality, in what Bang et al refer to as “zero point epistemology”. History begins right around the time where nature and culture diverge, with indigenous people swallowed into the void between the two. Environmental education thus becomes a separate domain, the study of the “natural world”, which exists outside, and occasionally in conflict with the human world. This separation reproduces settler colonial logics, and “reinscribes anthropocentrism by constructing land as an inconsequential or inanimate material backdrop for human privileged activity”.[9]Bang, M., Curley, L., Kessel, A., Marin, A., Suzukovich III, E. S., & Strack, G. (2014). Muskrat theories, tobacco in the streets, and living Chicago as Indigenous land. Environmental Education … Continue reading
Where the anthropocentric perspective is compounded by white supremacy, it reduces “other species, other cultures, and other races to their roles as labor, consumer, and commodity”.[10]Cachelin, A., Rose, J., & Paisley, K. (2015). Disrupting neoliberal discourse in critical sustainability education: a qualitative analysis of intentional language framing. Environmental Education … Continue reading Indigenous people were cast as an obstacle to be removed, while Black people became a resource, leveraged and exploited for labor. Our humanity is a byproduct, “an excess of that labor who must be bridled, caged, killed,[11]Paperson, L. (2014). A ghetto land pedagogy: An antidote for settler environmentalism. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 115-130. meaning we are uniquely disposable within the discourse of “protecting” nature.
This all plays into the conservationist narrative of “purity” wherein nature had to be protected from human interference, not for the sake of the natural world itself, but to preserve it for (white) human enjoyment or further resource extraction. It is no surprise then, that some of the most prominent conservationists were also major figures in the eugenics movement, which emphasized the “purity” of white blood.
Environmental education is often abstract and technical, and does not consider the relationships between people and the rest of the natural world, especially for Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth in the urban context.[12]Paperson, L. (2014). A ghetto land pedagogy: An antidote for settler environmentalism. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 115-130. The “environment”, after all, is what lies outside the city. And as Nxumalo and Cedillo point out, “environmental vulnerabilities, human exceptionalism, anti-blackness, and settler colonialism are interconnected”.[13]Nxumalo, F., & Cedillo, S. (2017). Decolonizing place in early childhood studies: Thinking with Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies. Global Studies of Childhood, 7(2), … Continue reading
Where Black people, particularly those of us who live in cities, are reduced to the “excess” of production, it proceeds logically that the bulk of industrial infrastructure should be situated right where we live — establishing long continuities of environmental racism.
What Are We Sustaining in an Education for Sustainability?
More recent environmental education, reframed as “education for sustainability”, rightfully focuses on disparities in environmental toxicity between white middle class communities and poor, working class, and Black and Brown communities. However, the discourse often reduces these communities to a state of perpetual victimhood, in need of salvation through capitalist interventions.[14]Paperson, L. (2014). A ghetto land pedagogy: An antidote for settler environmentalism. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 115-130. Coupled with the doctrine of personal responsibility, the blame is implicitly placed on the people in these communities, for their failure to “take care of their neighborhoods”, or a lack of political participation.
The solutions are often reactive and technological, apparently requiring the superior intellect or insight of state or corporate saviors — what Paperson calls “rescue curriculum” — rather than addressing the root causes, which would more correctly place the responsibility for these conditions with the purveyors of capitalism.
Rescue curriculum follows logically from pain curriculum. It presents green solutions in the form of urban gardens, recycling, clean fuels, etc. It leans explicitly on green technologies and implicitly on the technologies of government.[15]Paperson, L. (2014). A ghetto land pedagogy: An antidote for settler environmentalism. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 115-130.
This kind of education for sustainability “rarely engages decision makers that are drawn from students’ communities”[16]Bang, M., Curley, L., Kessel, A., Marin, A., Suzukovich III, E. S., & Strack, G. (2014). Muskrat theories, tobacco in the streets, and living Chicago as Indigenous land. Environmental Education … Continue reading in ways that interrogate systems, or challenge the dynamics of power. In failing to do so, it has the potential to erase or displace traditional cultural knowledge.[17]Gruenewald, D. A. (2003). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational researcher, 32(4), 3-12.
After centuries of warnings from indigenous groups, decades of warnings from environmental scientists, and clear evidence of the impacts went unheeded, the climate crisis has come into sharper focus. Yet the response of the global capitalist hegemony seems to be that we can sustain the current systems, proactively with just a few “green” tweaks, or reactively with some potentially dangerous technological interventions, like dimming the sun[18]Tollefson, J. (2018). First sun-dimming experiment will test a way to cool Earth. Nature, 563(7733), 613–615.. The wealthiest among us are preparing contingencies, from fully stocked underground bunkers to plans for colonizing Mars. As if colonization wasn’t directly implicated in the crisis at every juncture.
This misguided perspective, which reproduces “grand narratives of Eurocentric human-driven solutions”[19]Nxumalo, F., & Cedillo, S. (2017). Decolonizing place in early childhood studies: Thinking with Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies. Global Studies of Childhood, 7(2), … Continue reading, is evident in much of the discourse around education for sustainability, in how it is so often intertwined with “workforce development” and “green careers”. The concept of sustainability is inexorable from its roots in development discourse, as with the United Nations’ sustainable development goals, which although they sketch a picture of a better world, still suggest that economic growth can continue, at the intersection of “ecology, economy, and equity“ [20]Cachelin, A., Rose, J., & Paisley, K. (2015). Disrupting neoliberal discourse in critical sustainability education: a qualitative analysis of intentional language framing. Environmental Education … Continue reading
This logic is upheld by the dramatic power imbalance between the highly industrialized “first world”, responsible for the vast majority of planet-warming activity, and the remaining two-thirds, which bears the brunt of climate impacts. Mainstream sustainability discourse “reproduce[s] the problem they try to surmount by starting with a presupposition that people are apart from nature, that environmental degradation is mainly elsewhere”.[21]Engel-Di Mauro, S., & Carroll, K. K. (2014). An African-centred approach to land education. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 70-81. Citizens of the largest economies, like the United States, China, and the European Union, are afforded a relatively higher standard of living, due to the fact that much of the cost to people and planet is externalized to the two-thirds world.
Neoliberalism engages us in a shell game of extraction, production, and waste management through globalization that disguises externalities[22]Cachelin, A., Rose, J., & Paisley, K. (2015). Disrupting neoliberal discourse in critical sustainability education: a qualitative analysis of intentional language framing. Environmental Education … Continue reading
Education for sustainability, where it is still trapped within development discourse, fails even on a most basic level. The law of conservation of mass states that matter can’t be created or destroyed. Yet under the doctrine of infinite economic growth, young people are taught implicitly that there are no limits to consumption, and no ecological burden to the production of waste — especially where that waste is shipped elsewhere.
The Critical Pivot of Place-based Education
Education as it takes place in schools is often dislocated from the experience of living, and more so from the development of skills and competencies that will remediate ills and improve the quality of living. This dislocation takes place at the intersection of space and community enclosures, engendering both apathy and a lack of agency, which in turn maintains people’s dependency on the state, the market, or other constructions of capital which are complicit in their condition.
Mainstream educational discourses emphasize individualism and personal responsibility, which both obscures the systemic nature of social problems, and actively block the possibility of self-determination in order to keep people subordinate to capital. Through standardization, teachers and students are beholden to “placeless curriculum” featuring “abstractions and simulations”, which “devalue and distorts local geographical experience”[23]Gruenewald, D. A. (2003). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational researcher, 32(4), 3-12., exacerbating the disconnection between learning and living.
This is what Tewa scholar Gregory Cajete refers to as a “low-context view”, which focuses on “material objectivity, either-or logic, and reproducibility”. By contrast, indigenous science is “high context”, prioritizing relationality and interdependence.
Aligned with the high context view, the primary intervention offered by place-based education is to cultivate a “concern for local space”, which is schools is usually “overshadowed by both the discourse of accountability and by the discourse of economic competitiveness”.[24]Gruenewald, D. A. (2003). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational researcher, 32(4), 3-12.
Place-based education is — or should be — designed to develop place-consciousness, which is not only an awareness of and engagement with one’s social and environmental context, but also with the “historical memory of a place, and the tradition that emerged there, whether these have been disrupted or conserved’.[25]Bang, M., Curley, L., Kessel, A., Marin, A., Suzukovich III, E. S., & Strack, G. (2014). Muskrat theories, tobacco in the streets, and living Chicago as Indigenous land. Environmental Education … Continue reading In direct contrast to the standardized, placeless, mainstream education model, place-based education should provide people with the agency to “have some direct bearing on the well-being of the social and ecological places [they] actually inhabit”. This requires a deep understanding of place, how it is socially constructed by the people who live there, along long historical continuities, and deeply informed by the ecological context, and how place in turn shapes cultural identities.[26]Gruenewald, D. A. (2003). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational researcher, 32(4), 3-12.
“Place-based education” is a broad term, occupying a spectrum that extends from the more basic environmental education to what Gruenewald calls a “critical pedagogy of place”, which recognizes the “contextual, geographical conditions that shape people and the actions people take to shape these conditions”. In this paper I am more interested in the latter, for reasons discussed in my earlier critiques of environmental education and education for sustainability.
Place is political, and for that place-based education requires an analysis of the power dynamics and differentials between the people living and working there, both presently and historically, to “identify and confront the ways that power…limit[s] the possibilities for human and non-human others.[27]Gruenewald, D. A. (2003). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational researcher, 32(4), 3-12.
One of the most difficult challenges of a critical pedagogy of place is “meeting young people where they are”, by which I am referring both to their developmental readiness and their particular social and emotional contexts. Engagement with weighty, charged topics, like settler colonialism and white supremacy, especially when we take a systems-view, or a long historical view, revealing their immense complexity and resilience, can be demoralizing and leave young people feeling a deep lack of agency or hope for the possibility of change.
individuals with an “internal locus of control” feel that they command outcomes in their lives (i.e., success and failure is a function of one’s ability and effort) and, as a result, demonstrate higher levels of self-esteem, self-efficacy, and general satisfaction. Contrarily, those with an “external locus of control” do not feel that they determine outcomes in their lives and, as a result, evidence low levels of self-esteem, self-efficacy, and life satisfaction.[28]Grande, S. (2015). Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. United Kingdom: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
What seems crucial for place-based education in any case is the cultivation of empathy, of love for people and place, which can spur people to action against these seemingly intractable systems. I am in agreement with Leopold when he says that “an ethical relationship to land [cannot] exist without love, respect, and admiration for the land.[29]Leopold, A. (1968). A sand county almanac. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Again we can follow the lead of indigenous science, which is “guided by spirituality, ethical relationship, mutualism, reciprocity, respect, restraint, a focus on harmony, and acknowledgment of interdependence”.[30]Cajete, G. A. (2020). Indigenous Science, Climate Change, and Indigenous Community Building: A Framework of Foundational Perspectives for Indigenous Community Resilience and Revitalization. … Continue reading Western society, particularly in the U.S. encourages and reinforces the exact opposite: individualism, competition, selfishness, contempt, and excess. Because these are the attitudes that uphold white supremacy, capitalism, and settler colonialism.
What is critical for young people — and really, all people — to understand is that relations of domination, whether between people, or between people and land, are inextricably linked. While humans are naturally inclined toward community, we are also self-interested at a base level, particularly as it concerns our ability to survive. These two qualities are not contradictory when we remember that we, as individuals, are parts of a larger whole. Place-based education, therefore, must always be “high context”[31]Cajete, G. A. (2020). Indigenous Science, Climate Change, and Indigenous Community Building: A Framework of Foundational Perspectives for Indigenous Community Resilience and Revitalization. … Continue reading, in recognition of the fact that “the locus of environmental care may shift depending on one’s social and geographical position”.[32]Gruenewald, D. A. (2003). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational researcher, 32(4), 3-12.
Education for Self-determination: Earthships and Urban Agriculture
In my earlier discussion of education for sustainability, I critiqued the saviorist “rescue” approach, which position communities as deficient and incapable of addressing the challenges they face. On the contrary, I believe that place-based education can only be effective where it pushes for community self-determination. Accordingly, the “indigenized approach to sustainability education” seeks to:
build infrastructures that serve a broader spectrum of the community, explore local resources and solutions, advocate for local rather than governmental control of community development, and most importantly evolve from the cultural and practical knowledge foundations of the communities themselves.[33]Cajete, G. A. (2020). Indigenous Science, Climate Change, and Indigenous Community Building: A Framework of Foundational Perspectives for Indigenous Community Resilience and Revitalization. … Continue reading
For the purposes of this chapter, I would like to discuss two potential strategies, or “pedagogies” for building community self-determination: earthships and urban agriculture. For the uninitiated, earthships are human dwellings designed to be almost completely autonomous: zero-waste, zero-carbon, off the grid, and in many cases, capable of providing food for their inhabitants right on site. Earthships are an anachronism, unmoored from any particular time, for the fact that they were first designed in the 1970s by an architect in New Mexico, yet draw upon wisdom humans have collectively held for millenia, and offer solutions to some of the most pressing issues of today.
In line with the understanding that the nature-culture dichotomy is fictional, that social and environmental challenges have the same roots, earthships “address the fundamental question of how to provide safe shelter for their inhabitants”, and engage with “vital issues of sustainability, notably zero carbon and zero waste living, through recycling and reusing waste, energy saving and generation, water harvesting and recycling, and even food production”[34]Hewitt, M., & Telfer, K. (2010). Earthships as Public Pedagogy and Agents of Change. Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling, 171-178.
While the first earthship was created — and iterated upon for 30 years — to test the possibility of living off the grid under the most extreme conditions (the sweltering hot days and frigid nights of the desert in New Mexico), the model has been adapted to various locations around the world. This positions earthships as a particularly useful methodology within place-based education, in that the materials used to build them, the needs they address, the climatic conditions to which they respond, and even the design aesthetics, are dependent upon the specific social, environmental, and geographic contexts in which they’re built.
Earthships also respond directly to the enclosure and alienation inherent to capitalism and reflected in most housing design, which are also “the cause of much of the environmental damage being wreaked on the planet”.[35]Hewitt, M., & Telfer, K. (2010). Earthships as Public Pedagogy and Agents of Change. Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling, 171-178.
The earthship is a performance-based sustainable structure that needs to deliver all the basic comforts and amenities to its inhabitants because it does not have the backup of being connected to infrastructure.[36]Hewitt, M., & Telfer, K. (2010). Earthships as Public Pedagogy and Agents of Change. Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling, 171-178.
The resilience enabled by earthships will only become more important as the impacts of the climate crisis become more severe. Where extreme weather disrupts power grids, water supply lines, and other life-supporting utilities, the ability to be autonomous and self-determined will be the difference between life and death, particularly for Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities which are already experiencing disproportionate climate impacts.
In Oakland, California, there is a small “village” called Cob on Wood, located under a highway underpass.[37]Canon, G. (2021, May 11). Homeless Oaklanders were tired of the housing crisis. So they built a ‘miracle’ village. The Guardian. Although the creators and residents do not use the term “earthship”, the village employs many of the same principals and techniques: the use of natural materials and waste, and existing with almost complete autonomy from the surrounding infrastructure.
Cob on Wood was created in response to Oakland’s high unhoused population, which itself is the result of surging home prices and gentrification, and the rapid displacement of Black and Brown residents, which Paperson refers to as “ghetto colonialism”.
the ghetto serves as an interior frontier to be laid waste in order to renew. It is a terra sacer, doubling as sacred and accursed land, a murderable nonplace always available for razing and resettlement.[38]Paperson, L. (2014). A ghetto land pedagogy: An antidote for settler environmentalism. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 115-130.
Rather than appealing to the government for a legislative solution unlikely to come, builders, artists, growers, and others with a variety of skillsets, many of whom were unhoused, came together to create Cob on Wood. It is an example of people creating something that meets their material needs, but also helps build a sense of empathy, connection, and community between people, and model sustainable ways of living. It reveals the nature-culture dichotomy as artificial, dispensing with the idea that social and environmental crises are separate. The impetus for Cob on Wood was not “sustainability” or mitigating climate change, but addressing the material needs of unhoused people in a way that allowed them to be self-determined. The rebuke to capitalism is inherent in how Cob on Wood functions with near autonomy, and in how it presents a model for living that does not rely on extraction from people or the environment.
Where political/economic forces (e.g. gentrification) displace people, keeping them in a constant state of itinerancy — forced to move from one rental property to the next — or chronically dislocated (unhoused) it renders them unable to exist in deep relationality with place.
A resident is a temporary occupant, putting down few roots and investing little, knowing little, and perhaps caring little for the immediate locale beyond its ability to gratify. As both a cause and effect of displacement, the resident lives in an indoor world of office building and shopping mall, automobile, apartment, and suburban house and watches as much as four hours of television each day. The inhabitant, in contrast, “dwells” . . . in an intimate, organic, and mutually nurturing relationship with a place.[39]Gruenewald, D. A. (2003). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational researcher, 32(4), 3-12.
Where the basic means of living (food, shelter, community) are mediated by market forces and mechanisms (prices, policies, and supply chains), each of these insulates people against the possibility of building authentic connection to place, such as to understand their own well-being as tethered to health of the environment. In a global economy where these same means can be conveniently delivered between any two points in the world in two days, they do not seem to be intertwined at all.
Of all the things that can tether people to place, and foster self-determination, few are more critical than food.
Urban food production has similarly contributed to Black self‐determination. Indeed, foodways have long played an important role in emancipatory politics in African American communities—from the agricultural and culinary knowledge of enslaved people[40]McClintock, N. (2018). Urban agriculture, racial capitalism, and resistance in the settler‐colonial city. Geography Compass, 12(6), e12373.
For this reason urban agriculture is particularly powerful, both as a means for living, and as a pedagogy of place. But as McClintock illustrates in a literature review calling upon many, many scholars of geography, history, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and more besides, urban agriculture can be “simultaneously radical, reformist, or neoliberal, both undergirding and resisting capitalist accumulation”.[41]McClintock, N. (2018). Urban agriculture, racial capitalism, and resistance in the settler‐colonial city. Geography Compass, 12(6), e12373.
Settler-colonialism is undergirded by a triadic relationship [42]Engel-Di Mauro, S., & Carroll, K. K. (2014). An African-centred approach to land education. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 70-81.[43]Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society, 1(1). between “the settler whose power lies in shaping the land into his wealth, the Indigenous inhabitant whose claim to land must be extinguished, and the chattel slave who must be kept landless”.[44]Paperson, L. (2014). A ghetto land pedagogy: An antidote for settler environmentalism. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 115-130.
This dynamic manifested in indigenous dispossession and genocide and Black enslavement, our bodies regarded as fungible as an excess of our labor. In the aftermath of slavery, this triadic relationship extends to Black and Brown people immigrating from other countries, who are “kept landless through various immigration policies and therefore easily substitutable as laborers”.[45]McClintock, N. (2018). Urban agriculture, racial capitalism, and resistance in the settler‐colonial city. Geography Compass, 12(6), e12373.
Gentrification, as the contemporary iteration of settler colonial dispossession, also depends on “rendering Indigenous land and Black spaces as uninhabitable”, which enables developers to buy up tracts of land at low cost, convert it into “valuable” property, and then sell it to eager white transplants looking for a good deal, and perhaps intrigued by the “diversity”. This view of “uninhabitability” is rooted in original settler colonial logics of “terra nullius” and “manifest destiny”, wherein the invaders, for their failure to recognize indigenous infrastructure, declared the land “uninhabited”.[46]McClintock, N. (2018). Urban agriculture, racial capitalism, and resistance in the settler‐colonial city. Geography Compass, 12(6), e12373. It is this same characteristic, what Wright calls “deficient geography”, that makes it well-suited, if it not the only kind of space, for marronage.
If it is accepted that marronage can occur in various landscapes, regions, and temporalities, there is the potential to incite marronage today in undervalued rural and urban settings.[47]Wright, W. J. (2020). The morphology of marronage. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 110(4), 1134-1149.
A great example of this is the North Philadelphia Peace Park in the Sharswood neighborhood of North Philadelphia. Community members came together to clean up and restore health to a parcel of land, and convert it to a sustainable space for growing food and building community. They did not ask for “permission” from the owners — the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) — because no one should need permission to thrive. This early work set in motion a nine year struggle between the Park and PHA, for the very right to self-determination.
In the same way that indigenous people not claiming ownership of land was used as the rationale for dispossession, the idea that Black and Brown people don’t “take care of their neighborhoods” is used as a rationale for displacing them, whether through eminent domain or other tactics.
Just as European settlers immediately began cultivating land for food, and also as a means of establishing the boundaries of ”their” territory, urban agriculture has in many cases functioned as the vanguard of gentrification. Individualized and private, urban gardens become a conceit for white middle class “foodies” and a way to increase their property values, which in turn can have a ripple effect and drive up taxes for other residents.
On the other hand, where urban gardens restore Black, Brown, and Indigenous foodways, and help build community and a connection to the more-than-human world, they can serve as a way to “resists capitalist logics, fostering a ‘radical sustainability’ that also breaks individual and community dependence on the capitalist markets”.[48]McClintock, N. (2018). Urban agriculture, racial capitalism, and resistance in the settler‐colonial city. Geography Compass, 12(6), e12373. In this way, urban agriculture as “pedagogy” offers a path for people to explore science, history, social relations, form relationships, and cultivate a sense of belonging. As always, anchoring learning in the experience of living, providing young people with the means to thrive, makes it not only relevant, but essential.
The final point of the Black Panthers Ten Point Program states “We Want Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice, And Peace”.[49]Newton, H. P. (1980). War against the Panthers: A study of repression in America (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz). The demand for bread, a natural extension of the demand for land, points toward the need for food sovereignty. The Panthers understood that feeding starved people was part of “self-defense”, or the fight against oppression. Food itself lies at the nexus of multiple domains of power, the ability to control its sourcing, production, distribution, preparation, and consumption, represents both an immediate and long-term means of realizing liberatory potential. Imagine if the breakfast program could’ve been sourced from local farms and community gardens, and incorporated teachings on how to grow crops, and make food from scratch at home.
The Call for Land-Based Education
In his paper on a “critical pedagogy of place”, Gruenewald discusses “reinhabitation”, which he describes as “learning to live well socially and ecologically in places that have been disrupted and injured”[50]Gruenewald, D. A. (2003). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational researcher, 32(4), 3-12., and says is not possible without decolonization. Yet he frames decolonization as a metaphor, a process of identifying disruptions and injuries, and their root causes, and then working to remediate them.
As Tuck and Yang lay out in their seminal piece, Decolonization is not a Metaphor, these efforts cannot take for granted “settler futurity” — that is, the assumption that indigenous sovereignty is possible with continued colonial occupation.[51]Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society, 1(1). As Paperson warns, place-based education risks contributing to “the master narrative of future, green, metropolitan neo-colonies”, and “violently eras[ing] Indigenous understandings of that land and place”.[52]Paperson, L. (2014). A ghetto land pedagogy: An antidote for settler environmentalism. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 115-130. Thus the need for one more shift, from a critical pedagogy of place to land pedagogy, a relatively new body of scholarship and practice, albeit resonating with centuries of deeply embedded indigenous knowledges.
Land is essential to any praxis for liberation, as evident in its indispensability within all Red pedagogies, its centrality within Maroon societies, and its constant invocation in the political movements of both Black and Indigenous people.
Land pedagogy is essentially indigenous place-based education, in recognition that “land is both people and place, that is, Native people constitute and are constituted by Native land”.[53]Paperson, L. (2014). A ghetto land pedagogy: An antidote for settler environmentalism. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 115-130. This means that land pedagogy is steeped in indigenous ways of knowing, and indigenous sovereignty, which is impossible under settler colonialism.
Land pedagogy represents a resurgence of indigenous cosmologies, including the deep continuity of relationality between people and the more-than-human world, situating people as parts of, rather than apart from nature. The connection between people and land — which encompasses all kinds of ecosystems — has been clearly established even by Western science. Doidge discusses the “Sea Gypsies” — the Sama-Bajau people who live in the waters of Southeast Asia — whose very biology changed to adapt to their environment. Making their living by diving for pearls, and gathering food from the deep sea, the Sama-Bajau are able to hold their breath much longer than most people, and can control the dilation of their pupils so as to see more clearly underwater.[54]Doidge, N. (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. Penguin Publishing Group. Their example shows that rather than exerting “control” over nature, we are a part of it, our bodies changing and adapting even over the short term to cultivate intelligence with respect to our ecological context.
Land pedagogy is rooted in indigeneity, that is, the deep historical relationship to place. Whether in Africa, North America, or anywhere else in the world where people’s relationship to one’s environment was harmonious (i.e. non-extractive), the nature-culture dichotomy did not take hold. In various places throughout Northern and Western Europe, on the other hand, where the relationship between people and place was mediated by scarcity, there is a sharp rupture between nature and culture, between cultures, and between individuals, as competition took precedence over cooperation.
Land pedagogy resists enclosures of every kind, recognizing continuity not only between place, people, and all of our non-human relations, but within the structure of the land itself. It recognizes, for example, that the division of Africa into separate nation states does not correspond at all to the delineations of cultural groups which regularly traverse these boundaries. Nor does it correspond to the boundaries of different ecosystems.[55]Engel-Di Mauro, S., & Carroll, K. K. (2014). An African-centred approach to land education. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 70-81. Instead these lines are colonial, artificial, drawn through negotiations between European invaders over how African land — reduced to material resources — should be carved up and distributed among them.
Being engaged in land as pedagogy as a life practice inevitably means coming face-to-face with settler colonial authority, surveillance, and violence, because this practice places Indigenous bodies in between settlers and their money[56]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press.
Unlike place-based pedagogy, which encourages “reinhabitation” for everyone, land pedagogy is inexorable from indigenous sovereignty, and therefore requires decolonization. Place-based education, from a settler perspective, is far more “inclusive” – place becomes something everyone can claim, can tell a story about. Place-based education leads to restorying and re-inhabitation, whereas land education leads towards repatriation.[57]Paperson, L. (2014). A ghetto land pedagogy: An antidote for settler environmentalism. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 115-130.
Decolonization requires a refusal of settler futurity, because “if we accept colonial permanence, then our rebellion can only take place within settler colonial thought and reality.[58]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press. In other words, decolonization requires us to abandon the idea that most of us staying here is a necessary condition of the work we do (including restoring local ecosystems, cultivating food sovereignty, or building resilience against climate change). I critique most “education for sustainability” as not going far enough in that it seeks to establish “greener” versions of the same system. But even fundamentally changing those systems — including dismantling capitalism altogether — is “recolonial”, if we are not also restoring indigenous sovereignty.
This is a difficult tension to grapple with, because how can we motivate a mass mobilization to protect our communities and the environments in which they’re situated, if we need always consider the possibility that we’ll have to leave? This feels further complicated by the settler-native-slave triad, and the case of people who were transplanted here against their will, as are most people of the African diaspora. Or, in taking the non-anthropocentric view, the many animals and crops that were brought and established here over the centuries.
There are a few different responses to this tension. The first and most obvious is anxiety toward the prospect that all the work we are doing is preparing the land for someone else — even if the rightful original occupants — and not for ourselves. This anxiety is compounded by the assumption that relinquishing control of land will also mean our expulsion.
Another response is the selfless/empathetic one, where we do the work for its own sake, independent of any direct benefit for ourselves. This is the response most antithetical to capitalism, because not only does it refuse any analysis of “risks” or “benefits”, it accepts that the work may come at a personal cost, and we decide to pursue it anyway. I think that both responses are legitimate for people interpellated under settler colonialism and capitalism.
But perhaps the antidote to anxiety is to remember that the transition from settler colonialism to indigenous sovereignty is not a “transfer of ownership”. Possession is not the opposite, but the prerequisite to dispossession. Claiming ownership of land creates a zero-sum in which someone else, therefore, does not own that land. It was in part due to the European misunderstanding of indigenous land relationships that made them feel entitled to “claim it”. If no one “owned” it, then it was free for them to take. Contrary to European understanding of ownership, indigenous relationship to land is one of stewardship and relationality.
Indigenous bodies don’t relate to the land by possessing or owning it or having control over it. We relate to land through connection—generative, affirmative, complex, overlapping, and nonlinear relationship[59]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press.
This means that decolonization is really about freeing the land from all the capitalist and carceral structures that obstruct relationality and make stewardship near impossible. The very same structures that would deny young people the possibility of learning from and with the land.
Put a different way, decolonization is getting out of the way of indigenous epistemologies and ontologies — re-establishing indigenous sovereignty. That, in itself, does not necessarily demand our removal, but it does demand a shift in how we engage with the land. Existing in extractive, exploitative relations is mutually exclusive to any possibility of decolonization.
It is also valuable to remember that indigenous cultures emphasize an “ethic of mutual-reciprocal relationship and responsibility toward one another and the natural world”[60]Cajete, G. A. (2020). Indigenous Science, Climate Change, and Indigenous Community Building: A Framework of Foundational Perspectives for Indigenous Community Resilience and Revitalization. … Continue reading, as well as diversity, recognizing the contributions of other nations (including plant and animal), as in Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg story of Nanabush.[61]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press. It is undoubtedly true that non-indigenous people have culture, technology, lifeways, values, wisdom, etc to contribute to the larger cultural ecosystem, just as transplanted animals and crops have added to the natural ecosystem.
In taking this perspective, perhaps we prime ourselves for the gradual shift from invader to tourist to guest, which can only be achieved through the consent of indigenous people, and their invitation to share the land. At the same time, this perspective cannot assume that such an invitation is guaranteed, regardless of how concentrated or authentic our efforts at entering into right-relationship with people and land.
In the interim decolonization can serve, not as a metaphor, but as a philosophical frame, a spatiotemporal horizon that informs how we engage with land in the here and now, how we relate to each other and the more-than-human world, toward the goals of social and economic justice, ecosystemic regeneration, community self-determination, and ultimately: liberation.
Black Pedagogies: From Emancipation to Self-Determination
Moving Toward a Red, Black, and Green Ecology