Confronting colonial violences in and out of the classroom: Advancing curricular moves toward justice through Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies

Abstract

This article documents ongoing encounters with colonial violence throughout education by offering a glimpse into the ways I experience this as a racialized faculty member who teaches courses related to anti-Indigenous racism. It extends Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies and engages theorists who identify colonial violence as structurally embedded throughout education. This article advances curricular moves toward justice through Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies to explore the lessons that can be gleaned from teaching a graduate seminar on colonial violences in education. The course served as a pedagogical site for critical and unsettling conversations as students were prompted to reckon with their own positionalities as they relate to settler colonialism, consider how violence happening outside of classroom spaces is manifested and reproduced in schools, and think critically about educational responses to ongoing colonial violences. By enacting Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies, the course also became a site for liberatory praxis through the co-creation of an ethical space for engagement. The intention of the course was to prompt socio-political action beyond the classroom. Moreover, extending bell hooks’s sentiment that the classroom, despite its limitations, remains a site of possibility, Indigenous Maternal Pedagogies transcend classrooms spaces, as sites of resistance, to call for the change our current political moment demands.