Talking complicity, breathing coloniality: Interrogating settler-centric pedagogy of teaching about white settler colonialism

Abstract

Teaching students to think about white settlers’ and racialized non-black people’s complicity in settler colonial violence can still be an instance of settler-centric pedagogy underlined by the trope of the ‘dying Indian’. Through reflecting on my teaching of a well-circulated article by a racialized scholar, I discuss how, despite my intentions, my orientation toward Indigenous peoples’ resistance remained temporary whereas colonial violence became permanent in my pedagogy. Through paying particular attention to the methodology of unmapping, I argue that challenging the colonial world order does not necessarily lead to decolonization if Indigenous peoples’ conceptions of land, lives, and their futurities are not centered. Because of my inability to understand the refusals staged by Indigenous people in their scholarship and all other political acts, they remained as dying and vestigial while white settlers and racialized (non-black) people were the agentic subjects in my classroom. I reflect on my harm-producing colonial pedagogy to think about how we have to carefully teach the ethics and politics of complicity without making it into yet another damage-producing narrative about settlers’ empathy. I talk about failures that were personal and also produced structurally to think about how apparently decolonial, scholarship and pedagogies can be simply settler-centric.