"Decolonial Pedagogy & Emergent Strategy"

As a history in major in college, I learned to think carefully about the perspectives of authors I read and sources I studied. However, even with a background in history, I find that I can still easily fall into a trap of thinking that I am reading texts or looking at sources that claim to be liberatory or decolonialized when they may actually not be at all. With more opportunities to communicate across digital and visual means, this can complicate the search for truth even more. The introduction of new media in our society is not always immune to the myths perpetuated or narratives prescribed by the old media, especially when you consider who has reign over what the story is and how it is told. Angela Haas explains that there is a “pervasiveness of these misunderstandings…still evidenced today in contemporary museum displays, photographs, portraits, sculptures, children’s books, movies, television shows, advertising, websites, and more” (193). She cites the work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith and says, “The pursuit of knowledge is deeply embedded in the multiple layers of imperial and colonial practice” (189). Haas also pushes us to consider the own biases that we bring to teaching. She advocates for a decolonial pedagogy because she believes it helps us see “how colonialism has impacted the experiential and formal education of all learners and teachers of all cultural backgrounds, as colonialization has always already shaped our rhetorics” (191).

In learning and studying about American Indian rhetorics pedagogy, Haas says that if we do not “work with our students to interrogate, disrupt, and reimagine,” then “we risk reinforcing a colonial fiction woven into the fabric of nation building in the United States and proven to be a cash cow for media industries that not only allows for but is sponsored by the continued subjugation of peoples and intellectual traditions indigenous to this country” (190). At the end of her chapter, she says that decolonial and digital stories “have the power to make, remake, and unmake the world” (205). I appreciated Haas’s use of the words “reimagine,” “remake,” and “unmake” to describe an active process that we have to be thinking about and seeking in our work of dismantling the misrepresentations and misinformation of colonial hegemony. If we are not using creativity, imagination, and new ideas to shape a new future of thought, then we can easily perpetuate the very same systems and narratives we are trying to deconstruct. One person/group may see the avenue for improvement and enacting change as working within a colonial or an oppressive system. Another person/group may see the avenue for change as complete disassociation from the colonial and oppressive system so that it eventually crumbles. The tension between these approaches coincidentally came up for a character in The Heidi Chronicles, a feminist play I am reading this week for my other Bread Loaf class. The character, Susan, makes a statement to another character about the jobs she is considering: “Becky, I was seriously considering beginning a law journal devoted solely to women’s legal issues. But after some pretty heavy deliberation, “I’ve decided to work within the male establishment power base to change the system” (Wasserstein, 20). Later on, Susan becomes a Hollywood production executive and justifies her decision by saying, "...I know some of those Hollywood people can be pretty dreadful, but if I don't do it, someone who cares a lot less will" (Wasserstein, 44). This character keeps trying to change the systems on her own from within, but the systems end up remaining static rather than changing. She does not reimagine a different world outside of the system.

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Haas’s ideas about a “reimagining of the colonial expectation of a single indigenous experience and identity” made me think about Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, a book by Adrienne Maree Brown that I read in November 2017 (205).

In the book, Brown uses stories, poems, self and group evaluations, and playlists to offer the idea that all organizing and social justice work is actually science fiction because we are building something new that we have never conceived of or known just like the things in a science fiction world. Influenced by the work of science fiction writer Octavia Butler, Brown believes we can re-envision our world from the inside out through the ways we interact with each other. She spends time discussing the principles of biomimicry and permaculture, specifically the mutualistic and interdependent ways organisms such as mushrooms, mycelium, dandelions, and oak trees live and survive in nature. When reading and rereading this book, you begin to understand that even when people are coming from many different backgrounds and perspectives, our natural order is to find collaborative ways to evolve and move forward with each other.