You may not have known November was Native American Heritage Month, and a New York City elementary school principal wants to remind teachers to “illuminate […] indigenous ways of knowing” and the U.S.’s violence as a “settler colonial state.”
In a Tuesday piece in Education Week, Timothy Miller — also a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in “decolonizing educational leadership” — claims the country’s public schools “have a tendency to avoid honest examinations of our national history.”
Miller (pictured) says elementary and secondary school curricula often “dehumanize” Native Americans, portray them as “noble savages,” and ignore the “seizure of their land, their removal to reservations, and their resistance to genocide.”
To help “decolonize” curricula, Miller recommends educators “familiarize” themselves with the history of U.S. settler-colonialism, scrutinize materials that “obscure indigenous narratives,” and teach in ways that “challenge traditional power dynamics including top-down communication and hegemonically imposed uniformity of thinking.”
Suggested readings offered by Miller include “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” “For Our Nations to Live, Capitalism Must Die,” and “The Transformational Indigenous Praxis Model: Stages for Developing Critical Consciousness in Indigenous Education.”
The background image on Miller’s Linkedin page includes numerous books on Palestine, decolonization/settler-colonialism, and “culturally responsive” teaching. His school’s mission statement notes students are taught in a “least restrictive environment” which “aim[s] to grow [them] as agents of change by teaching into social issues and exploring students’ intersectional identities and positionality within the world.”
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So-called “indigenous ways of knowing” have made strides into academia over the last few years, including the hard sciences. The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, for example, had a committee which worked to “bridg[e] Indigenous and local knowledge with scientific knowledge” on environmental matters.
The government of New Zealand is trying to inject “Matauranga,” the Maori knowledge system, into the country’s science courses — which includes the belief that the forest god Tane is “the creator of humans,” and rain is the result of the goddess Papatuanuku “shedding tears.”
Among others, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology Elizabeth Weiss says the integration of such “ways of knowing” looks like “scientists kowtowing to animistic beliefs and engaging in absurd rituals.”
“Unfortunately, many scientists in general and anthropologists, specifically, are supporting this nonsensical idea that ‘indigenous knowledge’ can help us answer scientific questions,” she said.
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IMAGE: Tim Miller/X
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