EDUCATIONAL PROJECTS FOR DECOLONIZATION: ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN ALLYSHIP AND RESISTANCE EDUCATION IN THE AMERICAS by Anthony Meza-Wilson B.A., University of California – Berkeley, 2003 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (Society, Culture, and Politics in Education) The University of British Columbia (Vancouver) May 2012 © Anthony Meza-Wilson, 2012 Abstract This thesis covers the topic of decolonizing anti-authoritarian educational spaces in North America. It outlines historical perspectives on anarchist and anti-authoritarian alternative educational movements that are non-coercive and opposed to hierarchy including the free skool, Modern School, unschooling, and the free university. Further, it examines indigenous educational spaces that originate in decolonizing social justice struggles such as the survival schools, intercultural bilingual education, and educación autonoma. The analysis focuses around discursive practices by free skools in producing a vision of freedom and liberation, and enacting a decolonization agenda. The thesis draws on theory by indigenous women, most centrally Sandy Grande and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, as a way of engaging anti-authoritarian education for decolonization with a critical indigenous lens. The first section of analysis consists of content analysis of web-based free skool mission statements. I code for discursive units that refer to forms of freedom and liberation, defined as overcoming oppressions presented by Iris Marion Young in Five Faces of Oppression. The results of this quantitative analysis demonstrate that free skools, in mission statements, have a tendency to prefer addressing labor/consumer exploitation and powerlessness as sites of oppression significantly more frequently than cultural imperialism, the site of oppression where colonialism is enacted. This demonstrates that free skools place a value in their mission statements of discursively engaging a limited vision of freedom and liberation that disproportionately excludes decolonization in envisioning liberation. The second section of analysis focuses on documents such as curriculum, readings, and personal narratives produced for and by decolonizing anti-authoritarian educational projects such as Unsettling Minnesota, the Purple Thistle Institute, and POOR Magazine's PeopleSkool. My engagement with these documents has determined that in many ways these projects find affinity with the work of Sandy Grande and Linda Tuhiwai Smith. In this way, the documents are useful in understanding a theoretically supported anti-authoritarian education for decolonization and in the formulation of future work that can build upon this base. ii Table of Contents Abstract.................................................................................................................................ii Table of Contents.................................................................................................................iii List of Tables........................................................................................................................iv Acknowledgements...............................................................................................................v Dedication.............................................................................................................................vi Introduction...........................................................................................................................1 Situating myself...........................................................................................................3 Literature Review..................................................................................................................8 A brief history of education for nationalism and citizenship in the United States.......8 Historical perspectives on libertarian anarchist education.........................................11 The Modern School movement..................................................................................12 The Hobo College......................................................................................................16 Unschooling...............................................................................................................17 Free schools................................................................................................................20 The free universities...................................................................................................21 Free skools.................................................................................................................22 Indigenous anti-colonial education............................................................................26 State-sanctioned indigenous intercultural education..................................................28 The survival schools...................................................................................................31 The EZLN educación autónoma................................................................................34 Anti-authoritarian education for decolonization........................................................35 Theoretical Framework........................................................................................................38 Research militancy and critical engagement..............................................................39 Anti-authoritarian educational theory........................................................................42 Theorizing power in anti-authoritarianism and decolonization.................................45 Indigeneity and the “politics of recognition” in educational practice........................47 Indigenous feminism and decolonizing theory..........................................................48 Critical decolonizing educational theory...................................................................49 Methodology........................................................................................................................51 Discourse analysis......................................................................................................51 Definition and discussion of discursive themes.........................................................53 Content analysis, case selection, and emergent coding of discursive themes............57 Social engagement of activist discourses of decolonization in radical pedagogy.....59 Analysis...............................................................................................................................64 Quantitative analysis of free skool values..................................................................64 Toward an unsettling curriculum...............................................................................67 Unsettling ourselves...................................................................................................67 The Purple Thistle Institute........................................................................................74 POOR Magazine Escuela de la Gente/PeopleSkool..................................................77 Indigenous Free Skool................................................................................................78 Conclusions.........................................................................................................................80 Works Cited.........................................................................................................................83 Appendix.............................................................................................................................90 Appendix A: Content Analysis Coding Chart............................................................90 iii List of Tables Table 1 Discursive themes with example discursive units …....................................................52 Table 2 Percentage prevalence of discursive themes …........................................................... 64 iv Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to acknowledge the Musqueam people on whose unceded land the University of British Columbia resides. I hope that this thesis plays some part in the just return of your lands. I would also like to acknowledge the Tsleil-Waututh and Sḵwxwú7mesh people, on whose unceded and ancestral lands I currently live. I know I live here without your permission and I hope my presence here assists your struggle for self-determination and dignity. My utmost thanks to Mona Gleason, my superstar supervisor for giving me thorough feedback, encouragement, and for reminding me that my work is important and useful for the world. Thank you as well to Glen Coulthard, not only for agreeing to sit on my committee but also for his tireless work with challenging unjust systems of colonialism. Thank you also to Pierre Walter for reading my work with encouragement and enthusiasm, and for supervising my independent study on free skools, which was integral to this thesis. The crew at the Purple Thistle are awesome and have helped keep me sane through graduate school, particularly the Eat the Rich! folks, Fiona, Ander, Maya, Sasha, Kevin, Marita, and the rest. Carla, Mike Jo, Matt, Marla, and Dani, you have kept me rooted and connected to a true community. Thank you to Eli Meyerhoff and Wes from Santa Cruz for talking to me on the internet about free skools. My thesis support group deserves a big thank you. Elizabeth, EJ, and Ryan, thank you for being there and supportive and awesome the whole way through. Thanks to my housemates for putting up with me while I wrote this beast. Naava, Tom- Pierre, Yams, Lisa, and Echo. Thanks too for friends who listened or helped. Thanks Esther for being a poet. And lastly, thanks to my family for making me who I am. Thanks Mami and Papi, Benjamin, Alicia, Emily, Kiran, Riley, and little Juanita. v Dedication To all those who survived at the crossroads vi Introduction This study considers movement schools for decolonization in the Americas that sit at the intersections of such projects as autonomous schools, free skools/free universities, and indigenous community-based educational projects. These schools, which fall under the broad categories either of anti-authoritarian or anti-colonial education, find their historical roots in anarchist theory and indigenous resistance movements respectively. Where these educational projects overlap is what I will refer to as anti-authoritarian allyship education for decolonization, a location where sites of struggle from different historical traditions converge. The allyship of indigenous and anarchist struggles, an affinity at least dating to the time when colonialism and domination made these struggles necessary, finds their current collaboration through a mutual interest in challenging the dominance of the capitalist economic system, the settler-colonial state in the Americas, and patriarchy, three intimately intertwined sites of oppression as discussed by Lasky (2011). In particular, an anarch@indigenist1 allyship education challenges narratives of domination common to national education that legitimize settler- colonial states, white supremacy, and capitalist expansion. In more constructive expressions, anarcho-indigenist educational projects share in valuing the formation of autonomous, resistance-based, decolonizing, non-hierarchical social and political institutions, including that of education. Examples in the secondary literature from historical and current educational projects that contextualize anti-authoritarianism and decolonization in real-world struggles demonstrate the practical aspects of building a movement for a decolonizing anti-authoritarian education and are discussed in my literature review as a way to frame my analysis. In my research I look at documents produced by anti-authoritarian educational projects in two parts. First, I look at mission and vision statements put forward by free skools, engaging in a quantitative analysis of 1 Anarch@Indigenism is the term used by Lasky, drawn from Taiaiake Alfred's work but including a more explicit feminist analysis. 1 their expressions of freedom and liberation. I utilize the methods of content analysis to measure the likelihood that these skools will include decolonization as a component of their vision for what constitutes a liberating education. In the second portion I focus on documents produced by decolonizing educational projects in free skools including Unsettling Minnesota at the Experimental Community Education of the Twin Cities in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota traditional land of the Lakota, the Purple Thistle Institute in Vancouver, British Columbia on unceded Sḵwxwú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh territories, and the POOR Magazine PeopleSkool in the Bay Area of California, on the ancestral lands of the Ohlone. Through a discourse analysis of documents produced by these projects, including curricular coursebooks, syllabi, and reflective autobiographical writings produced by participants, I will critically analyze the points of tension and affinity between anti-authoritarian educational projects and movements for decolonization. My analysis will utilize anti-authoritarian and indigenous anti-colonial educational theories to understand the production and implementation of curriculum and pedagogy within anti-authoritarian educational projects. I am interested in the ways that free skools express their visions of freedom and liberation, and how these visions of freedom and liberation find affinity or points of tension with decolonization struggles. In addition, I am interested in the ways that radical2 anti-authoritarian education for decolonization finds expression through its self- produced documents. A central theoretical influence in exploring these expressions is presented in Quechua scholar Sandy Grande's Red Pedagogy, in which she outlines how critical pedagogy, with its foundation in Marxist theory, has failed to adequately address the educational and political issues faced by indigenous communities. Are anarchist educational theories, theories that originate in European intellectual traditions, capable of creating decolonizing educational projects? Or do they merely replicate colonialist assumptions as Grande claims critical pedagogy 2 I use the term “radical” to mean something that “gets at the root” when addressing a problem rather than as a synonym for extremist thought, an altogether too common usage. 2 has done? My central question is: Can the educational theories stemming from traditions of anti- authoritarianism and anarchism address the educational concerns of indigenous and settler-ally communities working towards freedom and liberation in the form of decolonization? In this paper, I argue that anti-authoritarian educational theories and projects both succeed and fail in addressing Grande's criticisms and I conclude by theorizing the potential formation of an anarch@indigenist education that will hopefully be of use for those creating decolonizing anti- authoritarian educational projects in their own communities. Situating myself I'd like to make it clear that I make no claims to indigeneity as an identity. Although I do know that my family lineage contains a concealed indigenous ancestry, I was raised within settler culture with the language and privileges of the colonizers of the North American continent. Where I do find some affinity is with the notion of the mestizaje, a notion explored in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa (Anzaldúa 1999). Mestizaje, the idea of a mixed or transnational identity, is an identity whose very existence stands as a challenge against essentialist frames in the context of the indigenous-settler relationship and holds a special position as bridge in the ally relationship which is central to this project. However, embracing mestizaje comes with the danger of erasing the indigeneity of others by employing the concept of hybridity, a concept found in social constructivist critiques of essentialist identities. As Glen Coulthard contends, “the social constructivist critique of … identity may not only over-estimate the emancipatory potential of anti-essentialist political projects, but it also fails to confront the oppressive relations of power that often serve to proliferate exclusionary and authoritarian identity formations to begin with” (Coulthard 2009). I want to be clear that mestizaje is solely a lens through which I make sense of the ideas and materials that I engage with, and is not intended to express any wider political project. My intent in invoking mestizaje and choosing to “wear” this identity is a way of clearly addressing both 3 my settler-privileges (English language fluency, access to education, relative economic stability) as well as the ongoing systems of colonial oppression that have an impact on me (racism, family histories of poverty and alcoholism, first-generation immigration). I aim to actively oppose the tendency for the erasure of indigeneity through a theoretical valorization of mixed trans-national identities that results in the diminution of a stable sense of indigeneity. I understand that indigenous identity needs to remain robust for anti-colonial and decolonizing work to proceed and I see no necessary contradiction in embracing a mestizaje identity for myself and understanding the need for continued nourishment of indigenous identity within indigenous communities. In this way I employ Gayatri Spivak's notion of a strategic essentialism (Spivak 1990) which counteracts some possible erasures of these identities by post-modern visions of hybridity, identities that are necessary for the survival of indiegeous communities. As a non-indigenous person who is interested in decolonization it is necessary to situate myself as an ally. Allyship, as a concept, stems from terminology used in social justice struggles to refer to “members of dominant social groups (e.g., men, Whites, heterosexuals) who are working to end the system of oppression that gives them greater privilege and power based on their social-group membership” (Broido 2000). Allyship in practice is fraught with the danger of reproducing oppressive dynamics including paternalism, unconscious domination, and unchecked privilege in all its manifestations. Operating from my position as a bridge between privileged and marginalized, a characteristic of the mestizaje identity, I hope to foster dialogue on issues of privilege and oppression; particularly I encourage an interrogation of possible colonial tendencies within the anti-authoritarian educational movement. This interrogation can occur through the critical examination of the aims and values of anti-authoritarian educational projects, as well as through the fostering of a “pedagogy of the privileged” (Curry-Stevens 2007) that intends to create educational spaces for settlers to understand and enact decolonization. 4