Decolonization is not a metaphor

Abstract
Our goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about
decolonization. Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land
and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our
societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by
educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of
calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or,
“decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. As
important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or
approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be
incommensurable with decolonization. Because settler colonialism is built upon
an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of
white, non- white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly
be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually
further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes
possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically
attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. In
this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to
forward “an ethic of incommensurability” that recognizes what is distinct and
what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil
rights based social justice projects. We also point to unsettling themes within
transnational/Third World decolonizations, abolition, and critical space- place
pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors,
making room for more meaningful potential alliances.
Keywords: decolonization, settler colonialism, settler moves to innocence,
incommensurability, Indigenous land, decolonizing education

Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a
program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical
practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding.
Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say it cannot be
understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact
measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and
content.
-Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963, p. 36
 Let us admit it, the settler knows perfectly well that no phraseology can be a
substitute for reality.
-Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963, p. 45

For the past several years we have been working, in our writing and teaching, to
bring attention to how settler colonialism has shaped schooling and educational
research in the United States and other settler colonial nation-states. These are
two distinct but overlapping tasks, the first concerned with how the invisibilized
dynamics of settler colonialism mark the organization, governance, curricula,
and assessment of compulsory learning, the other concerned with how settler
perspectives and worldviews get to count as knowledge and research and how
these perspectives - repackaged as data and findings - are activated in order to
rationalize and maintain unfair social structures. We are doing this work
alongside many others who - somewhat relentlessly, in writings, meetings,
courses, and activism - don’t allow the real and symbolic violences of settler
colonialism to be overlooked.

Alongside this work, we have been thinking about what decolonization means,
what it wants and requires. One trend we have noticed, with growing
apprehension, is the ease with which the language of decolonization has been
superficially adopted into education and other social sciences, supplanting prior
ways of talking about social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches
which decenter settler perspectives. Decolonization, which we assert is a
distinct project from other civil and human rights-based social justice projects,
is far too often subsumed into the directives of these projects, with no regard for
how decolonization wants something different than those forms of justice.
Settler scholars swap out prior civil and human rights based terms, seemingly to
signal both an awareness of the significance of Indigenous and decolonizing
theorizations of schooling and educational research, and to include Indigenous
peoples on the list of considerations - as an additional special (ethnic) group or
class. At a conference on educational research, it is not uncommon to hear
speakers refer, almost casually, to the need to “decolonize our schools,” or use
“decolonizing methods,” or “decolonize student thinking.” Yet, we have
observed a startling number of these discussions make no mention of
Indigenous peoples, our/their struggles for the recognition of our/their
sovereignty, or the contributions of Indigenous intellectuals and activists to
theories and frameworks of decolonization. Further, there is often little
recognition given to the immediate context of settler colonialism on the North
American lands where many of these conferences take place.

Of course, dressing up in the language of decolonization is not as offensive as

“Navajo print” underwear sold at a clothing chain store (Gaynor, 2012) and
other appropriations of Indigenous cultures and materials that occur so
frequently. Yet, this kind of inclusion is a form of enclosure, dangerous in how
it domesticates decolonization. It is also a foreclosure, limiting in how it
recapitulates dominant theories of social change. On the occasion of the
inaugural issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, we want
to be sure to clarify that decolonization is not a metaphor. When metaphor
invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it
recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it
entertains a settler future. Decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun)
cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they
are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks. The
easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form
of settler appropriation. When we write about decolonization, we are not
offering it as a metaphor; it is not an approximation of other experiences of
oppression. Decolonization is not a swappable term for other things we want to
do to improve our societies and schools. Decolonization doesn’t have a
synonym.

Our goal in this essay is to remind readers what is unsettling about

decolonization - what is unsettling and what should be unsettling. Clearly, we
are advocates for the analysis of settler colonialism within education and
education research and we position the work of Indigenous thinkers as central in
unlocking the confounding aspects of public schooling. We, at least in part,
want others to join us in these efforts, so that settler colonial structuring and
Indigenous critiques of that structuring are no longer rendered invisible. Yet,
this joining cannot be too easy, too open, too settled. Solidarity is an uneasy,
reserved, and unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor
forecloses future conflict. There are parts of the decolonization project that are
not easily absorbed by human rights or civil rights based approaches to
educational equity. In this essay, we think about what decolonization wants.
There is a long and bumbled history of non-Indigenous peoples making moves
to alleviate the impacts of colonization. The too-easy adoption of decolonizing
discourse (making decolonization a metaphor) is just one part of that history and
it taps into pre-existing tropes that get in the way of more meaningful potential
alliances. We think of the enactment of these tropes as a series of moves to
innocence (Malwhinney, 1998), which problematically attempt to reconcile
settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. Here, to explain why
decolonization is and requires more than a metaphor, we discuss some of these
moves to innocence:

i. Settler nativism
ii. Fantasizing adoption
iii. Colonial equivocation
iv. Conscientization
v. At risk-ing / Asterisk-ing Indigenous peoples
vi. Re-occupation and urban homesteading

Such moves ultimately represent settler fantasies of easier paths to

reconciliation. Actually, we argue, attending to what is irreconcilable within
settler colonial relations and what is incommensurable between decolonizing
projects and other social justice projects will help to reduce the frustration of
attempts at solidarity; but the attention won’t get anyone off the hook from the
hard, unsettling work of decolonization. Thus, we also include a discussion of
interruptions that unsettle innocence and recognize incommensurability.

The set of settler colonial relations Generally speaking, postcolonial theories

and theories of coloniality attend to two forms of colonialism2 . External
colonialism (also called exogenous or exploitation colonization) denotes the
expropriation of fragments of Indigenous worlds, animals, plants and human
beings, extracting them in order to transport them to - and build the wealth, the
privilege, or feed the appetites of - the colonizers, who get marked as the first
world. This includes so-thought ‘historic’ examples such as opium, spices, tea,
sugar, and tobacco, the extraction of which continues to fuel colonial efforts.
This form of colonialism also includes the feeding of contemporary appetites
for diamonds, fish, water, oil, humans turned workers, genetic material,
cadmium and other essential minerals for high tech devices. External
colonialism often requires a subset of activities properly called military
colonialism - the creation of war fronts/frontiers against enemies to be
conquered, and the enlistment of foreign land, resources, and people into
military operations. In external colonialism, all things Native become recast as
‘natural resources’ - bodies and earth for war, bodies and earth for chattel. The
other form of colonialism that is attended to by postcolonial theories and
theories of coloniality is internal colonialism, the biopolitical and geopolitical
management of people, land, flora and fauna within the “domestic” borders of
the imperial nation. This involves the use of particularized modes of control -
prisons, ghettos, minoritizing, schooling, policing - to ensure the ascendancy of
a nation and its white3 elite. These modes of control, imprisonment, and
involuntary transport of the human beings across borders - ghettos, their
policing, their economic divestiture, and their dislocatability - are at work to
authorize the metropole and conscribe her periphery. Strategies of internal
colonialism, such as segregation, divestment, surveillance, and criminalization,
are both structural and interpersonal.

Our intention in this descriptive exercise is not be exhaustive, or even

inarguable; instead, we wish to emphasize that (a) decolonization will take a
different shape in each of these contexts - though they can overlap4 - and that
(b) neither external nor internal colonialism adequately describe the form of
colonialism which operates in the United States or other nation-states in which
the colonizer comes to stay. Settler colonialism operates through
internal/external colonial modes simultaneously because there is no spatial
separation between metropole and colony. For example, in the United States,
many Indigenous peoples have been forcibly removed from their homelands
onto reservations, indentured, and abducted into state custody, signaling the
form of colonization as simultaneously internal (via boarding schools and other
biopolitical modes of control) and external (via uranium mining on Indigenous
land in the US Southwest and oil extraction on Indigenous land in Alaska) with
a frontier (the US military still nicknames all enemy territory “Indian Country”).
The horizons of the settler colonial nation-state are total and require a mode of
total appropriation of Indigenous life and land, rather than the selective
expropriation of profit-producing fragments.

Settler colonialism is different from other forms of colonialism in that settlers

come with the intention of making a new home on the land, a homemaking that
insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain. Thus, relying
solely on postcolonial literatures or theories of coloniality that ignore settler
colonialism will not help to envision the shape that decolonization must take in
settler colonial contexts. Within settler colonialism, the most important concern
is land/water/air/subterranean earth (land, for shorthand, in this article.) Land is
what is most valuable, contested, required. This is both because the settlers
make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also because
the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound
epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. This violence is not temporally
contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation.
This is why Patrick Wolfe (1999) emphasizes that settler colonialism is a
structure and not an event. In the process of settler colonialism, land is remade
into property and human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of
the owner to his property. Epistemological, ontological, and cosmological
relationships to land are interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward. Made
savage.

In order for the settlers to make a place their home, they must destroy and
disappear the Indigenous peoples that live there. Indigenous peoples are those
who have creation stories, not colonization stories, about how we/they came to
be in a particular place - indeed how we/they came to be a place. Our/their
relationships to land comprise our/their epistemologies, ontologies, and
cosmologies. For the settlers, Indigenous peoples are in the way and, in the
destruction of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous communities, and over time and
through law and policy, Indigenous peoples’ claims to land under settler
regimes, land is recast as property and as a resource. Indigenous peoples must
be erased, must be made into ghosts (Tuck and Ree, forthcoming).

At the same time, settler colonialism involves the subjugation and forced labor
of chattel slaves , whose bodies and lives become the property, and who are
kept landless. Slavery in settler colonial contexts is distinct from other forms of
indenture whereby excess labor is extracted from persons. First, chattels are
commodities of labor and therefore it is the slave’s person that is the excess.
Second, unlike workers who may aspire to own land, the slave’s very presence
on the land is already an excess that must be dis-located. Thus, the slave is a
desirable commodity but the person underneath is imprisonable, punishable, and
murderable. The violence of keeping/killing the chattel slave makes them
deathlike monsters in the settler imagination; they are reconfigured/disfigured
as the threat, the razor’s edge of safety and terror.

The settler, if known by his actions and how he justifies them, sees himself as
holding dominion over the earth and its flora and fauna, as the anthropocentric
normal, and as more developed, more human, more deserving than other groups
or species. The settler is making a new "home" and that home is rooted in a
homesteading worldview where the wild land and wild people were made for
his benefit. He can only make his identity as a settler by making the land
produce, and produce excessively, because "civilization" is defined as
production in excess of the "natural" world (i.e. in excess of the sustainable
production already present in the Indigenous world). In order for excess
production, he needs excess labor, which he cannot provide himself. The chattel
slave serves as that excess labor, labor that can never be paid because payment
would have to be in the form of property (land). The settler's wealth is land, or a
fungible version of it, and so payment for labor is impossible.6 The settler
positions himself as both superior and normal; the settler is natural, whereas the
Indigenous inhabitant and the chattel slave are unnatural, even supernatural.

Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants are beholden to the Indigenous laws
and epistemologies of the lands they migrate to. Settlers become the law,
supplanting Indigenous
laws and epistemologies. Therefore, settler nations are not immigrant nations
(See also A.J. Barker, 2009).

Not unique, the United States, as a settler colonial nation-state, also operates as
an empire - utilizing external forms and internal forms of colonization
simultaneous to the settler colonial project. This means, and this is perplexing to
some, that dispossessed people are brought onto seized Indigenous land through
other colonial projects. Other colonial projects include enslavement, as
discussed, but also military recruitment, low-wage and high-wage labor
recruitment (such as agricultural workers and overseas-trained engineers), and
displacement/migration (such as the coerced immigration from nations torn by
U.S. wars or devastated by U.S. economic policy). In this set of settler colonial
relations, colonial subjects who are displaced by external colonialism, as well as
racialized and minoritized by internal colonialism, still occupy and settle stolen
Indigenous land. Settlers are diverse, not just of white European descent, and
include people of color, even from other colonial contexts. This tightly wound
set of conditions and racialized, globalized relations exponentially complicates
what is meant by decolonization, and by solidarity, against settler colonial
forces.

Decolonization in exploitative colonial situations could involve the seizing of

imperial wealth by the postcolonial subject. In settler colonial situations, seizing
imperial wealth is inextricably tied to settlement and re-invasion. Likewise, the
promise of integration and civil rights is predicated on securing a share of a
settler-appropriated wealth (as well as expropriated ‘third-world’ wealth).
Decolonization in a settler context is fraught because empire, settlement, and
internal colony have no spatial separation. Each of these features of settler
colonialism in the US context - empire, settlement, and internal colony - make it
a site of contradictory decolonial desires.

Decolonization as metaphor allows people to equivocate these contradictory

decolonial desires because it turns decolonization into an empty signifier to be
filled by any track towards liberation. In reality, the tracks walk all over
land/people in settler contexts. Though the details are not fixed or agreed upon,
in our view, decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the
repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to
land have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is, all of
the land, and not just symbolically. This is precisely why decolonization is
necessarily unsettling, especially across lines of solidarity. “Decolonization
never takes place unnoticed” (Fanon, 1963, p. 36). Settler colonialism and its
decolonization implicates and unsettles everyone.

Playing Indian and the erasure of Indigenous peoples

Recently in a symposium on the significance of Liberal Arts education in the

United States, Eve presented an argument that Liberal Arts education has
historically excluded any attention to or analysis of settler colonialism. This,
Eve posited, makes Liberal Arts education complicit in the project of settler
colonialism and, more so, has rendered the truer project of Liberal Arts
education something like trying to make the settler indigenous to the land he
occupies. The attendees were titillated by this idea, nodding and murmuring in
approval and it was then that Eve realized that she was trying to say something
incommensurable with what they expected her to say. She was completely
misunderstood. Many in the audience heard this observation: that the work of
Liberal Arts education is in part to teach settlers to be indigenous, as something
admirable, worthwhile, something wholesome, not as a problematic point of
evidence about the reach of the settler colonial erasure.

Philip Deloria (1998) explores how and why the settler wants to be made
indigenous, even if only through disguise, or other forms of playing Indian.
Playing Indian is a powerful U.S. pastime, from the Boston Tea Party, to
fraternal organizations, to new age trends, to even those aforementioned Native
print underwear. Deloria maintains that, “From the colonial period to the
present, the Indian has skulked in and out of the most important stories various
Americans have told about themselves” (p. 5).

The indeterminacy of American identities stems, in part, from the

nation’s inability to deal with Indian people. Americans wanted to feel a natural
affinity with the continent, and it was Indians who could teach them such
aboriginal closeness. Yet, in order to control the landscape they had to destroy
the original inhabitants. (Deloria, 1998, p.5)

L. Frank Baum (author of The Wizard of Oz) famously asserted in 1890 that
the safety of white settlers was only guaranteed by the “total annihilation of the
few remaining Indians” (as quoted in Hastings, 2007). D.H. Lawrence, reading
James Fenimore Cooper (discussed at length later in this article), Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Henry David Thoreau, Herman
Melville, Walt Whitman and others for his Studies in Classic American
Literature (1924), describes Americans’ fascination with Indigeneity as one of
simultaneous desire and repulsion (Deloria, 1998).

“No place,” Lawrence observed, “exerts its full influence upon a

newcomer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed.” Lawrence argued that in
order to meet the “demon of the continent” head on and this finalize the
“unexpressed spirit of America,” white Americans needed either to destroy
Indians of assimilate them into a white American world...both aimed at making
Indians vanish from the landscape. (Lawrence, as quoted in Deloria, 1998, p. 4).
 Everything within a settler colonial society strains to destroy or assimilate
the Native in order to disappear them from the land - this is how a society can
have multiple simultaneous and conflicting messages about Indigenous peoples,
such as all Indians are dead, located in faraway reservations, that contemporary
Indigenous people are less indigenous than prior generations, and that all
Americans are a “little bit Indian.” These desires to erase - to let time do its
thing and wait for the older form of living to die out, or to even help speed
things along (euthanize) because the death of pre-modern ways of life is thought
to be inevitable - these are all desires for another kind of resolve to the colonial
situation, resolved through the absolute and total destruction or assimilation of
original inhabitants.

Numerous scholars have observed that Indigeneity prompts multiple

forms of settler anxiety, even if only because the presence of Indigenous
peoples - who make a priori claims to land and ways of being - is a constant
reminder that the settler colonial project is incomplete (Fanon, 1963; Vine
Deloria, 1988; Grande, 2004; Bruyneel, 2007). The easy adoption of
decolonization as a metaphor (and nothing else) is a form of this anxiety,
because it is a premature attempt at reconciliation. The absorption of
decolonization by settler social justice frameworks is one way the settler,
disturbed by her own settler status, tries to escape or contain the unbearable
searchlight of complicity, of having harmed others just by being one’s self. The
desire to reconcile is just as relentless as the desire to disappear the Native; it is
a desire to not have to deal with this (Indian) problem anymore.