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Remember “Indian Control Over Indian Education“? That was 1972.
What if we stopped looking for colonial accreditation and recognition in education? What if we took all the energy we put in trying to change a broken education system and put it into local, community-controlled immersion education programs? Programs centred on our own ways of knowing – programs deliberately connecting our peoples to the land, our political traditions, our languages and the local issues of relevance. What if we purposefully educated our own?And what about post-secondary education? What if we centred education in a nest of everyday acts of resurgence (to use the words of Jeff Corntassel)? We’ve been participating in post-secondary education for several decades now. We have a lot of people with BAs, MAs and PhDs. What can programs like AFS teach us? What if our sole purpose is using our own intellectual traditions to educate our own youth and our allies?
MORE
—
-Paige Bartholomew
James Baldwin
“But the picking out, the choosing. Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind. My mind.”
Jazz by Toni Morrison
What settler colonialism does is that it sets a ceiling on what the future can be such that we cannot even imagine a future without genocide. This tendency then leaves us to develop critical visions only within the constraints of the possible and then infects all the work that we do.
For instance if we look at the Academic Industrial Complex. We whine and complain about how racist it is. As if the only problem is a few racist administrators who need to be fired. And if we just convince them how great Ethnic Studies is, they’d just give us more money. But if we were actually to imagine a liberatory educational system would this be it? Professors, do we say, “Tenure was the most fun thing I’ve ever done, I wish I could do it again”? Do students say, “You know, I love it when I work really hard for my finals and then get a bad grade anyway, how empowering was that”? We don’t even try to imagine building an alternative to the Academic Industrial Complex. We act as if the problem is that there is racism in the academy, not that the academy is structured by racism. And here’s where we can learn from the Prison Industrial Complex. Is not that the organizing against the Prison Industrial Complex puts forth a model of abolition that doesn’t just say that it’s about tearing down prison walls now but it’s about building alternatives that squeeze out the current system. Similarly, while we might have day jobs in the academic system, why can’t we start building alternatives to this system, build the educational system that we would actually like to see that could then squeeze out the current system as it develops. So, for instance, when Arizona says something like they’re going to ban Ethnic Studies, we think, “Oh no, there’s not going to be Ethnic Studies because the State says so!” We presume the state owns Ethnic Studies and it actually can ban it. We don’t say, “Uh, whatever, Arizona! Ethnic Studies is not a gift from the Academic Industrial Complex or from the state. It’s a product of social movements for social justice, and as long as they exist there will be Ethnic Studies wherever and whenever we go.” And did we ever really think Ethnic Studies was going to be legitimate in a white supremacist and settler colonialist academy? And if ever did become legitimate, we would know we had failed in our task.
”| — | Andrea Smith plenary talk at Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide, Thursday, March 10, 2011 ( |
| — | The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison |
Be it Jade, it shatters.
Be it gold, it breaks.
Be it a quetzal feather, it tears apart.
Not forever on earth; only a little while here.
--- Nezahualcóyolt (April 28, 1402 – June 4, 1472)
I want Working Class Studies set up. I want working-class and working-poor histories, cultures, ideologies, theories, languages studied. I want the many worthy individuals who spent their lives working for social justice studied and examined. I want us teaching each other, want the labor halls and the community centers filled with janitors, secretaries, house cleaners, garbage men, lineworkers, want us in charge of the curriculum and reading lists and teaching. I envision us at the center; I don't want "experts" explaining our live sto us, standing behind a lectern and pontificating for two hours on proletarians.
---Joanna Kadi from her book "Thinking Class: Sketches from a Cultural Worker"
“The concept of portraying evil and then destroying it - I know this is considered mainstream, but I think it is rotten. This idea that whenever something evil happens someone particular can be blamed and punished for it, in life and in politics, is hopeless.”
- Hayao Miyazaki
And that's why I Heart Monsters: In one package, they represent:
1) The sublime reaches of Human Creativity
2) Righteous Anger against human cruelty
3) The ultimate life-saving power of the AbsurdMORE
If we are truly committed to ending oppression and violence, then we must be committed to each other. Then we must live out of the simple truth that we need each other. We need each other. And this is where I would like to center my comments for today.
The best analysis in the world is useless if we don’t invest our time and energy in learning how to treat and love each other better, if we can’t build relationships that can last more than 2-5 years. If we can’t commit to practicing working out hard dynamics in our relationships or if we are recreating the very conditions we are fighting against inside of our collectives, organizations, and movements.
It doesn’t matter how much you know, if you’re not willing to work on your heart and your relationship with yourself. If you don’t know how to say, “I’m sorry,” “that really hurt my feelings,” or “I messed up.” None of this matters if you are interested in staying “right” all the time or always wanting to only talk about the places you’re oppressed and never talk about the places you are privileged.Mia Mingus on Leaving Evidence
Language is a code. The kinds of words we use and where we use them act as signals. People hyperfocused on language rather than underlying attitudes are missing the point entirely; they seem to think that there is a dictionary of jargon they can use, and if they avoid the words, they’ve resolved the problem. Eliminating certain words from usage was never the goal of discussions about language; asking people to examine their attitudes was the goal of these conversations.Posted at This Aint Living by SE Smith
via bettacomecorrectqueerbrownxx:
thepeoplesrecord:
— Zoe LeonardOne of the first images I ever posted on this blog. I think it’s time for a repost.
I will never stop loving this quote.
Via tumblr
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Globalization and modernity in India: A gendered critique by Subhadra Mitra Channa (via sitaronse)
Wangechi Mutu | The Catatonic Bliss of Violent Incidences
Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal
Naomi Shihab Nye
After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.
Well — one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she
Did this.
I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?
The minute she heard any words she knew — however poorly used -
She stopped crying.
She thought our flight had been canceled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late,
Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
Would ride next to her — southwest.
She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.
Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.
Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.
She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.
She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies — little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts — out of her bag —
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo — we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.
And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers —
Non-alcoholic — and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American — ran around serving us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.
And I noticed my new best friend — by now we were holding hands —
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,
With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
Not a single person in this gate — once the crying of confusion stopped
— has seemed apprehensive about any other person.
They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.
Not everything is lost.==
Also by Naomi Shihab Nye: Supple Cord | The Rider
For me this has also reiterated the importance of learning new languages.
Beautiful is the world that wakes up early for evil,
beautiful is the world that falls asleep to sin and mercy,
in the profanity of our being together, you and I.
Beautiful is the world.
Via
How beautiful would it be if we attacked problems before they became massive bleeding ulcers? How beautiful would it be, if we actually woke up early for evil?
I'll tell you-- I think of the whole issue of ethno-chic in terms of the following concepts: appropriation; cultural/racial supremacy; displacement; sustainable economies on local and global levels; naivete; colonialism; and pluralism-- and I try to have a complicated anti-racist and anti-poverty, feminist response to the whole matter. I do think that learning about and sharing in multiple cultures can be a good thing but-- please-- neither culture nor fashion is ever meaningless. Slapping someone else's cultural, religious, or sexual artifact on your body in the name of diversity does not comprise progressive action; nor is it automatically the wrong thing to do. I don't believe in elevating or reducing anything to pure art or in the social innocence of art, so I think it's important to pose specific questions to ourselves when we're borrowing or changing or leaving behind cultural forms. I go through this process every morning as I lean into my mirror and decide on the bindi, going through each of the above concepts in my mind. It's a difficult way to live my life, but it's the only way I can try and be an honest, social human being. And being social, after all, is-- in my opinion-- the best part of being human.MORE
Many of these issues remain deeply relevant today, but what is important to note here are not the particular views that Tagore advanced in these—and other such—areas, but the organizing principles that moved him. The poet who was famous in the West only as a romantic and a spiritualist was in fact persistently guided in his writings by the necessity of critical reasoning and the importance of human freedom. Also, those were the philosophical priorities that influenced Tagore’s ideas on education, including his insistence that education is the most important element in the development of a country. In his assessment of Japan’s economic development, Tagore separated out the role that the advancement of school education had played in Japan’s remarkable development—an analysis that would be echoed much later in the literature on development. He may have been exaggerating the role of education somewhat when he remarked that “the imposing tower of misery which today rests on the heart of India has its sole foundation in the absence of education,” but it is not hard to see why he saw the transformative role of education as the central story in the development process.
Tagore devoted much of his life to advancing education in India and advocating it everywhere. Nothing absorbed as much of his time as the school in Santiniketan that he established. He was constantly raising money for this unusually progressive co-educational school. I have to declare a bias here, since I was educated at this school, and my mother was schooled there decades earlier, in what was one of the early co-educational institutions in India. After learning that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, Tagore told others about it, or so the story goes, in a meeting of a school committee discussing how to fund a new set of drains that the school needed. His announcement of the recognition apparently took the eccentric form of his saying that “money for the drains has probably been found.”MORE
Well I for one am curious and so these are going on my library list!
The Essential Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man
Stories are instructions, inspirations a culture tells itself; stories are a mirror held up by a culture about itself. Thus a theme might be applicable to be universal; growing up, falling in love, being dutiful, feeling frustrated, having a child - but a STORY, can't be.
Yes, I'm saying it, a story cannot be universal. It belongs to the culture and traditions, background and surroundings of the teller; of its author. And if there are similar things in it, to something else, that someone else can relate to without needing too many pauses to translate, or without needing to only focus on the broader theme - then that's great for that individual.
Unfortunately, USian Imperial Cultural Hemogeny likes to present the false argument, that because it has infiltrated so many places, and affected so many peoples, that all places and all peoples are merely waiting to adopt USian cultural practices (or similar) and thus, as much as these USian tales are exported and labeled 'universal'; not having universal themes, but labeled as being UNIVERSAL STORIES, it becomes acceptable within this Imperialism to take stories that belong to other places, other peoples, other legends, other voices and spin and push, fold and shove, mutilate them to fit.
And I don't think too many people talk about what is destroyed; the beauty and the message that is destroyed when that is done. MORE
The question of universality is precisely what I was thinking about over at atheism and race recently. LOVE seeking Avalon's breaking it down.
