Paper short abstract:

How do youth come to embody their places in community? How does compulsory U.S. American public education unbraid reciprocal relations between humans and non-human beings? This paper explores epistemological and pedagogical alternatives to current environmental science and ethnic studies programs.

Paper long abstract:

This paper assumes that the knowledge reinforced and the pedagogies employed in public education in the U.S. are intertwined with the objective of fashioning citizens beholden to and complicit in reproduction of settler nation-states and logics. With this premise, the author asserts that a justification for international participation in such a world order is the nation-state's interest and capacity to continue as a naturalized instrument of governance, competing on a global market scale. A globalized "free" market presupposes inter-connected economies, which position all resources of colonized lands and developed and developing waterways--including species that humans consume as food--as commodities for exchange in a currency market.

In this day and age, how do young people come to find and embody their places in community, sometimes requiring the contestation--if not denial--of knowledge transmitted at home and in out-of-school communities? How does formal socialization, e.g., compulsory U.S. public education, work to sever strands of interdependent, intimate, reverent relations between humans and the more-than-human world, or non-human relatives? If science class as early as elementary school is framed only in the lineage of Eurocentric Enlightenment founding fathers, with its contemporary objective being the technological advancement of military, medical, and human-centric superiority--on Earth and beyond--how do teachers include Indigenous knowledges, honor Elders as educators, and learn from Indigenous languages without unjust appropriations of epistemologies? This paper explores epistemic and pedagogical alternatives utilized in an after-school ecology program, concluding with a call for educators to reground ourselves in wider ecological contexts and [re]turn to Indigenous knowledges.