SRIS Newsletter - September 2019 (Plain Text Version)

Judith Landeros

Pablo Montes

We are PhD students at the University of Texas at Austin in the Cultural Studies in Education Program. Austin, TX, although many times unacknowledged, has always been home to many Indigenous communities such as the Coahuiltecan, Comanche, and Tonkawa, among many others. As multilingual authors, we recognize that our communication is both in English and Spanish, two languages that continue to be used as colonial tools in education. Since colonialism—and the continued settler colonialities still present today—language, education, and Land have been manipulated/maneuvered to serve a nation-state building project with the United States. For example, the deployment of boarding schools in Indigenous communities, language as a proxy for racialization, the justification for separating Mexican and Latinx children by language use, and the continued erasure of Indigenous languages within the curriculum on stolen sovereign Land.

Our Call to Action

Our call to action interrogates dominant ideologies of Indigeneity, which includes decentering English as the normative language that continues to uphold colonial legacies. Such legacies consist of genocide, displacing of bodies, dehumanization, spiritual subjugation, and language terrorization. We urge the TESOL community to critically examine how the teaching of the English language is not innocent and carries sociopolitical and historical legacies that must be disrupted. TESOL must also recognize the consequences of English supremacy and its proliferation within laws and policies that regulate structures of dominance that uphold the interests of whiteness, capitalism, and multiple settler colonialities. For example, in Texas there are 184 detention centers that are incarcerating, most often, Indigenous peoples to Abya Yala (North & South America; Garfield, Gal, & Kiersz, 2019). We have witnessed how xenophobic discourses instill a sense of fear and superiority among “Americans” that reify the justification for current family separation policies and the continued construction of child concentration camps.

With this understanding, we position English as a cartographic colonial power. In other words, English serves as a hegemonic force that manifests in places such as the Mexico-Texas border. For example, migrants seeking asylum who do not speak English, or at times Spanish, are detained for an indefinite period of time because of the lack of translators who are able to communicate with Indigenous migrants (Medina, 2019). Even when there are translators who do speak Indigenous languages, it is often structurally rooted within standards of the English language. The translator services that are provided to Indigenous peoples give the illusion that immigration law is an equitable experience. However, those translation services which are entrenched in Eurowestern logics are too narrow too fully understand the complexity of Indigenous languages and thought. An elder reminds us, “I think we have to keep in mind…we need to express these concepts that we’re putting together for the kids in Indian thought because what you see…is we’re really fishing around for the correct English words to express the Indian thought [emphasis added]” (Bang et al., 2014, p. 46).

For this reason, we have compiled a list of actionable possibilities to further unsettle these tensions and center Indigenous languages and people. We invite the readers and the TESOL community to consider the following:

• Recognize the Indigenous Land that you are residing on and make a reciprocal effort to engage with the community. This map is a website to begin the processes of ethical Land acknowledgements.
• Critical cartography lesson/activity: Map your own migration stories and investigate how they are interrelated with current immigration policies and the creation of borders.
• Discussion/writing activity: Deconstruct the purposes of maps and turn the gaze onto who created and benefits from borders, boundaries, and vertical colonial impositions.
• Language pedagogical practices: When teaching English, be intentional about contextualizing and historicizing the use of the English language as a colonial imposition.
• Beyond standards of language: When focusing on language revitalization, it is imperative to realize the interdependence between language, Land, and culture.
• Personal/communal reflection: As a member of the TESOL community, continue to unpack how the commitments are beyond just teaching a language.

References

Bang, M., Curley, L., Kessel, A., Marin, A., Suzukovich III, E. S., & Strack, G. (2014). Muskrat theories, tobacco in the streets, and living Chicago as Indigenous land. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 37–55.

Garfield, L., Gal, S., & Kiersz, A. (2019, July 5). Migrant detention centers in the US are under fire for their 'horrifying' conditions — and there's at least one in every state. This map shows which have the most. Business Insider. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/ice-immigrant-families-dhs-detention-centers-2018-6

Medina, J. (2019, March 19). Anyone speak K’iche’ or Mam? Immigration courts overwhelmed by Indigenous languages. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/us/translators-border-wall-immigration.html

Pablo Montes is a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the son of migrant workers from Guanajuato, Mexico, and currently works with the Coahuiltecan community in central Texas. His research interests include the intersection of queer settler colonialism, Indigeneity, and Land education.