Natalie Avalos on Insurgent Pedagogies: Decolonization is For All of Us

June 2017's Teaching Resistance column in MaximumRockNRoll deals with the educational imperative, at ALL levels, of decolonization and how we can facilitate this process as teachers in a world where literally no one is exempt from the structures and processes that have kept colonialism and oppression intact. The column is by Natalie Avalos, an ethnographer of religion whose research and teaching focus on Native American and Indigenous religions in diaspora, healing historical trauma, decolonization, and social justice. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Connecticut College. She was born and raised in the Bay Area and cut her radical consciousness teeth in its underground music scene.

Insurgent Pedagogies: Decolonization is For All of Us

We hear the word decolonization often in resistance circles but what does it mean? Some of you may dismiss it as irrelevant by thinking “I’m not a POC, I haven’t been affected or constrained by colonialism?” Bad news, buddy. We are ALL affected and constrained by colonialism, not just in the U.S. but around the globe. The parallel logics of modern colonialism can be seen more readily in 20^th c. U.S. interventionism such as in El Salvador or Vietnam, but its contemporary expression, contingent on racial hierarchies (where whiteness sits atop as the ideal locus of humanity), religious persecution, and “economic development,” have been replicated in places like Tibet, by China. The strains of empire that transformed the Americas hundreds of years ago have morphed into a global, multi-national system of neocolonial players that subjugate less powerful nations through economic bullying. We are still in the throes of colonization. Whiteness does not preclude you from decolonizing projects. If you are descended from European settlers, the social and economic privileges of whiteness contribute to your individual social capital. My constraint and dispossession have directly supported your access to wealth and prosperity. We are deeply linked through these overlapping histories and so share their legacy. Although they shape and constrain us in different ways, the ideological and material structures (racialization, patriarchy, heteronormativity, neoliberalism, the objectification of the earth) produced in their wake act as the foundation of our social life. And thus, we have a collective responsibility to undo them. Together.

We can think of decolonization most simply as the undoing of colonialism, not only its structures (see above) but also the amelioration of its affects, like historical trauma and internalized colonialism. For instance, in a material context, it can mean deconstructing settler states and redistributing lands back to Indigenous peoples or even organizing against racist policies. In an affective context, it can mean personal empowerment, healing, and cultural regeneration. These two contexts are contingent—one necessitates and supports the other. Decolonization is the driving theme for many of my classes, meaning my primary pedagogical objective is for students to not only understand specific histories of colonialism, whether in the Americas, Oceania, or Asia and their correlating structures, but also learn about the many paths of resistance, material (boots on the ground organizing) and immaterial (developing a radical consciousness). As a religious studies scholar, I emphasize that we cannot decouple the material and immaterial dimensions of life because they shape one another. Ideas, ethics, and belief are a major component of this resistance. We cannot transform our material conditions without deconstructing the ideologies and affective drives that have forged them. We cannot transform our material conditions without naming the multiple forms of our dispossession and claiming our existential rights to live in our full humanity. We are whole beings that have been subject to ideological/structural violence for generations. Even those of us who have benefited the most from these injustices are still affected and disfigured by their horror. It will take time and effort to undo this doing. First we have to understand what we’re resisting, why were resisting it, what forms of resistance have been effective and why.

My approach to teaching decolonization projects, since they are multiple and diverse, is exploring how at heart they are about transforming our relationships to power. Franz Fanon noted that colonization estranges the colonized from their own metaphysical worlds—their cosmologies, knowledges, and ways of being. Multiple forces of power (institutional, epistemological, religious) collude over time to produce this estrangement. Decolonial scholar, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, describes coloniality as a matrix of knowledge, power, and being. Naturally, a decoloniality that addresses these three dimensions of human experience is necessary. I agree with Fanon and Maldonado-Torres that understanding the nature of coloniality is critical to its intervention. However, we can’t stop there. We need to consider (and celebrate) real and existing solutions. The exploration of power is a generative starting place for understanding how to decolonize projects because it is often a catalyst for resistance. Although colonial dispossession of power (material and immaterial) has appeared totalizing, the dispossessed have found creative entry points to take back power. For example, individuals and communities may begin to take back their power by regenerating their ways of being through revitalized religious traditions and other forms of traditional lifeways or by researching their own institutional histories and forming a new locus of governance. The simple but powerful refusal to be complicit in racism or homophobia is a tacit way to take back power. Thinking through these possibilities de-naturalizes hierarchies of power, forcing us to consider what more lateral forms of power look like. A framework of decolonization also forces us to see social life as deeply interconnected. When a constellation of social change in line with decolonization is taking place, whether through movements for Native sovereignty or Black Lives Matter, our web of relations is forced to continually shift and accommodate these new rules for living and being. We are forced to consider our relationship to unjust expressions of power and respond in kind. You may think “well thas cool, but how do we negotiate decolonization in our everyday lives?”

Many of us in the underground music scene were intuitively resistant to normative social structures and expressions. For me, and likely many of you, I remember feeling distrustful of social norms that appeared to be rooted in unjust relations of power, whether this was traditional gender roles, racial hierarchies, or even normative beauty standards. I found myself reveling in social critique. It was a way for me to take back power. This critique motivated me to learn more about these structures of oppression and eventually understand them as complex expressions of empire. But after awhile (years) of criticizing these structures, I found myself longing to believe in something, for a kind of social analysis that could both deconstruct and construct and maybe even instruct. I was drawn to working as a scholar because it provided me with unique opportunities to be critical but also generative. As an educator, I am invested in helping students develop their critical voices, which is fundamental, but also explore solutions to social problems. Why is this important? Because we need direction. Colonization has stripped many of us of our ethical and political systems and left us with a hollowed out social world that has exchanged consumerism for ethics and meaning. We need alternative visions for living and being. And we need to remind ourselves it is possible to live in a different kind of world. To remind ourselves that we have so much more power than we realize. To remind ourselves of the possibilities beyond all those oppressive structures shaping our lives, such as misogyny and racism, when they seem totalizing. To recognize that we have internalized these structures in ways that may take us a lifetime to unravel and to be gentle with ourselves when we feel defeated by our own shortcomings (not being “aware enough” “having the right analysis” etc.). To recognize that needing community (and direction) doesn’t make us flawed, it makes us human.

Yes. I love me some good social critique. Here, here, y’all woke boo boos around the world. But we can get stuck there. Our love of critique may be rooted in our natural inclination to scratch beneath the surface, to act as dialecticians, seeking the antithesis of the thesis. But we often struggle with synthesizing our new insights into a coherent worldview that allows us to step into a better future. One of the problems we face teaching radical forms of resistance is that we can never come up with perfectly objective solutions. One community’s decolonization is going to look different than another’s. One individuals’ relationship to power, depending on their social position will determine how they decolonize. We often have to feel our way through particular scenarios of injustice in order to understand our options for resolution. This is highly contextual and a lot of work. But teaching students to both critique and be generative allows us to see that this is not only possible but that the macro structures constraining our lives are replicated in the micro relations of our everyday lives. We may not be able to eliminate Racism as a structure in our everyday but we can recognize and challenge our internalized assumptions about others, and ourselves, enabling us to build stronger happier communities. We may not able to eliminate the settler state overnight but we work towards building functional communities from the bottom up. The fact that we intuitively seek to improve upon our social world is a sign that we want to improve it. Many of us in this struggle are idealists that want to see and live in a better world. But sometimes we lose track of the trees for the forest. We forget that when we transform the micro relations in our everyday lives—relationships with our families, co-workers, friends, partners, etc.—we are actively transforming our social world. --Natalie Avalos

Prisons and Schools: Institutional Education and the State

Miles of ink have been spilled debating and dissecting the fabled school-to-prison pipeline, a problem endemic to the U.S. education system that almost-exclusively affects its most socioeconomically disadvantaged students; students for whom realistic options for survival and resistance were always slim and high-risk. Less commonly discussed, however, is what options exist for these students' educational attainment following their likely incarceration at the hands of an oppressive capitalist state – and what options for survival and resistance remain in this most-restrictive of environments. March 2017's Teaching Resistance column in MaximumRockNRoll features some powerful reflections from Lena T., a PhD researcher and teacher living in Oakland, CA, and a perennial MRR reader as well as contributor in more recent years. Her column focuses on the importance of not-for-profit prison higher education and solidarity in the post-reason era. Lena can be reached at lena.tahmassian@gmail.com

On February 1, 2017 inmates took over a wing of the Vaughn Prison in Delaware, protesting Trump and demanding better conditions and “remedies conducive to reform and rehabilitation” with education at the top of their list. A guard who was taken hostage died and there is now, at the time of writing, a civil rights coalition asking for a transparent federal investigation. Little more than that information was made known to the public. While most prisons are public institutions, there is not much common knowledge about what goes on in them. Whether or not there will be a further degradation of prison conditions under Trump (there could easily be), this act holds symbolic weight: members of the most marginalized group in society (most can’t even vote) protest an administration that will more than ever place private profit over people, an administration that has already made explicit that various (disproportionately nonwhite) sectors of the population are essentially disposable.

Returning to the prisoners’ demands, this column is in defense of not-for-profit higher education in prisons, not only because I believe that people are not disposable, but also that teaching and learning go both ways. My higher education teaching experience to date has been split between graduate student teaching at an elite university and volunteer teaching for the accredited college program at San Quentin State Prison. I got involved in the latter because there was a need for my particular skills, I wanted to do something less self-serving than just getting a PhD, and to expand my teaching skills. In general, I was up for the challenge of teaching people whose experiences would mostly be very different from my own.

While I’ve taught in two radically different learning environments, my basic objectives are fundamentally the same: to teach them to create meaning out of texts and to critically think and rethink the basis of knowledge production. One notable difference of prison higher education, other than the technological lack (only pen and paper are available), is that when your everyday reality is the very definition of confinement, the classroom acquires a new liberating dimension. Students are eager to speak and share their experiences, and the classroom is, unlike their cellblocks, racially integrated. For us as instructors, being a volunteer in a free program is also in itself liberating (provided you can make time for it). This dynamic does seem to partially inform the students’ attitudes which shift more towards “Thanks for teaching us!” rather than the “Hey, I’m paying for this!” vibe of the increasingly neoliberal academy. That said, I’ve had many considerate and inquisitive students at the traditional university, but some do treat education like a product to be consumed. I suppose in defense of the student-as-consumer mindset (from their perspective), one must recognize that the astronomical cost of higher education and the fact that many students will be indebted into the foreseeable future places increasing pressure on them to see learning as a serious financial investment on which they must see a return.

In my experience, incarcerated students tend to ask “is this how they do things at… (Stanford, Berkeley, etc.)?” They want to know that they are being challenged and not patronized. It’s also a good practice for me to always question and reflect on my methods by having to explain why we assess learning a certain way. I’ve come to believe strongly however that it’s not just about importing and adapting methodologies from the elite academy for those who in many cases were never afforded the opportunity of higher education, but that prisoners also have a lot to teach us. Bringing all of their diverse life experiences to the table opens up new possibilities for discussion. Also, many of us tend to slide through life avoiding our problems, burying our traumas, making the same mistakes, and never facing our insecurities head on. For those seeking rehabilitation, self-reflection is unavoidable and often involves identifying and extirpating the markers of toxic masculinity. I’ve seen how the various programs offered, including college education, help develop self-awareness, discipline, resolve, and a spirit of cooperation that I have not seen anywhere else. For prisoners it can be a matter of life or existential death. Those who go through the rehabilitation process have accomplished the very difficult task of confronting their issues head on and facing those whose lives they have potentially damaged. To thrive within the walls for the time being, you have to be able to imagine something better beyond them. Perhaps this is something we can all learn from.

Upon advocating for prison higher education, I know that on ethical grounds maybe I am mostly preaching to the choir in this column. But for the naysayers (maybe they’ll be at your next family function), it also makes a lot of sense from a utilitarian standpoint. Even though most of us don't have much of a clue what goes on in prisons, we nevertheless fund them through our taxes. Like it or not, most prisoners are eventually released, and access to education while incarcerated dramatically decreases the rate of recidivism. Yes, there are dangerous people who are probably incapable of not harming others–those who fit this profile are not typically eligible for rehabilitation programs in the first place.

Thus higher education in prison is good for both prisoners and society, and those who initiated the Vaughn prison uprising surely knew that. But the current rise of corporate fascism is indeed a double whammy, as it seeks to designate enemies of the state and profit off of their subjugation, which can take the form of public prison labor and private prison contracts, border walls, armaments, etc. Now more than ever, electoral political discourse is beyond logic and reason, with no longer even a semblance of concern for others (unless you’re white and poor, then there is just a semblance of concern for you, but seriously, wake up people: those industrial jobs are not coming back and its not brown people’s fault).

However, on a positive note, there is a whole new generation of resistance cropping up who is questioning what they’ve been told about who the “bad guys” are in the first place. The consensus has fallen out. Let’s hope that sliding back to corporate liberalism is not the best we can do. Specifically, on the topic of issues that impact incarcerated people directly: last year Obama did bring back Pell Grants for prisoners for the first time since 1994 when Bill Clinton pulled the plug on all federal funding for prison higher education by signing the Violent Crime Bill, which was actually written by the then senator Joe Biden. The democrats of old may have reversed their stance on that disastrous bill, but the damage is surely done. Also, I can’t say for sure, but my best guess is that Pell Grants for prisoners will be going away again. (Is the incoming Education Secretary seriously a semi-illiterate billionaire and advocate of for-profit education and arming schoolchildren?)

These days, a lot of people seem to be asking a variation of the question: “What is our responsibility to people we disagree with?” (“Is it ok to punch a Nazi?”) I don't claim to have all the answers (Yes, it’s ok to punch a Nazi). I think there’s actually a simple formula for this: if your worldview is defined by exclusion and denying people’s humanity, then you’re actually the one shutting down the possibility for discussion. Aside from the more extreme examples (unfortunately, I think they’ll be increasing), should we try to change people’s minds? We need to build our resistance, but is there a tool to measure the distance between our ideas, to determine when it’s no longer worth our breath? I think teachers are in a privileged position to promote dialogue, expand minds, and also build empathy bridges in the classroom, but also way beyond. A lot of the students share my worldviews, many don’t. In light of the current reality, I’m all for increasing the possibility of encounters with people you would probably otherwise never engage with. Sometimes I feel like our social media echo chambers will be the death of us. I’ll carry on contemplating the limits of our responsibility.

On a final note, I highly encourage grad students, graduate degree holders, and faculty to get involved with prison higher education in your area. There are also organizations that take book donations to send to incarcerated people–I’ve met inmates who have accessed important literature this way! If you live in the Bay Area, I can point you in the right direction. You will talk to a lot of interesting people, learn about the prison system, and subsequently become a prison abolitionist or at least an advocate for the humanity of those who deserve a second chance, or even an actual first chance at a decent life. Compounded by the fact that American reality is now producing marginality at a rapid rate, it has been reassuring to hear the marginal voices growing louder and more plentiful in the last weeks. We must continue to also defend the basic rights of those who have no voice at all. -Lena T.