New Semester

I start teaching again in a week. It has been six months of writing, writing, writing. But if I’m honest, I missed the classroom. I missed the spark and the curiosity. Of course, there are things about teaching that are challenging, but I love being there for the moment of realization, when things that were once obscure become just a bit more legible.

But I wanted to reflect on something that I posted over on twitter a while back.

It started like this:

I’ll paste the whole thing here:

So you want to decolonize your syllabus, a thread:
1. Start by understanding what decolonization means, and that it is not a metaphor (Tuck and Yang), but a material, tangible, physical process.

2. But what does that mean for my syllabus? It means not simply adding one or two Indigenous texts, but asking how the fundamental premise of the course is predicated on settler colonialism, theft of land, culture, and life, and then, and only then...

2 (ctd). asking what changes to the structure of the course, the questions you are asking, and the method or approach to those questions can be not just inclusive of, but centered on, and in good relations with, Indigenous decolonial praxis.

3. This means foregrounding methods over content; praxis as a source of theorization and "content". And in this way, asking students to learn not just "about" Indigenous peoples, but how to relate to knowledge in a way that foregrounds Indigenous life.

4. But can I read Indigenous texts if I don't know much about Indigenous people? Yes, of course. You can start with asking why there is a gap in your syllabus in the first place, and then asking what filling that gap would mean both to you and your students.

5. Sometimes this means admitting to students that "the canon" or "the method" or "the discipline" is flawed. Because it is. And then asking them, and yourself, what it would mean to think those things in a different way, to act on them differently.

6. So, perhaps this looks like doing an evaluation of your primary source materials, an audit so to speak, and trying to build your course around a few core Indigenous texts that speak to broad themes of Indigenous praxis, life, science, art, love, etc.

7. Perhaps this looks like framing canonical texts not as priorities, but as addendums to the core Indigenous texts; flipping the canon/method/discipline so to speak.

8. Perhaps this looks like asking for help. Doing some work first, and then asking what texts or examples or methods are lacking, and then figuring out how to center those as core principles.

9. Perhaps this looks like doing some humble work and reading up on what others have said about this, reading about critical Indigenous pedagogy, the basics of critical Indigenous studies, Native American studies, etc.

10. Of course, all of this will depend on your field, but whether in STEM or humanities or social sciences or healthcare or any field at all, there are Indigenous writers and scholars and artists who are leading the field in new and exciting directions. The task is to listen.

OK, so, this thread was pretty popular in academic circles, as far as that is a thing. And I got some push back from right wing crazies, which did frustrate me, but I’ve let it go. But what I wanted to revisit here is the idea of praxis.

Praxis is how you do things. How you think and write and breathe. Praxis is the doing of the work. The enactment of the process.

Merriam Webster says: Praxis (n.)

1 : ACTION, PRACTICE: such as

a : exercise or practice of an art, science, or skill

b : customary practice or conduct

2 : practical application of a theory

The exercise or practice of something. The application of a theory. But here is where I want to be clear: Indigenous praxis is not simply the exercise of a skill or the application of a theory, but a constellation of actions that mutually reinforce each other as part of an ongoing and systemic cosmological and epistemological network, a set of evolving relations, on the one hand, and on the other, the actions that support the ongoingness of those relations.

To put it another way, praxis is not just “applying” decolonial theory to the field of Latin American studies, for example, but enacting the relations that are required for Indigenous and Black life to be centered in all their complexities. In all their complications and possibilities.

I think I wanted to make the point in the Twitter thread that decolonization is not simply “adding” another reading. Decolonization is not metaphorical, that much we get. But it is also not additive. It is wholistic and ongoing. But that ongoingness is not a linear trajectory from canon to counter-canon, (or from center to margin, and then bringing the margin to the center). It is to foreground the praxes that endeavor to bring to life the possibilities of Indigenous and Black futures.

But let me add another wrinkle, another shade to this, for the Marxists surely are wringing their hands. Marxist praxis, or praxis as understood within traditional Marxism, is the expression of quotidian life that transforms the surrounding world. That is well and good. But it is also divested of spirituality, of the cosmic, the sacred (and not in the sense that property is sacred, not that).

So even if the Marxists say that praxis is crucial, they do not understand praxis as existing beyond the material. Materialism is untenable in an Indigenous epistemology—or rather, onto-epistemology.

(As an aside: I’m aware I’m perhaps going a bit afield, but this is just me writing some shit down, so…)

And if Indigenous onto-epistemologies, in the plural—because there is not one, but multiple proliferating, infinite forms of Indigenous social and spiritual life—if Indigenous onto-epistemologies are incommensurable with materialist critiques, that is because materialism (both old and new) can only understand matter as an expression of the metaphors, language, invented by humans to name things that the materialists imagine existed only as conjured by human imagination.

Nope.

Anyway. I’m not really sure if any of this makes sense, but I wanted to revisit the issue of praxis, and I think I’ve done that, even if the text is a bit divergent.

Does this make sense?