[The study of] experiences and the traumatic residuals of genocide, ethnic hatred, aggression, and forms of state-sanctioned—and hence legal—social violence requires educators to think carefully about their own theories of learning and how the stuff of such difficult knowledge becomes pedagogical.
This exploration needs to do more than confront the difficulties of learning from another’s painful encounter with victimization, aggression, and the desire to live on one’s own terms. It also must be willing to risk approaching the internal conflicts which the learner brings to the learning.
Internal conflicts may be coarsened, denied, and defended against the time when the learner cannot make sense of violence, aggression, or even the desire for what Melanie Klein calls the "making of reparation."
Deborah Britzman
For most of us American settlers, we do not want to recognize that our government committed illegal acts to establish itself.
Eiko Kosasa
Britzman, 1998, p. 118.
Kosasa, 2024, p. 6.
Settler colonialism is a system of oppression in which a dominant power displaces an indigenous society with the intent of replacing it. The settlers' political system, culture, and language dominates as the indigenous society is replaced. Patrick Wolfe coined the term "logic of elimination" to describe this elimination as the organizing principle of settler societies. Elimination is necessary to gain access to territory, which is important because in settler-colonial societies like the United States, the settlers intend to stay. As such, Wolfe argues that settler colonialism is "a structure, not an event." (Wolfe, 2006, p. 388).
The primary motive of settler colonialism is the dissolution of indigenous societies to "[erect] a new colonial society on the expropriated land base." (Wolfe, 2006, p. 388). Indigenous peoples can exist in settler societies, but only as subjects with limited rights and no sovereignty in their native lands. Elimination is a continuous feature of settler societies, and erasure is embedded in its institutions. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui states, "the logic of elimination of the native is about the elimination of the native as native." (Kauanui, 2016)
According to Kosasa, "the United States recategorized Indigenous peoples to become ethnic groups (not global political bodies belonging to nations)." (Kosasa, 2024, p. 6) Under international law, however, "Indigenous people have the right of self-determination and thus possess national identity." Categorizing indigenous peoples such as Native Hawaiians as ethnic groups rather than a people with the right of self-determination makes them part of the multicultural melting pot in the United States. Under this dominant ideology, Native Hawaiians are considered just another ethnic group among many other groups in Hawaiʻi.
Britzman, D. P. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward a psychoanalytic inquiry of learning. State University of New York Press.
Dion, S. D.(2004). (Re)telling to disrupt: Aboriginal people and stories of Canadian history. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies. 2(1), 55-76.
Felman, S. (1982). Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable. Yale French Studies, 63, 21–44. https://doi.org/10.2307/2929829
Kauanui, J. K. (2016). “A Structure, Not an Event”: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity. Lateral, 5(1). https://doi.org/48671433
Kosasa, E. (2024). Notes regarding difficult knowledge, from one settler to other settlers (on US imperialism and settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi.
Matsuda, S., & Komeiji, K. (2023). Kuʻu ʻāina kulāiwi. up//root. https://www.uproot.space/komeiiji-matsuda
Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240
