Intimate colonialisms: the material and experienced places of British Columbia's residential schools

The theoretical premise of this paper is that place is an unbounded material, social and cultural agent within and through which practices of colonialism were enacted in British Columbia. Specifically, the places of British Columbia's 'Indian' residential schools, and the subjects who occupied them, are conceptualized as intimate sites nested within Canadian colonial and nation-building agendas that were predicated on policies of assimilation, enculturation or annihilation of indigenous people. Such conceptualizations allow for an understanding of both how colonialism was actualized against First Nations' peoples and how First Nations' peoples actively navigated and resisted that colonial project. In order to access experiences of residential school places, the article draws from published First Nations' testimonial literatures. It also draws from creative materials produced by students within the schools in order to understand how First Nations' students articulated against assimilative educational processes. The article concludes with a consideration of how nested place, First Nations' resistances, and Euro-colonial concepts of gender are circulating today with reference to a Dakelh woman (and former residential school student) under consideration for beatification in northern British Columbia.     

Cultivating ignorance of Aboriginal realities

The principal problem in Aboriginal education in Canada is the education of Canadians. This article exposes Canada's long history of ignorance of Aboriginal Peoples and suggests that while education may not be the source of ignorance, it is now perpetuating it. Using the Ontario secondary school curriculum as an example, this article looks at mainstream Canadian and World Studies, of which geography is an integral part, and Native Studies courses, offered in Ontario since 1999, but available for study to few young Ontarians. Curricular reforms during recent decades have removed the worst expressions of racism, but have not addressed fundamental colonial attitudes in the mainstream curriculum. As a citizenry we are complacent about a deep‐seated ignorance of the country's past and present, affecting both Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal Canadians. Lack of interest in traditional and modern Aboriginal cultures doom immigrants and established settlers to a dysfunctional relationship with the growing and increasingly internationally recognized indigenous population. As university educators and teachers of teachers, geographers must assume responsibility for promoting truthful and inclusive perceptions of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada and, in recognizing the subtle strategies of cultivating ignorance, examine how geography as it is currently taught in schools might exclude Aboriginal People and understanding.     

The Race Gap in Student Achievement Scores: Longitudinal Evidence from a Racially Diverse School District

Black and Hispanic students often display substantial gaps in test scores when compared to White students at all levels of education. In this article, we examine when and how the Black-White and Hispanic-White test score gaps develop in the early elementary grades in a California school district with a large minority population, where more than 80% of the students are Black or Hispanic. We use multivariate analysis to predict the annual reading and math test scores of a student cohort from first through fourth grade controlling for various school and family factors. We find that in this racially diverse school district achievement gaps do develop, for both Black and Hispanic students. However, in comparison to the Black-White achievement gaps, the Hispanic-White gaps develop later, in particular in math, and they are half the size of the Black-White achievement gaps. The eventual widening of the gaps for Hispanic and Black students does not seem to be the result of minority students attending schools of less quality. Finally, in contrast to previous studies with fewer minorities, the estimated achievement gaps by the fourth grade are small. ¹     

School Choice and Educational Stratification

Recent growth in the number of school choice programs across the country has ignited debate on the stratifying effects of these programs. In the context of interdistrict open enrollment, this paper analyzes—both theoretically and empirically—how choice programs affect stratification levels through the mechanisms of (i) the relative characteristics of program participants and nonparticipants and (ii) the schooling choices of different groups of program participants. The theoretical analysis uses Monte Carlo simulation techniques to analyze a hypothetical world where interdistrict choice is available to students in three school districts that are allowed to vary in student composition, the type of students who take advantage of the interdistrict choice program, and schooling choices of students who open enroll. The results of these simulations provide an understanding of the conditions under which an interdistrict open enrollment program leads to increases, decreases, or no changes in stratification levels. The empirical analysis uses data from the universe of students attending Colorado public schools in 2009–10 to examine how the state's interdistrict choice program affects stratification levels. It also analyzes the factors responsible for any increases or decreases in stratification and finds both participation patterns and differences in schooling decisions across groups to play important roles. The paper concludes with a discussion of its implications for research and policy.     

Gender Education Gaps among Indigenous and Non‐Indigenous Groups in Bolivia

This article studies gender education gaps among indigenous and non‐indigenous groups in Bolivia. Using the National Census of Population and Housing 2012 and an estimation method analogous to difference‐in‐differences, the study finds that the intersection of gender and indigenous identity confers cumulative disadvantage for indigenous women in literacy, years of schooling and primary and secondary school completion. While gender education gaps have become narrower across generations, there remain significant differences within indigenous groups. The Aymara have the largest gender gap in all outcomes, despite having high overall attainment rates and mostly residing in urban centres with greater physical access to schools. The Quechua have relatively smaller gender gaps, but these are accompanied by lower attainment levels. The article discusses the possible sources of these differentials and highlights the importance of taking gender dynamics within each indigenous group into greater consideration.     

Entre souveraineté indigène et sécurité nationale : Négocier la sécurité frontalière et la culture Mohawk à Akwesasne

Based on the case of the Mohawk territory of Akwesasne, wedged between Ontario, Quebec, and New York state, this paper provides an analysis of the links between the affirmation of indigenous culture and the implementation of security policies on borderlands. The focus extends beyond political conflicts over border issues to encompass the ways in which Aboriginal sovereignty is affirmed within processes of negotiation and cooperation in the matters of identification requirements, border agents’ cultural sensitivity, and law enforcement. We find that the enhancement of border security can paradoxically be a political opportunity for local leaders to reaffirm indigenous sovereignty, and that this reaffirmation through cooperation is, at the same time, emerging as a key factor in the implementation of border security policies.     

House prices and school choice: Evidence from Chicago's magnet schools’ proximity lottery

Studies of open school policies predict house prices to rise in areas that gain access to high-quality schools. However, excess demand may limit access to high-quality schools. We take advantage of changes in Chicago's schools’ admissions policies to test whether a higher probability of admission to magnet schools for students living within 1.5 miles leads to higher house prices. Results indicate that the 1997 and 2009 reforms increased house prices for homes within the 1.5 mile radius by about 4% and 12.6%, respectively. The higher probability of admission for black students after a consent decree was vacated in 2009 led to a significant increase in prices in predominantly African-American areas on the south side.     

Bushwalking in Kakadu: a study of cultural borderlands

This paper examines the relationship between the contested domains of Aboriginal traditional owners and non‐Aboriginal Park users, specifically bushwalkers, in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia. It argues that Kakadu remains a cultural borderland where a negotiated relationship between local Aboriginal traditional owners and non‐Aboriginal Park users is struggling to emerge. It finds that the rhetoric of Aboriginal/non‐Aboriginal co‐existence, which pervades the Park, is infused by the legacy of a colonial settler state, which has presumed access to territory, marginalized Indigenous people and obviated their social and cultural landscape in favour of an expansionist aesthetic of wilderness preservation and appreciation. This paper finds that the activities of bushwalkers and the concerns that these activities generate in the local Aboriginal domain produce a novel space where place is contested and transformed, a space of negotiation and resistance where people's cherished values both compete with and influence one another.     

Public School Search Policies and the "Politics of Sin"

In recent years, high school students have been subjected to greater levels of drug searching and surveillance on school grounds. The effect of such searching is potentially wide-ranging, because public schools "play an important role in socializing students according to the norms and mores of society" ( Vergari, 2000 ). Using the "morality politics" framework, this study reports and analyzes the presence of random, suspicionless drug searches in the Nebraska public schools. Whereas most studies of morality policy have focused on the state as the unit of analysis, we consider the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of principals in regards to drug policies in schools. Our findings, based on a survey of 181 high school principals, reflect several features of morality policy. There has been a significant rise in the number of random drug searches, despite the principals' observation that these measures neither lessen drug use nor catch perpetrators. The most important predictors of drug policy are pressure from local sources, perception of the problem within the community (but not the schools), and the racial composition of schools. Principals articulate limited concern for student rights, and students largely accept searches without resistance. In the discussion, we consider these findings in light of recent court rulings and introduce the potential ramifications of waging the drug war in our nation's classrooms and hallways.     

试论日本华侨学校的法律地位及其所带来的问题

作为日本华侨社会的主要教育设施,华侨学校不仅为华侨子弟的教育做出了贡献,也为整个华侨社会的统合和稳定发展以及中日文化的交流立下了汗马功劳。华侨学校具有持日本国籍的学生增多、学生总体趋向多元化,毕业生去向以升人日本学校为主流,以民族教育和升学教育为两大教学目标及注重培养学生的国际化观念等特点。但由于华侨学校长期处于边缘化的法律地位,故在学生入学、升学及学校财政等方面都受到了极大的限制。这也直接影响到了华侨学校教育活动的实施。     

Negotiating Neoliberal Empowerment: Aboriginal People,Educational Restructuring,and Academic Labour in the North of British Columbia,Canada

Aboriginal peoples in Canada are gaining influence in post‐secondary education through Aboriginal‐directed programs and policies in non‐Aboriginal institutions. However, these gains have occurred alongside, and in some cases through, neoliberal reforms to higher education. This article explores the political consequences of the neoliberal institutionalization of First Nations empowerment for public sector unions and workers. We examine a case where the indigenization of a community college in British Columbia was embedded in neoliberal reforms that ran counter to the interests of academic instructors. Although many union members supported indigenization, many also possessed a deep ambivalence about the change. Neoliberal indigenization increased work intensity, decreased worker autonomy and promoted an educational philosophy that prioritized labour market needs over liberal arts. This example demonstrates how the integration of Aboriginal aspirations into neoliberal processes of reform works to rationalize public sector restructuring, constricting labour agency and the possibilities for alliances between labour and Aboriginal peoples.     

“I do not know if Mum knew what was going on”: Social reproduction in boarding schools in Soviet Lapland

ABSTRACT

This inquiry into the history of boarding schools for indigenous and quasi-indigenous, tundra-connected children in the Soviet part of Lapland tries to answer why children were sent to a boarding school despite their parents living in the same village, and also why an additional school for mentally disabled children, a school half as big as the boarding school for “regular” children, was opened. Data from oral history interviews among former pupils and teachers, both indigenous and incomers, are combined with archival materials. Using the concepts of cynical knowledge as well as the Bourdieuan notions of social exclusion and reproduction, concealed functions of the boarding school system are identified, among which are the attenuation of housing shortage and the operation of the school out of economic interests, alongside with ethnocentric and paternalist patterns. The stigmatization of mostly Sámi children from relocated families as mentally disabled is set in a frame of individualization of the negative, which sought to present failures of the state’s social engineering as personal fallibility.     

Educating Citizens or Defying Federal Authority? A Comparative Study of In‐State Tuition for Undocumented Students

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of state government policies addressing immigration‐related issues. This article addresses an example of state policy regarding immigration: since 2001, 11 state legislatures have granted undocumented high school graduates in‐state tuition status should they wish to attend public post‐secondary schools, while 18 others have considered, and rejected, the same policy. We argue that these outcomes are largely explicable by the manner in which the policy is presented and debated within state legislatures, especially the terms in which policy targets are socially constructed and state jurisdictional authority is framed. We apply this framework to two states (Kansas and Arkansas) that, in spite of demographic institutional similarities, reached different outcomes on in‐state tuition bills. The different outcomes can be traced to the manner in which policy deliberations in Kansas focused on positive evaluations of undocumented high school students, portraying them as “proto‐citizens,” while in Arkansas debate became centered on the state's jurisdictional authority to enact such a policy, an issue frame that effectively killed the legislation. This article suggests the importance of both social constructions and issue framing when state legislatures become the lead actors in crafting immigration policies.     

Defiant Retreat： The Relocation of Middle Schools to China＇s Interior, 1937-1945

This study focuses on the migration of middle school students to the interior of China after the Japanese invaded in 1937. It argues that the Guomindang （GMD） central government was generally successful in handling the 500,000 displaced students, making substantial efforts to monitor, register, educate, and provide training for them, as well as establishing government-run ＂national middle schools＂ during the war. Meanwhile, the GMD also exerted a strong influence on course curriculum, instructing educators how to implement the Three People＇s Principles and other party doctrines in classrooms. These processes expanded the state＇s hand in secondary education and allowed the GMD to include refugee students and schools in its wartime narrative of progress, praising the students＇ patriotic participation in defying the Japanese occupiers and their contribution to ＂national reconstruction＂ （jianguo）. However, there were still many challenges. Refugee students, teachers, and principals forcibly converted Buddhist temples into schools and clashed with local monks, farmers, villagers, and even the GMD military. With schools merging and moving inland, relocation also provided opportunities for unscrupulous administrators and teachers to exploit the situation for themselves, as government reports reveal many cases of corruption in the wartime schools.     

Claiming Space: Aboriginal Students within School Landscapes

There is an emerging body of theoretical, historical and design research that examines the ways in which race and cultural identity are understood to be produced and represented in the landscape. Yet, there remains a dearth of research examining both the historic and contemporary effects of race upon the development of school geographies. This paper has two broad purposes. It highlights the experiential aspects of racialized geographies within schools and, at the same time, it grapples with the processes that maintain or challenge the spatial conditions for the construction of whiteness. Drawing upon in-depth case study research this paper highlights the experiences of Aboriginal students and staff at four different schools, with a particular focus on cross-cultural schools, in Manitoba, Canada.

What is needed is a concept of landscape that helps point the way to those interventions that can bring about much greater social justice. And what landscape study needs even more is a concept of landscape that will assist the development of the very idea of social justice. (Henderson, 2003, p. 196)     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 34, Number 2. April 2018

Cover caption, volume 34 issue 2 Front Cover: School shootings Student lie‐in at the White House to protest gun laws, 19 February 2018. The demonstration was organized by Teens For Gun Reform, an organization created by students in the Washington, DC area in the wake of the 14 February shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Earlier on the day of the shooting, the priest at the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe mused during the Ash Wednesday ritual whether valentine hearts and bouquets of red roses could coexist with ashes on foreheads and reminders of human mortality. Could love and death be partners? As the congregation exited the church, mobiles rang with news of yet another school shooting and the deaths of 14 high school students and three teachers trapped inside an elite high school in suburban Florida. The gunman was a high school reject and white supremacist. It was the 292nd school shooting in America since Sandy Hook, the tiny tot massacre of 2013. Yet America's presidents and political leaders across the political divide remain hostage to the National Rifle Association's mantra: more automatic rifles equals more security, now including in US schools. State laws prevail over executive orders. Currently 14 states in the US arm teachers and 16 states allow local school boards to decide whether to do so. But one thing has changed as the survivors of the school massacres and their young followers have taken the reins. Beginning on 14 March, thousands of students from elementary and high schools have begun to march out of their classrooms. A new and powerful civil rights movement is spreading across the nation. Meanwhile Trump and his education secretary are proposing to target poor, black and Latino students, to undo President Obama's policies that protected male minority students from disproportionately harsh ‘zero tolerance’ school policies. In this issue, Scheper‐Hughes considers school shooting antecedents, beginning with the misfired Clinton campaign against youth violence. Back Cover: ESTHER GOODY (1932–2018) Esther Goody during fieldwork in Ghana, 1957. Esther Goody was a member of one of the most famous husband‐and‐wife teams in anthropology. She devoted her working life to the study of northern Ghana's peoples and to synthesizing social anthropology and social psychology.     

Negotiating Cultural Heritage? Aboriginal–Mining Company Agreements in Australia

Mining and other forms of industrial development can result in profound and often irreversible damage to the cultural heritage of indigenous peoples. Fear of such damage regularly results in indigenous opposition to development and, in many cases, to delays in construction of development projects or even to their abandonment. Government legislation has generally proved ineffective in protecting indigenous heritage. An alternative means of achieving protection arises from the growing recognition of indigenous land rights and the opportunity this creates for negotiations with mining companies regarding the terms on which indigenous landowners may support development. To evaluate the potential efficacy of negotiated approaches, this article analyses forty‐one agreements between mining companies and Aboriginal peoples in Australia. It argues that negotiated agreements do have the potential to protect indigenous cultural heritage, but only where underlying weaknesses in the bargaining position of indigenous peoples are addressed. This finding has wider implications given that negotiation and agreement making are increasingly being promoted as a means of addressing the structural disadvantages faced by indigenous peoples and of resolving conflicts between them and dominant societies.     

The non-graded elementary school

The history of education in a number of industrialized countries during the first part of the 20th century testifies to the political will behind school centralization and the closure of small and non-graded rural elementary schools. A closer examination shows that school centralization throughout these countries can be associated with the development of a more unified educational system and that a unified school system is in turn seen as a political tool for the advancement of social welfare. In particular, this article discusses the development of the Norwegian non-graded elementary school. It examines the nature and the effects of the applied policies, and analyses the rationales – both political and educational – behind political decisions on education. The overall conclusions can be linked to and complement international research in this area.     

British Imperialism and Cyprus 1878–1914: The Inconsequential Possession

In recent decades historians have devoted considerable attention to the historical treatment of indigenous title in Anglophone settler colonies. These scholarly accounts have tended to emphasise the role metropolitan legal and intellectual discourses played in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. In this article I present a critical analysis of an influential example of such work in respect to the British denial of Aboriginal rights in land in the colony of New South Wales before providing an alternative account of the manner in which Aboriginal title was treated, which focuses on the nature of the relations on the ground between sojourners, settlers and Aboriginal people, the ways in which these encounters were represented by the British and the local practices regarding the transfer of land.     

Dispossession 1990s style: Aborigines,islanders and the policy making process of the Goss labor government

Aboriginal and Islander people in Queensland remain unempowered in the policy making process of government. This is achieved by downgrading and under‐resourcing the relevant portfolio, by co‐locating it with welfare, by giving other departments statutory rights in decision making on indigenous issues which are not reciprocal, by relocating key indigenous policy areas into otherwise antagonistic departments, by ghettoising the issues in Cabinet and by failing to elucidate clear policy guidelines on indigenous issues. The Goss government has also ensured that indigenous people remain unempowered outside of government by failing to legislate for regional land councils, Aboriginal majority on national parks boards of management and an Aboriginal‐controlled statutory acquisitions fund and by retaining excessive discretionary power in the administration of the 1991 Land Acts.