Keywords

1 Introduction

Yellow, pink, pink, yellow, pink, yellow, green, yellow, pink, green, pink, pink, more pink. No blue, not one single blue. Frustrated, I put down my multi-tipped highlighter as Einstein’s famous definition of insanity came to mind. I refilled my coffee and prepared myself for yet another student data team meeting where we would discuss how ‘low’ our kids are, throw our hands up in the air, and swap stories about how nothing worked to motivate our yellows and pinks, those kids who stubbornly scored ‘basic’ or ‘minimal’ on standardized measures of academic achievement. Save the few, green ‘proficient’ students and occasional blue, ‘advanced’ student, coded data sheets year after year revealed a depressing picture of yellows and pinks at data meetings. These felt more like pity parties where predominantly white teachers and administrators banged their heads against the cold, white, cinderblock walls of the tribal school. Sick to my stomach, I attended the meetings hoping someday the conversation would shift from all the things most of our students lacked to the invisible assets and talents they possessed—it never did.

American Indian (AI) public school students’ racially disproportionate academic and social-educational performance, objectified and commodified as grades, standardized test scores, and behavioral records, act as dehumanizing measures that consistently devalue these students as a racialized, classized group. This legacy of the settler-colonial school system has created systems of flat representation, devoid of AI students’ historical and cultural struggles toward educational sovereignty, within schools’ predominantly white, middle-class, assimilation-based academic and social norms. Traditional public school methods of ranking students by grade point average, comparing academic success of AI students with white students, and judging AI students’ behavior against white norms have produced persistent patterns of racial disproportionality which are often seen as individual/family/community deficits, and not artifacts of historical hegemony and forced assimilation. This chapter examines how education for AI (also referred to as Indigenous) youth remains a problem in the eyes of dominant educators perpetuating cycles of failure and deficit-based outcomes using standardized measures compared to white, middle-class performance. After providing historical context from the Indian boarding school era, this chapter will explore mechanisms of racialized perceptions that lead to devaluation of Black and Brown youth in schools, a legacy of settler-colonial education.

2 Assimilation: The Indian Problem Then Is the Indian Problem Now

Before its inception, the United States has grappled with its ‘Indian Problem,’ dealing with multitudes of Indigenous Peoples living throughout ‘wild’ places eyed by European missionaries, colonists, and, later, settlers. Considering white men’s insatiable greed for land, resources, minerals, and other bounties on Indigenous lands, leaders like Carl Schurz advanced assimilation into individualistic, capitalist American ways of life as the answer for all Indians. ‘The circumstances surrounding them place before the Indians this stern alternative: extermination or civilization,’ asserts Schurz (1881, p. 7), who asks the perennial white man’s question, ‘Can Indians be civilized?’ (ibid.).

As Indian boarding schools continued their missions, following General Richard Henry Pratt’s dictum to ‘Kill the Indian, save the man’ (Pratt, 2003) at the turn of the twentieth century, official government reports contained testimony of Indian agents and others tasked with oversight of the education of Indigenous children from a multitude of tribal nations across the United States. Initially funded by monies from the US War Department, Indian boarding and residential schools acted as ideological arms of the US war machine, deploying weapons like Bibles, paper and pencil, and chalk and blackboards in the hands of teachers tasked with the daunting goal of assimilating Indian children into respectable, clean, hard-working, and moral Christian adults.

In the 1903 Report of the Superintendent of Indian Schools, the question arises, ‘Is there an Indian problem? If so, what is it, why is it, and where is it? E.T. Hamer, industrial teacher from Siletz, Oregon answers, ‘I would say the problem is to make the Indians, as individuals and as a race, self-supporting, self-respecting and respectable citizens … he should be removed from a state of dependence to one of independence’ (Miller, 1903, p. 36).

Leaders of Indian Education used a strategic plan not only to educate the Indians in reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also endeavored to make individual property owners out of collectivist tribal peoples who had no concept of personal ownership prior to European contact. With the overarching goal of civilizing the Indian into an economically successful property owner who could earn a living independent of government subsidies, the curriculum of Indian schools focused on teaching trades and domestic skills. Like Pratt envisioned decades prior, Indian children learned trades and useful domestic skills to prepare them for a distinctly American industrial and agricultural future. In the 1903 Report of the Superintendent of Indian Schools, W.P. Campbell, assistant superintendent of Salem School in Chemawa, Oregon, asserts:

To train the head and heart and not the hand is to stop short of the best success and the product is a useless citizen. The industrial education idea is growing and will soon take its proper place in the front ranks … and our large schools should be stepping-stones for the students into the body politic. (ibid.)

Superintendent of the Indian school at Chilocco, Oklahoma, S.M. M’Cowan reminds the Lake Mohonk Conference (1905, p. 72) that all this benevolent schooling comes at a high cost to the US government, and spending too much money on the Indians has not made them into what the whites expected:

Our pernicious, wicked kindness is worse, ten thousand times more harmful than others’ harshness. The old, uneducated Indian will not accept our civilization, just as the Chinaman will not. It is foolish, absurd, to think he will. For 400 years we have done our best to absorb him without educating him, yet he is no more one of us today in thought, hopes and ambition than the caged wolf who eats from our hand, but would burrow in his native wilds snarling in glee if he could.

M’Cowan and others, dissatisfied with Indians’ lack of becoming appropriately absorbed, even after all the time, money, and efforts by whites to Christianize, school, and thereby change them from collectivist hunter/gatherers into individual landowners/farmers, viewed these investments as wasteful, directly connecting the lack of expected results with inherent defects and unwillingness of Indians to change.

Assimilation into the melting pot of America was, and still is, the White Answer to the Indian Problem. Then and now, assimilation remains the main goal, with compulsory education and mainstream American culture/media the dominant ideological forces threatening Indigenous youth today. As long as American public education measures and compares Indigenous youth’s school performance using white standards administered in settler-colonial-white supremacist-capitalist (SCWSC) mainstream frames of perception, Indians will always be a problem and whites with their capitalist ways of life, self-ordained as solutions.

3 Looking at the Indian Problem Through Critical Race and Marxist Lenses

Ray (2019), paraphrasing Marx (1867/2004), defines ‘race not as a thing but as a relationship between persons mediated through things. This definition of race eschews biological essentialism and highlights that race is constructed relationally via the distribution of social, psychological, and material resources’ (ibid., pp. 29–30). Using concepts within Critical Race and Marxist theories, I now attempt to address the Indian Problem by shifting readers’ focus to the colonial-capitalist, inherently classist and racist roots of our current public education model, which delimits, reduces, objectifies, and commodifies student performance into quantitative measures compared always to white, middle-class norms. The master-cycle of alienation inherent within capitalistic systems of production, examined in Marx’s (1844) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, can be applied to modern American schools as sites of capitalist production.

Marx’s explanation of various forms of alienation within capitalist production, along with examination of use versus exchange value and fetishism of commodities in Capital Volume One, Part One: Commodities and Money (1867/2004), illuminates how objectifying and commodifying non-white academic and social performance in schools reifies non-white subjugation. I argue that this systemic practice is so ingrained in American educational institutions, it is invisible, ubiquitous, and for those reasons the most pervasive and insidious threat to AI and other minoritized students’ humanity and survival. As the losers of the public education game, AI students’ lower scores predictably contrast their white peers’ success, reifying and recreating systems of alienation of students furthest from white ideals.

According to Marx (1867/2004), alienation marks capitalist production in several ways as workers are forced to create products that estrange their humanity from their labor, as both their labor and the products of their labor are controlled and manipulated by others. Bourgeoisie controllers of capitalist production determine what is produced, as well as the conditions of production including where, when, and how the proletariat expend their labor. Synthesizing human labor with natural materials, the why of production revolves around capitalistic profit, leading to erasure (through alienation) of the individual workers’ human identities and lives whose labor made production possible. In the factory model of schooling, all students’ labor is similarly externalized, objectified, and alienated from them, as their academic and social performance become commodities. However, the predictable bifurcation of human experience within alienating capitalist systems cleaves along class lines. In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels (1845) describe:

The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self- estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self- estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence.Footnote 1

Moreover, as capitalist production yields commodities which are assigned objective values based on their exchange value: ‘by equating their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour. … Value, transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic’ (Marx, 1867/2004, pp. 166–67) As teachers, administrators, parents and students decipher these social hieroglyphics, what do they find? The seemingly objective commodification of school performance in the form of standardized test scores, grades distributed along the bell curve, and behavioral reports all of which mask the underlying ‘secret’ (ibid.) of commodity fetishism—human labor’s equivalence through abstraction.

To make the system of commodities’ exchange values possible, differential human labor must become commensurable, assumed equivalent during the process of abstraction, alienated from not only the individual workers themselves, but also their particular social and material contexts. Standardized curricula and evaluation assume uniform human labor inputs, equivalency in abstraction through the objectification/commodification process, and historically determined social-material relations among laborers masquerade as simple exchange value. Thus, a student’s labor in the learning factory of schooling is only valuable as a commodity, in relation to other commodities’ relative values which the capitalist mode of production via commodification requires abstraction and assumed equivalence of human labor. The resulting valuations (or devaluations) of particular commodities obscure material, social, and historical inequities embedded within labor, manifesting as objective, quantifiable measures of students’ aptitudes within the assimilatory system.

Aggregated white, middle-class students’ scores (values) starkly contrast with non-white, underclass students’ scores (values relative to whites’ scores), reifying and normalizing settler-colonial, white supremacist hegemony as legitimate contemporary artifacts. SCWSC domination in schools and the larger economy requires subjugation of non-white Others’ academic performance to perpetuate ideologies of relative value and differential investment in children, where ‘the sky’s the limit’ for apt pupils while the less apt become fodder for the SCWSC war machine. AI students and other non-white Black and Brown youth are still fighting the war leveraged on their ancestors now, though this war has been made invisible through generations of reification within assimilatory systems of capitalist production in schools and the larger economy.

4 Racial Capitalism as a Conceptual Framework

Thinking about how racism in America operates like capitalism, with almost the same level of ubiquity and invisibility, helps foreground not only how pervasive and important it is to us all, but also how both systems operate from similar ideologies about the relationship between diverse people’s humanity and the naturalized socioeconomic world. Robinson (2020) uses the term ‘racial capitalism’ to refer to the development of racism’s permeation of social structures emergent from capitalism. Integrating a racial lens with Marxism helps reveal the inner workings of the normalized functions of human devaluation, in both economic and social organization.

Devaluation of entire racialized groups’ humanity requires social stratification, wherein those at the bottom are valued according to what they can potentially produce within existing or emerging industries. Marx’s (1867/2004, p. 291) description of capitalist production describes how human lives (time, energy, labor) participating in capitalist systems become, or manifest, into capital via the production of surplus-value through extraction of surplus-labor and ‘the subordination of labour to capital.’

By exploring the connection between this transformation and subordination of labor to capital and its racially and socioeconomically disproportionate effects via manipulation by powerful agents of capitalism, one may see that the racism system works like our capitalist system. These intertwined systems directly manifest patterns of production and consumption in which certain demographic groups, whose humanity has been devalued, provide a constant supply of cheap labor. This aids in production of more and more capital, benefiting the powerful agents who control these cycles. Moreover, I argue that these same certain demographic groups, who not only spend a substantial portion of their lives producing capital, also experience/produce (in both bodies and minds) disproportionate amounts of human suffering, disease, dysfunction, and strife. These have also become lucrative sites for capitalist profit in our modern information age. Capital’s birth becomes humanity’s death as the vampires direct and control production: ‘Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour’ (Marx, 1867/2004, p. 342). As a means of producing more and more capital and profit, producing increasing numbers and appetites of consumers to buy goods and services is also a main goal, feeding the system from the other end, via consumption.

Racial capitalist processes begin early in our experiences with the social world, where we learn our places and value to society through the institution of schooling. This chapter attempts to uncover the inner mechanisms of what the author calls the Invisible War Machine, which is driven by dehumanizing processes perpetuated by dominating SCWSC frames of perception which objectify and commodify youth’s school performance into standardized, comparative measures. This three-dimensional (3D) to two-dimensional (2D) representation and comparative value to idealized models of white behavior and academic achievement in schools perpetuates cycles of Black and Brown children’s failure, continuing deficit and need-based approaches that reify normalized white supremacist structures and ideology. Racialized, non-white, Othered children’s subordinate outcomes to those of middle-class, white peers lead to inequitable socioeconomic opportunities and assure a large, undereducated population ready for vampiric exploitation by Capital. American schooling’s predictable racialized and classized achievement gap inequalities and other social inequalities are explained and justified by social scientists’ applying the SCWSC gaze—placing dysfunction in individuals and cultures, rather than racialized, capitalist systems.

5 Making the Invisible War Machine Visible

Bonilla-Silva and Zuberi (2008) use the terms white logic and white methods to describe how the physical and social sciences have actively helped create racial stratification as a scientifically legitimate and socially acceptable concept, helping create and justify racialized outcomes and experiences using the self-endowed power of human objectivity. This power of assumed objectivity and the power of objectification of everything entering its perceptual field have historically been controlled by white capitalists, who use this god-like perspective to control the production of knowledge as well as cycles of production and consumption of goods and services. The white racial frame as described by Feagin (2020) similarly theorizes how the same white logic and methods called out by Bonilla-Silva and Zuberi (2008), and James (2008), reveal how white supremacist, dominant perspectives operate under the assumption that their perceptions, evaluations, and explanations are purely objective. This is then presented as the most correct and justified conclusion about the nature of the unjust relationship between whites and non-white Others. Feagin’s (2020) concept of the white (supremacist) racial frame illustrates how human perception by powerful elites self-justifies as it produces and exploits patterns of human suffering, war, environmental degradation, cultural and genetic erasure, and other hegemonic effects that become normalized and accepted as part of everyday life.

The biological and social evolutionary paradigm provided the intellectual and scientific basis for colonial thought, as Seth (2009, p. 374) explains: ‘The racialised practices of colonial administration … drew heavily on the content and status of Darwinian biology and natural history. The history of almost all modern science, it has become clear, must be understood as “science in a colonial context”.’ If science was the means of colonial investigation into the Other resulting in recommendations for action, the ends was the overarching civilizing mission. Seth (ibid.) asserts:

As part of the civilising mission, science played two contradictory roles in colonial discourse, at once making clear to the ‘natives’ the kind of knowledge that they lacked (which omission justified colonialism itself) and holding out the hope that such knowledge could be theirs.

This cruel and ironic contradiction within science as both colonizer and teacher of Indigenous Peoples can be seen as the tremendous effect of the power placed on what counted as knowledge. Colonial authorities counted their own epistemologies, cultures, languages, religions, and ways of being as exemplars of the highest forms of human civilization on Earth, and all Other (non-white/non-European) epistemologies were subjugated, trivialized, and dismissed. As indicated by Said (1978, p. 7), ‘the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures.’

The invisible war over educating our children has been centuries-long struggle to maintain our full humanity in the eyes of powerful whites bent on assimilating racialized Others. Omi and Winant (2014) point to the connection between race-making and Othering, which is a process not solely based on racial distinctions. Along with race, other perceived distinctions like gender, class, religion, age, sexuality, among others ‘are frequently evoked to justify structures of inequality, differential treatment, subordinate status, and in some cases violent conflict and war’ (ibid., p. 105). The invisible war over Indigenous education is so old, omnipresent, and tireless, it has become unquestioned and embraced as normal. To help deal with the psychological trauma of uncovering the invisible war, it is helpful to separate the dehumanizing, evil effects powerful European elites have created and perpetuated on others through their colonial-capitalist ideologies, by theorizing colonial power as a machine (Mitchell, 1991).

Through considering the power, physical and ideological control which colonial agents wielded on Indigenous Peoples through countless generations evokes a timeless, ubiquitous, terrible machine that is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Since the dawn of the spirit and embodied actions of colonialism and capitalism, necessary ideological developments that led to those belief structures and their quasi-omnipresent reign required Europeans to elevate their humanity in order to subjugate Others. Harris (2020, pp. 2–3) points out:

Power organizes hierarchies. Inequality is not the product of dysfunctional culture, or the biology—the ‘comorbidities’—of misbehaving, undisciplined bodies: rather, racial regimes construct and exploit vulnerabilities. These are preexisting conditions, embodiments, material manifestations of exploitation. This is a feature of racial capitalism.

6 Who’s Looking? War Machine’s Gaze Devalues and Dehumanizes the Other

Separating single human lives or identities from SCWSC ideologies and actions leads us to imagine the SCWSC machine as subject with gigantic eyes of mirrors. Constantly reflecting everything using this comparative frame continuously creates and re-creates settler-colonial illusions of white supremacy. Through these illusions, no Other can possibly be ‘better’ than any white settler, on any dimension or aspect of life, without qualifying this brilliance using more settler-colonial fantasies (also based on white supremacist ideology). The concept of ‘better’ itself remains one of the most foundational ideological constructs of the SCWSC gaze, arranging objectified human beings along an increasingly dehuman continuum of value, based on their social and material worth to the colonial-capitalist machine. As Foster et al. (2020) point out, ‘Marx invariably saw such indigenous and noncapitalist societies as reflective of a long struggle for free human development, one which included the fight for survival of indigenous societies and control over their own lands and lives.’

Repeatedly creating the object of the Indian and Indian Problem within the SCWSC ideological-perceptual lens (with evaluation as its iris, contracting and relaxing to let varying, selected amounts and types of information in) is inherently comparative to itself only. Set up using racial/class/religious/other sociocultural categorical comparisons as its framework, the SCWSC lens yields subjects’ creations of Indigenous (and other non-white) dehumanized objects as reflections of the SCWSC gaze. These reflections reify settler-colonial, capitalist conquest of Indigenous Peoples through objectification and commodification of learning within the standardized curricula and measurement inherent in modern American education systems. As the factory model of schooling perpetuates differentially valued products, Marxian analysis points to the importance of examining the fetishism of commodities, which originates in ‘the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them’ (Marx, 1867/2004, p. 165).

As a composite of the a-historical, a-material, alienated human labor of learning, commodities like grades and test scores produced within standardized measures assume equality of material conditions and social relations among producers, masking the inherent inequality on which normative white success has been made possible in the United States. As commodification demands this assumption of commensurability and thus equality of human labor within exchange value actions, US schools devalue and dehumanize non-white students by assessing their learning using standardized, white-normed measures. American Indian and other non-white students’ efforts toward this assimilationist model of learning (objectified and commodified as low grades and test scores) provide educators operating within the SCWSC mindset evidence of Indigenous Peoples’ subjugation, conquest, inferiority, and less-human nature, perpetuating the cycle of non-white failure and justification for low investment in non-white communities. This flattening, decontextualizing, and ahistoricizing function of the SCWSC machine, driven and controlled by the SCWSC gaze, posits deficits among racialized children as inherently intrinsic, rather than socially/historically constructed by colonial-capitalist forces.

Hundreds of years of colonization and domination by those beholden to this gaze have created a perceptual filter, a way of looking at the world and human interaction with Others and the environment through white supremacist, imperialistic assumptions. This filter created by the SCWSC lens has established a ubiquitous blind spot that is so old, so powerful, and so accepted by the mainstream that it often goes unnoticed and unquestioned.

7 Functions of the SCWSC Machine

For the SCWSC gaze to maintain its power, direction, and control over subjects’ perceptual frame, obsequious lookers are required to devalue and dehumanize Others to maintain their ideological and material hegemony. Subjects’ use of microaggressions, biases, and other semi-conscious actions helps reveal the sometimes-veiled system of white supremacy/colonial power always operating in the background of US settler-colonial (public) schools. Teachers of Indian children, hypnotized by the SCWSC gaze and acting within this perceptual frame, unknowingly (or sometimes knowingly) do violence, create harm, perpetuate false imprisonment, abuse, neglect, dehumanization, and other crimes against body, mind, and spirit. These most often go unnoticed, unacknowledged, and are therefore made invisible within the SCWSC school system. Indian children a hundred years ago and today live the first part of their lives greatly affected by public schooling, under the gaze of an almost exclusively white teaching force.

Through standardized curricula written from the SCWSC ideological frame, imperialist notions of Manifest Destiny and justified colonial exploitation and continual vampiric sucking of life from labor reify the failure of AI and other Black and Brown people in assimilatory education systems. Here, learning factories’ reliable creation of non-white deviance and academic failure in the form of 2D, commodified grades, test scores, behavior reports (all compared to white ‘peers’) serve a planned, two-fold purpose. First, filling in the lower rungs on standardized measures and bell curves, this reifies, contrasts, and provides comparative ‘evidence’ of white and middle-class success, advancing the privileged few at the expense of the faceless many. Second, this faceless mass of youth, whose humanity has been devalued, objectified, and exchanged as a commodity, become prepared for economic and social exploitation. As Marx (1867/2004) describes the fetishism that demands the illusion of equality of labor among workers, objectification and commodification of youth’s school performance flattens hundreds of years of SCWSC exploitation into reified codes where the predictable many are headed to feed capital and the conditions of production of future capital.

Worse, this dehumanizing, alienating cycle of recreating SCWSC domination and hegemony has not only created the learning factory commodity system itself and perpetuated it by preserving the status quo; this systematic oppression has been internalized by many stakeholders in education. This leads to attitudes of learned helplessness and limiting Othered youth’s academic and social potential. As Pratt and other architects of the first government schools for Indians envisioned and prepared AI people for lives of vocational, agricultural, or domestic work, today’s schools largely ensure a ready ‘surplus army’ (Marx, 1867/2004)Footnote 2 of workers and prisoners to feed the SCWSC war machine, growing capital at the expense of entire lineages and ethnic groups, social classes whose ancestors’ labor, land, and lives themselves built this nation.

Conceptualizing how the often-invisible control mechanism works in the SCWSC gaze helps us to think about Indian children in early US boarding schools and today’s Black and Indigenous/Brown minoritized Others. Then and now, as youth attend schools, they are being forcibly put into a world behind the mirror, where settler-colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism form the ideological frame. The mirror itself forms the eyes of the ubiquitous machine that evaluates our children, consumes our hopes, fuels our fears, desires, appetites, and choices—manipulating and controlling us by producing illusions. Those in power maintain control over us by controlling these illusions, projections, and reflections of white supremacy and evaluative hegemony, which hypnotize us into thinking all we are and deserve are the lookist labels we find in the eyes of the SCWSC machine. As a function of this perceptual filter formed by white supremacist, capitalist ideology, non-white Others face lookism. This is a mode of prejudice or discrimination grounded in physical appearance measured against societal ideals of beauty, activated simply by attending public schools and interacting with whites. All minoritized Others are automatically positioned as less-than, simply by being forced to see themselves in the SCWSC mirror; always being forced to compare ourselves to imagined, idealized notions of white success, goodness, beauty, and ways of being and representing knowledge.

8 War Over White Control of Cycles of Production and Consumption

Each time the Indian is recreated as an object of white settler intervention and control, comparative frames mask their inherently inequitable histories and historically accumulated experiences by objectifying learning and academic success as measurable commodities. Actions within the public education system, like standardizing and commodifying artifacts of learning, enact the motives and intention of the SCWSC ideologies influencing settlers’ choices and proclivities. This includes their designs for and evaluations of planned progress in assimilating the Indian into white, middle-class norms by controlling what students can produce and consume within school walls. Is this reification of SCWSC dominance not also true today? Students who are successful at participating in settler-colonial schools and meeting SCWSC expectations for academic achievement and social acceptance (privileged reflections of whiteness) become somehow commensurable with racialized, minoritized Others within the commodity fetishism produced by capitalist production. Multiple facets of compulsory, government-funded schooling including top-down governance through funding, regulation, and maintenance of material (i.e., curricula, disciplinary protocols) and social structures alienate those furthest from white ideals, and dissolve minoritized people’s agency within assimilatory systems.

Marxian analysis is helpful to uncover capitalist assumptions of the commensurability and homogeneity of human labor as workers create commodities for exchange (Marx, 1867/2004). Marx’s (1875/1970) critique of the ‘bourgeois right,’ or concept of ‘equal right’ based upon standardized measures invented and wielded in capitalist modes of production, may be applied to dominant systems of education wherein the social relations of students’ labor appear as relations among its products/commodities (i.e., standardized test scores, grades along a bell curve). Debunking notions of equal right connect to their correlates within SCWSC schools—the illusions that human learning outcomes are objective reflections of the same, equivalent human labor and interactions within the system. Differential exchange value resulting from commodity fetishism reifies settler-colonial domination by masquerading as evidence of the inherent defects of racialized, minoritized Others.

Evaluations reviewed throughout the primary sources (Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior, 1908; Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian and Other Dependent Peoples, 1905; Miller, 1903) gave anecdotal and general accounts of the overall functioning of Indian schools, and tables enumerated attendance, financial expenditures, personnel data, and other material facts. Projects to be undertaken and challenges encountered were occasionally described, but details about individual students’ achievements were not included in these broad government reports. Every section of primary sources reviewed for this chapter only included whites’ perspectives; Indigenous voices did not populate the assessments nor inform the experience of the human objects of the Indian school system. This one-sided representation overwhelmingly present in these primary sources should be explored in contemporary public schools—are student, family, and community perspectives included in government or school reports?

Indigenous Peoples’ conspicuous authorial absence from these reports demonstrates their lack of administrative control and evaluative powers within early government schools, yet AI youth’s deviance from white norms and racialized difference are continually foregrounded in deficit language. Largely, this is still true today as AI and other Black and Brown youth continually are described in terms of what they are not. The floating target of normative white academic and behavioral success reliably produces patterns of failure among minoritized youth, as their assimilation is always unfinished under the SCWSC gaze. Black and Brown students’ failure and alienation from academic success should be considered as a reliable byproduct of the larger settler-colonial-capitalist system that ensures minoritized people’s socioeconomic status remain below that of whites, and is not simply just a measure of their deficits. Marx (1867/2004, pp. 782, 784) points to capitalist accumulation’s production of ‘a relatively redundant population of labourers … a surplus population,’ as a ‘disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital … [and] creates … a mass of human material always ready for exploitation.’

As capitalist societies like the United States require an abundance of cheap labor in the form of a less-educated underclass, it also requires this same underclass to fuel consumption such that our bodies and minds become productive sites of suffering ready for capitalist profit. For example, avoidable health problems like diabetes, heart disease, substance abuse, and cancer disproportionately affect AIs and correlate with lower levels of education and lower socioeconomic status. In a sense, we are the cattle that feed the capitalist machine through forced control of cycles of production and consumption, beginning with objectification of our youth in public schools, and ending with shorter lifespans marked by physical and mental suffering as we are fed upon by ubiquitous, unseen capitalist forces.

Invoking a Marxian analysis of the four manifestations of alienation (Hall, 2018; Marx, 1844), not in industrial factories producing goods, but in historical and modern learning factories of assimilatory, standardized education, foregrounds its productive and ideological value to the capitalist machine. First, through severing control, agency, and connections among academic products produced directly by students and as entire communities and ethnic groups, students are alienated from the things they create within the system. Standardized curricula, evaluative systems, behavioral reports, attendance records, participation in extracurricular activities, and other easily comparable and exchangeable, societal markers of value and potential value control stakeholders’ perception of minoritized students’ performance and place in the larger system. The fetishism of these commodities erases the inherent inequality necessary to uphold the system, requiring illusions of commensurability as a sense-making presupposition. Through forced participation in government schools, these commodified products of AI and other Black and Brown youth reify white dominance, myths of meritocracy, and continued underfunding and devaluation of minoritized students’ full humanity.

Second, as AI students are schooled through SCWSC institutions, they are also alienated from their bodies, minds, spirits, cultures, and communities as they are forced to reproduce what is expected by the curricula and standards. With little to no control over educational structures, direction of learning, culturally congruent approaches to communicating information and learning from others, AI and other minoritized students are alienated from the learning process itself. Third, this leads to low effort, expectations, interest, motivation, growth, and other important factors of school success, and as such they are also alienated from each other and differing demographic groups in many ways. Tribal people with rich interconnections to extended families, clans, and the natural world are forced to become individuals and individualistic, to compete with peers and strive to be the ‘best’ by assimilating into white, middle-class values that undergird school culture. Teachers stuck in the SCWSC perceptual frame cannot see these rich, complicated connections and do not bring them into the learning endeavor, rendering them invisible or absent, and leaving deficits the only intelligible explanation for AI failure. These ‘social hieroglyphics,’ as predictably decoded by educators, simultaneously inscribe non-white, non-middle-class failure and SCWSC success, and are then exchanged as differing forms of value for different social and racial groups.

Fourth, Black and Brown youth’s deficits, commodified as standardized measures of achievement and social success (markers of assimilation and control), alienate these Othered youth from what Marx called their ‘species-being’ (Marx, 1844). Uniting, and thereby affirming the inherent worth of different racial groups’ humanity under the biological designation of one species, our use of Marxian analysis points out the severing of connections of all workers to the natural world, the original and ultimate source of survival prior (and subsequent?) to capitalism’s reign. Perhaps the case of Indigenous youth most immediately illustrates this last form of alienation in the current era, as standardized curricula immediately conflict with the home and community cultures, ways of being, values, and epistemologies carried by these youth and under constant threat in dominant institutions of schooling.

9 Indigenous Strategies for Decolonialization of Public Schools

9.1 Foregrounding Relationships

Prashad (2022) concludes, ‘Decolonial thought … cannot go beyond post-Marxism, failing to see the necessity of decolonizing the conditions of social production,’ which is prerequisite to decolonizing the mind. This prioritizing of transformations in ‘the conditions of social production that reinforce the colonial mentality’ (ibid.) in capitalist systems can be approached using shifts toward decolonizing perspectives from Indigenous lenses, which privilege relationships grounded in reciprocity among concepts, people, things, and places over the concepts, people, things, and places themselves (Kimmerer, 2013). Those intent on contributing to decolonizing efforts must foreground relationships as a way of beginning to see and act in a different, future decolonized world. As a decolonial-ideological move against the inherent objectification our people have been subjected to since contact with Europeans, foregrounding and working on multiple relationships attempts to reconcile historical traumas and heal connections between groups and individuals across racial lines and all species of life. Indigenous Peoples’ reciprocal relationships with land, mineral resources, other human beings, plants, animals, air, and water shared in a place for thousands of years still exist and must be honored and normalized, replacing SCWSC objectification and alienation in economic as well as educational contexts.

As Veracini (2017, p. 7) asserts, ‘If settler colonialism is a mode of domination premised on a particular relationship, its undoing will be a relationship. This is not a metaphor. This is what happens after land is returned and substantive sovereignty is acknowledged.’ If individualistic white settlers dominated and controlled aspects of the world to legitimize and disseminate colonization, then ‘Decolonization will be a collective, indigenous-led endeavor’ (ibid.). According to Veracini (ibid., pp. 2, 4), settler-colonial studies must ‘focus on settlers and what they do in order to undo settler colonialism,’ including settler-colonialists’ logic of elimination, which ‘remains the dialectical counterpart of indigenous sovereignty.’ Turning Pratt’s infamous quote around, Veracini (ibid., p. 10) proposes to metaphorically ‘kill settlers’ to ‘save their humanity’ aiming to ‘turn the descendants of invaders, including their political descendants, into resources for decolonization.’ Here, to save their humanity, Veracini’s Pratt-like proposal posits settlers (who may be white or non-white) as the object of intervention; this key shift reverses settler-colonial logic. In the larger historical (present) assimilatory systems of settler-colonialism that held (hold) Indian removal as their main objective, Indigenous youth’s presence posed (continues to be) a problem for settlers in general and settler-colonial (public) schools.

9.2 Settler-Colonial Replacement to Indigenous Futurity

According to Wolfe (2006, p. 388), settler-colonialism ‘destroys to replace,’ revealing white settlers’ ultimate goal of finally being able to claim native status to the places in which they desire to reside. This includes, of course, full use and control rights over land, water, plants, animals, and other natural resources present in these places. Wolfe (2006, pp. 394, 390) asserts, ‘Settler colonialism was foundational to modernity’ and is ‘a structure rather than an event.’ Wolfe (ibid.) connects overt genocide via physical murder, and Indian removal by the US government of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with government-run, Indian boarding schools that also sought to eliminate the Native through epistemic and cultural erasure. I further argue that the unfinished settler-colonial project of the Indian boarding schools continues to this day, inherently built into American public schools in myriad ways.

Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013, p. 73) theorize the settler-colonial curricular project of replacement, ‘which aims to vanish Indigenous peoples and replace them with settlers, who see themselves as the rightful claimants to land, and indeed, as indigenous.’ The unwavering desire of settlers to become the sole owners of Indigenous land requires severing original inhabitants’ relationships to the land itself, and retelling history from white supremacist perspectives that justified invasion and conquest. Teaching history from the SCWSC perspective, inscribed through the curriculum and communicated by state-sanctioned agents, amounts to a larger pedagogic project on a societal scale. This biased and incomplete historical outline of how the United States came to be, the mainstay of the settler-colonial curricular project of replacement, is described as ‘intent on relieving the inherent anxiety of settler dislocation from stolen land’ (ibid., p. 78).

Conflict over Indigenous land and current and future control over associated resources must be recognized as the central concern in decolonial efforts. Revealing patterns of the omission of Indigenous perspectives within and control over school curricula and policy begins to address this conflict, and the largely invisible injustice that perpetuates Indigenous alienation in schools. It is important to critically examine the opportunity cost of educational hegemony and commodification by first recognizing and confronting the advance of American public assimilatory education at the expense of marginalized communities’ chosen approaches, forms, traditions, values, and place-based methods of education in reciprocity with the natural environment. Interdependently developed by Indigenous nations and self-sustaining social networks, long before colonizers created Indian boarding schools, parents’ and communal rearing of children in Indigenous cultures endured and resisted total erasure by compulsory schooling. As decolonial efforts to reconceptualize, re-write, and populate the curricular representations of knowledge and accepted canons of study with Indigenous epistemologies and approaches, it becomes more difficult to disappear the Native. Those who claim to use decolonialism as an ideology or method must overcome their settler anxiety, and reconcile their own participation, first, in the settler-colonial curricular project of replacement, and second, in the dominant stance on settler futurity. According to Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013, p. 80), this:

always indivisibly means the continued and complete eradication of the original inhabitants of contested land. Anything that seeks to recuperate and not interrupt settler colonialism, to reform the settlement and incorporate Indigenous peoples into the multicultural settler colonial nation state is fettered to settler futurity.

Focusing on how epistemic erasure is perpetuated and reified in standardized curricula and enacted through pedagogy based in SCWSC perspectives, settler-colonial projects of replacement are directed and materialized by dominant agents sanctioned to uphold and gatekeep academic achievement to preserve white privilege. Recognizing how success within assimilatory schooling systems amounts to portable ‘Whiteness as property’ (Harris, 1993, p. 1709) that reifies non-white, non-middle-class subordination in the propertyless races, the commodified nature of material learning artifacts exposes the disappearance and negative participation of marginalized Others within compulsory school systems. Hierarchical, stratified social reproduction created by schooling, along class and race lines requires reproduction of the conditions of capitalist production, namely, a surplus source of labor-power. This human experience in the space of alienation as undifferentiated and dehumanized surplus value, a mainstay of capitalist production, is also the space of settler futurity made possible by the settler-colonial project of replacement’s vampiric ‘sucking of living labor’ (Marx, 1867/2004, p. 342) by capital.

Critically examining patterns of the effects of colonial power requires a unification and collapsing of the human experience of time. This is an Indigenous worldview and approach to life explained by Cusicanqui (2012, p. 96), as follows: ‘The indigenous world does not conceive of history as linear; the past/future is contained in the present. The regression or progression, the repetition or overcoming of the past is at play in each conjecture and is dependent more on our acts than on our words.’ Here lies the path out of the grasp of the SCWSC frame—what we do now (more so than what we say or write) creates our future, keeping in mind our past also informs our future. This reminds us that for Marx (1844), ‘[Socialism] proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence.’ This move toward reviving the basis of human interaction with place and the multitude of plants, animals, and other beings advances transformation of social relations of production by combating capitalistic processes of alienation of man from his ‘species-being’ (ibid.).

Our reflection and action, coupled with democratic evaluation and sovereign control by those most oppressed by SCWSC ideology, will synthesize into place-based, decolonizing praxis. Cusicanqui (2012, p. 100) plainly asserts, ‘There can be no discourse of decolonization, no theory of decolonization, without a decolonizing practice.’ Action absent intentional, decolonizing practice and attempts toward decolonizing means and ends must drive real, material change as well as spiritual, ideological change that includes evidence of societal transformation from the perspectives of the abject, minoritized Others.

Tuck and Yang’s (2012, p. 1) important reminder that ‘Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools’ makes a clear connection between the unchanging, ultimate settler-colonial goal of ridding desired lands from Indigenous Peoples, and modern settlers’ desire to reconcile historical injustice. White and other settlers looking for a way out of the perennial Indian Problem hastily apply the term ‘decolonization’ metaphorically to name aspects about their approach, practice, method, or aspiration as educators, when their very presence in the place of potential Others (who come from the communities served by the school and mirror students’ demographics) remains a problem from the Indigenous perspective. ‘The desire to reconcile is just as relentless as the desire to disappear the Native; it is a desire to not have to deal with this (Indian) problem anymore’ (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 9).

9.3 Browning the Curriculum and Rematriation

Using critical lenses, browning the curriculum as decolonizing praxis uncovers the settler-colonial foundations of American public education, by making connections between larger sociopolitical historical power relations and everyday people’s lives. Through changing the object in curricula systems from assimilation to decolonization, browning curriculum opens the door to authentic, non-white cultural infusion within existing school curricula, alongside the invention of new, decolonial curricula. Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013, p. 84) explain the decolonizing function of ‘browning’ the curriculum: ‘Browning highlights the present absences and invokes the ghosts of curriculum’s past and futures, unsettling settler futurity.’ Allowing time, energy, and curricular space to do this will require sweeping changes to how schools conceptualize curriculum and personnel-resource allocation.

An entire rethinking and restructuring of the localized manifestations of the approach and spirit of education and all its reflections of the SCWSC machine must be called out, to track the violence inherent in institutions of compulsory education which feed the capitalist war machine with our very lives. Challenging zero-sum game expectations grounded in competitive societal interactions moves us away from thinking and acting as if one group’s futurity must come at the expense of many Others.’ Can AI and other devalued Black and Brown youth ever be seen as more than what they never were, are not, and never can be, as demanded by the SCWSC gaze? Through overcoming our own species-alienation, by uncovering normalized, ubiquitous constraints perpetuated by the SCWSC gaze, we begin to revalue hitherto devalued human beings and their communities through reconnection and restoration of relationships across humans, environment, and collapsing of time.

Overturning centuries of SCWSC alienation via dehumanization through the commodity fetishism inherent in schooling must reveal the secret of the illusion that undergirds cycles of reification. Inequitable historical material experiences do not disappear by employing a standardized measure, driven by commodity fetishism. Instead, the exchange value differentially stamped on commodities reifies the social relations of production (Marx, 1867/2004). SCWSC control of cycles of production of evaluative measures and ‘evidence’ of academic success create the necessary conditions of production for the next generation. This perpetuates the forced consumption of the material and social-ideological curriculum of the institution and reifies white, middle-class hegemony.

After breaking illusions generated by SCWSC frames of perception, standardized measures’ power to commodify and compare minoritized youth is exposed. AI and other minoritized youth begin to regain full humanity as they step from behind the mirror, empowered to control their own futurity as agentic creators. Though we may remain haunted by settler-colonial ghosts while schools work through the decolonial transition, stubborn ghosts and the living who embody and act in the settler-colonial spirit will help future generations recognize, name, and finally rid public schools of minoritized children’s SCWSC nightmare. Indigenous Peoples who bring previously undervalued, dismissed visions of education will create decolonial alternatives, previously precluded by their planned, conspicuous absence.

One key present absence in teacher education identified by McCoy and Villeneuve (2020) provides an example of the generative utility of browning as a decolonial strategy. The conspicuous absence of non-white teachers, administrators, and other educators in public schools today was not always so. Returning to the topic of early Indian schools, McCoy and Villeneuve (ibid.) use a historical-critical lens to describe seven stories from various Native American nations that illuminate how Indigenous People have repurposed schooling to advance Indigenous interests, since the 1830s. Surprisingly, by the turn of the century, hundreds of Indian teachers and teacher training programs existed: ‘Between 1884 and 1909, the government hired 134 Indigenous people as industrial teachers, assistant teachers, and teachers in the six industrial board schools that had offered teaching departments, over half of which were women’ (ibid., pp. 502–03). This important realization begs the question, if substantial numbers of Indigenous teachers were certified and employed in government schools over 100 years ago, why not today and what could the field gain by raising a new generation of Indigenous educators?

Accompanying a flood of changes that will ensue after the door to decolonizing praxis opens, increasingly diverse hands will take the wheel of the curricular vehicle through a process Eve Tuck (2011) calls ‘rematriation.’ According to Tuck (ibid., p. 37), ‘A rematriation of curriculum studies is concerned with the redistribution of power, knowledge, and place, and the dismantling of settler colonialism.’ Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013, p. 84) describe rematriation’s focus: ‘it, by design, aims to undercut and undermine the legacy of settler colonialism in curriculum.’ To do this, employing the reversal tactic is essential for replacing paternalistic precedent and unsettling the foundations of settler-colonialism. By employing the relational, ecological lens of rematriation in place of the objectifying, instrumental lens of the patriarchal SCWSC gaze, alienation is overcome through a return to relationships and human revaluation through unity and redistribution of power and control of knowledge production. As Indigenous worldviews and cultures gain presence and change educational systems’ structures and approaches to learning, relationships become foregrounded and people with diverse epistemologies gain power.

Given our global, crisis-level challenges shared in the present time, an ecological approach reversing SCWSC tactics and assumptions has the potential to transform the curriculum and schooling for all. When Othered, silenced, overlooked and denied perspectives are affirmed and included, given leadership and design power, minoritized people wield real, material, and ideological power, advancing their important roles in humanity’s ‘survivance’ (Vizenor, 2008). They are encouraged to not only bring their unique ideas and new approaches in problem-solving to public schools, but to lead with the wealth of human technology they bring, revolutionizing teaching and learning. In the decolonial era, they will light the path forward we will walk together.

9.4 Centralizing the Perceptual Shift: 2D Illusions to 3D Realities

Before decolonization efforts can be realized, educators and researchers must first reflect upon their own perceptions to be able to see how they have been controlled by the SCWSC machine’s gaze. In attempts to shift the illusion of individualized Indigenous failure to system failure, I insist readers must first shift reflections from the SCWSC mirror to consider Indigenous Peoples’ lived realities as entire worlds behind (and controlled by) the mirror. Only then will decolonizing approaches be able to change the way educators see Indigenous students’ current performance and future trajectories. Decolonial perspectives demand data be seen and acted upon from Indigenous perspectives, flipping school power orientations of evaluation, control, and design, from using strictly SCWSC ideologies to realizing decolonial and anti-colonial ideologies.

To make the flipping action possible, I recommend an unsettling of familiar beliefs and expectations using an exercise with a mirror. Look closely into a mirror and wave with your right hand, noticing the image that appears in the mirror is waving with its left hand. In regular household (planar) mirrors, the images ever-created and re-created are distortions of reality, reflecting light against material objects in such a way that flips each image/perception from front to back—the image you see in the mirror is not exactly the same as a camera or person ‘sees,’ but its mirror opposite. That image, as a 2D reproduction of you, looks like it is waving with the same hand you are because you are moving your right hand and the 2D image’s hand is moving also on the right side of the mirror. However, if this image-person was real, living in three dimensions, looking at you somehow, from behind the mirror, s/he/they is/are waving at you with her/his/their left hand—proof that the 2D image is not you and the virtual image is an illusion.

Seeing that now-strange, mirror-image replica of yourself in the mirror, waving to you with its opposite hand, helps call attention to the importance of seeing images/representations of ourselves, our actions, and ideologies always as reflections of SCWSC ideology, on which most human mainstream success has been made possible in the United States. Though that image in the mirror looks and acts like you, it is not you (nor could it ever be all of you), but a flip-flopped, reversed virtual representation of your material body, from your perspective. As in regular household (planar) mirrors, these images ever-created and re-created in the SCWSC frame are distortions of reality.

Making the familiar strange to disrupt the power of the SCWSC gaze helps white educators unsettle common perceptions about minoritized students, families, and communities. When mainstream educators finally realize their assimilatory actions may actually hurt and impede Indigenous Peoples’ success, rather than helping, they may begin to value Indigenous perspectives and moves toward decolonizing public schools. This process also requires a great deal of reflection and dialogue with Others who have been oppressed so long, they may also need liberating through this perceptual shift. I argue that this paradigmatic perceptual shift is a necessary first step in fighting for those whose humanity is frozen in racist perceptions maintained by the ubiquitous SCWSC frame that only sees and recreates illusions from its own perspective.

Marxist humanist approaches demand the same shift from commodification and exploitation of humans and their labor to affirmation of their inherent humanity (Marx, 1844). As Marx (ibid.) asserts, ‘But natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically through the medium of industry; and has prepared human emancipation, although its immediate effect had to be the furthering of the dehumanization of man.’ Fundamental perceptual shifts from the SCWSC gaze to Indigenous, decolonial frames of perception reverse this industrial transformation back toward rehumanization and ‘human emancipation’ (ibid.).

10 Conclusion: The Indian Solution, Smashing Reflections Frozen in Settler-Colonial-Capitalist Mirrors

When we look closer, shift our way of seeing to using the perspective of that Other who is standing behind the settler-colonial mirror, we finally see how backward, inverted and therefore incorrect that powerful image is. When we make the SCWSC, two-dimensional plane mirror unfamiliar to ourselves, we can begin to question the images created from that ideological framework. When we consider how long all-white researchers and educators have been the most powerful seers/lookers and evaluators of non-white children, modern scholars of education and other subjects should begin to question the images and persistent patterns consistently created and re-created. These keep circulating the same flat, predictable, 2D representation of reality that depicts non-white, non–middle class, non-mainstream Other children as broken, deficient, needing help, less-than, all as compared to their white peers’ physical and ideological performance in the material world. The dominance of this performance is reproduced and reified as necessary products of material manifestations of the social relations of labor within SCWSC-dominated schools, using standardized curricula and evaluative methods also all created from SCWSC perspectives.

Seeing only these representations, and these flat, reversed reflections of reality so often, normalizes us into thinking that they are real. In reality, when we acknowledge them as illusions, we realize that these are mere representations of reality produced within settler-colonial capitalist mirrors of white supremacy, and that there are entire worlds beyond the mirror. More importantly, there are entire societies of Others who have been stuck there, behind the mirror, limited, controlled, and frozen into 2D reflections of inferiority by those powerful enough to control the mirror. When white mainstream educators are brave enough to step out from the mirror they have enjoyed their whole lives, they might humbly attempt to see the world from the eyes of the disempowered, abject Other. They might finally help the children of centuries-long, white supremacist, colonial violence see these incorrect images for what they truly are: twisted and incomplete, flat representations, created purposefully to control and disempower. Brave educators willing to bear the discomfort of stepping into Others’ real, 3D worlds and perspectives help us capture these evil, frozen, timeless distortions of reality and one by one, smash them.

Inverting and reframing reified instantiations of Indigenous and other minoritized youth’s deficits into solution-based, revalued, and centralized opportunities for systemic change opens new possibilities for decolonial praxis in education. Further, critically examining, exploring, and advancing non-capitalistic approaches to education creates space for potential new, humanist worlds to emerge from decolonial praxis. Rather than preventing Indigenous Peoples’ non-commodifiable, inherently invaluable relationships to land and life inform institutionalized education through severing these via alienation, Marxian analysis and adaptation of critique of capital to historic and current models of education help shape how we may make this invisible war over cycles of production and consumption visible.

Addressing SCWSC ideology requires the conscious praxis of shifting from the usual, ubiquitous SCWSC gaze to being open to Others’ perspectives, and demands the reconciling of one’s own participation in settler futurity, regardless of race. If the power is (and has been) yours, give it. If the power has been kept from you, take it. Where you see dull, cheap, ordinary bits of broken coal and gather us as fuel for your settler-colonial, capitalist war machine, we know ourselves as diamonds here! We are those same bits of broken carbon, having stuck closer and closer together under tremendous heat, weight, and pressure of history’s struggle—we are harder than anything and able to withstand anything as one; able to cut through your lies and resist your consumption.

Decolonial praxis conceptualizes the Indigenous as the Indian Solution—legitimate, central and necessary, rather than deviant, marginal, and surplus. Ripping Capital’s vampire parasitism off of living labor may become possible when all facets of humanity are deemed unexploitable. Unifying and revaluing the Othereds’ experiences in mainstream society through tracing tracks of the SCWSC war machine through generations of capitalist hegemony offer a way to centralize and reposition marginalized educational stakeholders as fully human, not as commodified objects assigned differential value as exchanged and contrasted with ‘peers.’

Systemic change-work using decolonizing frameworks like Indigenous Learning Lab (Bal et al., 2021) begins with identifying stakeholders who have been othered by local SCWSC gaze at the transformation site. It brings them together in a constructive, problem-solving team, where they learn from each other’s perspectives and experiences, sharing power to create. Educators ready for change and committed to discovering how they unknowingly perpetuate the ills of the SCWSC gaze must stand together in doing the work of separating dehumanizing SCWSC machinery from present school functioning and ideology. Only then may the fetishism of commodified learning entrenched in settler-colonial schools be revealed, and minoritized Others allowed for once to define themselves by who, and how they are, rather than measured by who and how they are not reflections of SCWSC ideals. Empowering and sharing design, directive, and evaluative control over various aspects of school functioning in culturally respectful ways allows minoritized Others to be recognized as fully human, as they build a new system in which commodification, reification and the resulting erasure of Black and Brown futurity are revealed and transformed.

As the expansive space opens where opposing gazes meet, the same machine living within the SCWSC mirror in all of us begins to become visible. As the machine becomes unmasked, It loses its hypnotic power required to maintain control. As Foucault (1978, p. 86) illuminated, ‘power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.’

Empowering decolonial perspectives allows those whose humanity remains frozen in SCWSC reflections to advance their own sovereign powers of creation by shattering false illusions. Tracing the patterns of effects of those acting as part of the SCWSC machinery across generations and throughout the globe forces the machine into our purview where we can finally see It and call It by its name. To the SCWSC ideological machine we say:

We see you, though you will never truly see us. We’ve followed your tracks and can see you for what you are by what you’ve done and continue to do to our children and futures. We are not afraid anymore to be what you are not, denying the anti-human in all of us.