Grant program: Disrupting Colonialism through Teaching: An Integrated Seminar Series and Grants Program

Grant recipient: Michael Everton, Department of English

Project team: Nimrit Basra, research assistant

Timeframe: September 2020 to September 2021

Funding: $5929

Course addressed: ENGL 347 – Studies in American Literature before 1900 (Iteration: “The United States of Lyncherdom”)

Final report: View Michael Everton's final report (PDF) >>

Description: In literature classes, we often teach metaphor as a cognitive strategy for learning about the world. We can understand how students understand the topics they encounter by attending to how they parse the metaphors writers use to represent their thinking. A feature of a decolonized literature classroom seems to me to be an awareness of how colonization and its component parts are represented figuratively. In ENGL 347 – Studies in American Literature before 1900, I want students to understand how the ideology of manifest destiny and in turn removal and “Indian hating” were represented in a range of texts, from newspaper editorials to court decisions to short stories to poems to novels. I want students to be critical of the language they read and hear on the subject of Indigenous rights to land and culture. I want them to be able to deconstruct its figurative implications as well as its history. When students hear Canadian leaders say, for example, that the blockade of the Northern Gateway pipeline construction must come down because Canada is a country of “the rule of law,” I want them to be able to suss out the ironies of that statement inherent in words such as “rule” and “law” and to be able to see the history of such terms in white settler North America. In short, I want to decolonize the language we use by helping students learn how to decolonize it themselves.

Questions addressed:

• What do students know about colonization in nineteenth century U.S.? In twenty-first century Canada?
• How do students know what they know? 
• Do students show capacity for unpacking the figurative implications of language?
  

Knowledge sharing:  We shared our findings formally at a 1.5-hour faculty colloquium in October 2021. While the session was attended primarily by faculty members, there was also a sizable contingent of graduate students and even some undergraduate students there (about 35 in all), including one of the students from our original class. 

Informally Nimrit and I have both talked at length about the project with faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students. I have also talked about the project in my subsequent courses.

Keywords: Settler colonialism, white supremacy, manifest destiny, racism, “Indian Hating,” removal/genocide, nineteenth-century, literature, history