Colonial Solutions to Problems Caused by Colonial Ontologies
By: Luke R. Barnesmoore
Tags: Pedagogy, Masks, Education, Ontology, Environment

Recreating the Problem through Insubstantial Land Acknowledgements

Inscribing Colonial Ontologies on Students Through Dramatic Renditions of Colonial Violence

‘I want to recognize that we are hosting this conference on the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam people. Now, lets turn to our dramatic rendition of a status quo settler colonial conference of settler colonial nation states to determine settler colonial, Sino-US-EU dominated, market based ‘solutions’ to climate change.’ Just another day at the University of British Columbia… All the purportedly post-colonial colonial academics were so very excited. ‘Isn’t this a cool exercise? The students are so creative.’ No, dramatic performance of colonial violence is not a fucking ‘cool exercise’. Compelling our students to dawn the mask of colonial nation states and perform their colonial violence on the stage of life is not fucking cool — not in the fucking least. Imagining solutions within the dominant-domineering framework of settler colonial nations/corporations and the colonial social/political/economic systems and the colonial ontology that binds these settler colonial systems into ontological coherence is far from what I would describe as ‘creative’ — there is no freedom without ontological freedom, and there is no ontological freedom in a dramatic rendition of the relational ontology that binds the ontologically settler colonial nations of our world together into the sickly whole that we know as ‘global governance’…

The colonial academics were giddy with joy and enthusiasm. Some countries want to make the top 100 environment destroying TNCs pay for climate change mitigation!!! But, of course, that wont go in the final language of the climate agreement because the US wont accept such a policy… This climate summate exercise did not inspire a drop of hope in me, let alone excitement — all it did was once again illustrate the obvious reality that we are not going to solve the problems of anthropogenic environmental degradation through the existing settler colonial governmental infrastructure that is levied by such international climate summits. We recognized that we were sitting on stolen Indigenous lands, and then we proceeded to discuss solutions that were all rooted in the assumption that settler colonial governments like Canada, the US and China would continue to be allowed to assert their baseless claims to sovereignty over Indigenous Lands — there were no abstract steps, let alone concrete steps, towards the return of the Land (of these Lands) to Indigenous sovereignty that land acknowledgements were originally intended to foster. Land acknowledgements have become another line of insubstantial rhetoric in the elite class attempts to paint a smile on the colonial machine that is eating this earth alive.

Anyway, lets try to think of assignments that draw students into imagining solutions to environmental degradation and climate change that are not rooted in the colonial relational ontologies (between nation states, between individuals and nation states, between nation states and Indigenous peoples, between nation states and the Land, between humans and nature, between the ‘animate and inanimate’ worlds, between conquest-colonization and deliverance into the Promised Land, etc.) that gave rise to environmental degradation in the first place. Lets try to think of assignments that don’t ask students to dawn the colonial mask of settler colonial nation states — that do not thus inscribe colonial ontologies upon the being of the students who dawn these colonial masks and perform these colonial roles. Lets provide our students with assignments that draw them into experience of non-colonial ontologies — into dramatic renditions of non-colonial ontologies that ask students to dawn non-colonial masks and thus inscribe non-colonial ontologies upon their being. By asking students to dawn non-colonial masks their performances will create a liminal space between their existing world and the world that becomes possible in a non-colonial ontology — instead of creating colonial subjects, we would thus be destroying colonial subjects… We cannot solve the problems of unjust relations, be they among humans or between humans and the rest of nature, from the relational ontology that begot those unjust relations in the first place. The dominant-domineering legal, economic, political, social, etc. systems of our world — particularly as crystalized in ‘global governance’ systems through Sino-US-EU hegemony — embody the sickly Artificial-Domineering Worldview and associated sickly relational ontology that forms the root of many if not all of the unjust relationships that are drawing the earth to the brink of mass extinction (mass extinction of life, mass extinction of virtue, mass extinction of beauty, mass extinction of truth, mass extinction of love, etc.). Settler colonial governments and their associated legal, economic, political, social, etc. systems embody the colonial ontologies and associated states of consciousness that form the root of our problems — “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” (Lorde 1983)