Stop Perpetuating Colonialism In Education! by Ashley Rodriguez Lantigua

In the Dominican Republic (DR), the history of Christopher Columbus went as far as knowing that he “discovered the Americas.” Not invaded, but rather “Discovered.” How can my island, romanticize, commemorate, and monumentalize their first recorded oppressor? Growing up in the DR, I noticed that every year, Christopher Columbus was celebrated as a heroic scavenger who found Hispaniola. Secondary schools are named after him, streets are named after him, and monuments remembering his voyage mark our lands with his false savior narrative. The traces of colonization in our land are not invisible. It’s not by accident that one of the most-visited parts of the country is called La Zona Colonial in our capital Santo Domingo, which translates to Colonial Zone. Sometimes, I wish I could ask it, “do you want to be known for being colonized?” 

This transcending legacy of my island fails to mention that the Indigenous people, the Taino of the Arawak, populated the land long before Columbus’s abrupt arrival. This legacy fails to mention that he raped, murdered, and enslaved our native people. It erases Columbus’s criminal record. It doesn’t remember that he stole our riches and that our gold and sugarcane that once flowed with abundance got exported back to Spain. It jumps over the fact that he brought illnesses and diseases that killed millions. Worst of all, this commemoration fails to mention the intersection of the race that came to be because of his invasion of my island. The appraisal of Spanish blood is embedded in this tragic legacy that the Dominican Republic still claims. It fails to acknowledge that our island’s race turned into one  amalgam of Indigenous Taino, African enslaved, and Spanish masters. The commemoration of Christopher Columbus fails to say the whole story. It fails to tell my history. 

The scraps of colonization left oppression in shadows big enough to cloud the experiences of our people, this led my family to seek refuge elsewhere. I left the Dominican Republic and moved to Providence, Rhode Island in 2011 in search of a land that promises freedom and liberation: America. We came in search of dreams of my ancestors, parents, and even liberating dreams of my own I didn’t even know I had. My family hoped that free education in America would provide me with opportunities to critically think and learn through uncensored outlets. It did not take long for me to learn that liberation is censored in American Public Schools curriculums, too. We were not taught about the Native Americans and how we were standing on what is their land. Liberation became a paradox here, too. The calendars bolded oppressors' names, too. How can a girl who is in search of liberation find her truth in yet another country that celebrates her oppression?

A corner of hope in the South Side of Providence was fighting against my oppression long before I called them family. A few years later, while I navigated the Providence Public schools and struggled to see a reflection of myself in any of the books I was still learning to translate, I became involved in a youth organization called Youth In Action (YIA). YIA empowered me to dismantle and embrace my identity by sharing my story, dig deeper into the education system I was placed in, challenge the censored history being taught to me, and fight for the liberation of marginalized communities. Although the Public Schools I attended still celebrated Christopher Columbus, YIA invited all of its youth, every year, to attend the Pronk (short for Providence Honk) parade, a celebration, and honorarium of the contributions of Indigenous people and Native Americans. Only the students involved with organizations like YIA  are able to get exposed to a more comprehensive understanding of their history and not through critical curriculums embedded in their schools but rather community organizing taking place outside of the classroom. If I had not joined YIA, I would not have seen the sign that called out “Columbus Who? Canceled. Thief, rapist, murderer!” at the Pronk parade. The sign provoked me to question everything I had been taught, even the promises of public schools in America. 

The public schools that I had attended were all placed in the middle of an urban city, serving predominantly BIPoC students, low-income communities, many of whom derived from peoples that have been oppressed by Columbus and other colonizers. The education my family dreamed of me getting is supposed to liberate me from all of the oppression that they had to withstand for me to exist here. Instead, throughout my education journey in Providence, I have noticed that neither my history nor the history of the people of this land we live on is taught, and what I have learned is that this isn’t by accident or new. 

Historical colonial education in America enabled early boarding schools systems to do what Dr. Jennifer Nez Denerdale, historian of the Navajo Diné tribe, describes to be ethnically cleansing rather than assimilation of Native Americans. The operation and legacy of the federal Indian Boarding school system enforced that Native American children to lose all of the connections they had to their history, traditions, and practices. Their long hair which resembled strength and dignity was cut to Anglo standards. These Native children were being militarized, changing their native clothes to military style uniforms. Even sacred prayer and ceremony were forbidden from Native students at the boarding schools that were many miles away from their families. The government used the excuse of having an “Indian problem,” treating it as enough validation to create and run these boarding schools to harm and strip away the identities of the incoming generation of Native American children. 

These dynamics that were embedded in this early educational system left these children with trauma that still ripples in Indigenous communities. The censorship of the history of marginalized groups in education continues to be a White Supremacist tactic used to keep these students from mobilizing and civically engaging. In 2010, in Tucson, Arizona, LatinX students began to wake up when the Raza studies programs that promoted and included learning about their history and identities had been included in their curriculum. Once Tom Horne, the superintendent of the Tucson Magnet High School saw positive changes that the programs brought, he wrote an open letter campaigning to end the ethnic studies programs. This superintendent saw the social mobility and resistance of a group of marginalized and historically oppressed students as a dangerous power dynamic shift. Not only was he politicizing education but also openly using his power to suppress the oppressed. 

The tactic to suppress the awareness of the lived experiences of BIPoC students stems from the racist backbone that has upheld education. It wasn't until I walked through the doors of higher education that I learned there is a name to this suppression of marginalized voices, and that it is just one recurring politicized dynamic. It’s called interest divergence, and it means that if including the history of oppressed minorities is not in the best interest of white supremacists, they decide to not support the initiatives like Tom Horne did with the Raza studies programs (Delgado, 1996, 2007b). This is how education becomes colonized with the white narratives, and how racism normalizes these racialized hierarchies and footprints of colonialism. 

In my introductory Anthropology class, I was introduced to the ongoing struggle of settler colonialism, which is what the United States did by destroying the sacred lands of native people in order to replace and build a new nation on top of that land. In the podcast All My Relations, which works to represent and change the way folx see Native America, Adrienne Keene, a citizen of the Cherokee nation, a scholar, and the blogger behind “Native Appropriations,” summarizes settler colonialism to her students in one phrase: “Y'all [colonizers] never left!” and extractive colonialism as “Ya’ll [colonizers] left but left a big mess!” My anthropology course and the All My Relations podcast have heightened my awareness of my position in America as an immigrant who although directly impacted by extractive colonialism in the DR, is now partaking in the results of settler colonialism that continue to oppress Native Americans in what currently is America. Having access to higher education is a privilege I know many of the BIPoC students who attend the public schools I attended will not have the opportunity to attain due to many of the barriers that colonialism alone imposes on them. 

Failing to provide students who have been brutally oppressed throughout history with critical and uncensored curriculums, and celebrating oppressors and colonizers such as Christopher Columbus perpetuates the cycle of oppression and marginalization. To the American schools that celebrate oppression: don’t teach us that Christopher Columbus discovered the “New World” on October 12, 1492, that world was already there. Tell it how it was: Christopher Columbus began his INTRUDING in the fate of Indigenous lives and land in the Dominican Republic, the island from where I come from. I will continue to hold my Pronk parade sign high, vigilant of schools and institutions that praise colonizers to put BIPoC students to sleep, but us BIPoC students, we’ll stay awake, plotting all the ways we’ll sail away from the old taught ways of thinking. We are on our way; we are on our own voyage to decolonize our minds. 

Sources:

Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, by Richard Delgado

All My Relations Podcast: https://www.allmyrelationspodcast.com/podcast/episode/32b0bd95/ep-1-all-my-relations-and-indigenous-feminism

Unspoken: America’s Native American Boarding schools: https://www.pbs.org/video/unspoken-americas-native-american-boarding-schools-oobt1r/

 Precious Knowledge:  https://vimeo.com/ondemand/preciousknowledge/