Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity

Abstract

This paper describes the ways in which “curriculum” has been and continues to be a project of settler colonialism, premised on white settler supremacy. We examine a number of ways in which this has manifested and how various attempts at interrupting this not only get sidelined, but reappropriated in ways that re-inscribe settler colonialism and settler futurity through strategies of replacement.  We use the character of Natty Bumppo from James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales as an allegory for the ways in which white settlers seeks to absorb indigenous peoples, people of color and their knowledges, only to turn themselves into the “native.” While various interventions have tried to dislodge the aims of replacement, the settler colonial curricular project of replacement is relentless in its recuperation and absorption of those critiques, effectively replacing those who offered the critiques with (now) more informed white bodies.