What does it take to instigate an authentic paradigm shift? How can we know that we are “making progress.”
The ostensible shift in America’s perception concerning the relationship between the cultured/civilized white and the needy/seeking Indian, and the institutional manifestation of that shift as exhibited by changing educational policies for educating Indian children, was a farce. Big surprise. Here we have yet another instance of insidious mechanisms for exerting control and maintaining power structures through the method of disciplining and punishing (Man on the Band Stand). We get it Foucault!
Whenever we think “good” or “right” or “natural” or “progress” we must filter these assumptions—these little droplets we cling to, begging for something different—through a critical mindset; we must look for what is underlying those thoughts, align ourselves with Foucault and Pierce and decode what we think we see.
My frustration after reading these insightful and largely spot on assessments of oppressive educational structures disciplining under the guise of care, progressive thinking, and “reform,” comes from a desire for engagement with something genuine. When can I look at something and see what I see? When can we begin to trust? Should we? Or can we only trust this reality that we can never know, can never affirm but only falsify—can this method of falsification, bringing us not closer to the truth, but farther from the false, ever be satisfying? Should it? How do we enact change?
Was the Indian Reorganization Act a genuine attempt, at best towards “making amends” for past discriminatory policies which manifested in the educational systems designed to culturally cleanse/polish the Indian peoples? Were the facilitators of this illusion malignant? Or were they just ignorant, products of their own form of structural disciplining, which rendered them incapable of seeing and critically examining the discourse which conditioned them?
AID Africa.
Monogamy.
Welfare.
The list goes on.
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