Abstract
Jamaican scholar and writer Sylvia Wynter traces the evolution of Western Man's "descriptive statement" through recorded history, positing it as a story that defines Man by terms that annul the onto-epistemological validity of Black, Indigenous and all nonwhite racial Others. "All the Children Are Indigenous" argues that Western-style, one size fits all, compulsive schooling, is the womb that nurtures and reproduces Man (white, male, rational, self-interested, destined-to-rule by the gods and the sciences) and legitimizes his culturally singular story and resulting takeover of the category of the Human. This essay journeys through a comparative analysis of Black and Māori history in Western-style schooling, from self-taught during slavery and the Native School System, to social control and civilizing missions, exposing how Man's systems for learning and living, promise purpose and freedom if only we silence/slaughter our own visage to don masks in his likeness. Meanwhile Black and Indigenous folks are at risk, underdeveloped, perpetually guilty and marked for death, even in compliance, and Earth on the way to inhabitable. "All the Children" hinges on the assertion that violent macrosocio-political goals are scaled and executed in the micro spaces of the schooling apparatus and on the minds and malleable bones of our most precious and vulnerable.
This thesis then considers the challenge levied to Man's onto-epistemological omnipresence by Black and Indigenous families who choose life without school. Through the stories of Black and Māori unschoolers in the United States and Aotearoa, New Zealand, aged 6 to 46, "All the Children Are Indigenous" will explore how they/we engage in deep, generative world-building and ending projects that contort Man's boundaries and make space for alternative ways of being, learning, and relating. Guided by distinctly Black and Indigenous discourses like Storywork, whakawhanaungatanga, imaginative citation and Afropessimism, this work contends that Black and Māori unschooling forms a fluctuating conceptual ecotone, expansive enough to hold and remediate our reindigenizing and abolitionist, compatible and competing, dreams. The unschooling stories within weave through the argumentation, or stand-alone, lighthouse-like, illuminating paths to self-directed meaning-making in a demonstration of the type of speculative mapping and future-facing illegibility that true liberation may indeed demand.