Critical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogy

The US-Dakota War Re-Examined

Rick Lybeck

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030624866
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

This book explores tensions between critical social justice and what the author terms white justice as fairness in public commemoration of Minnesota's US-Dakota War of 1862. First, the book examines a regional white public pedagogy demanding "objectivity" and "balance" in teaching-and-learning activities with the purpose of promoting fairness toward white settlers and the extermination campaign they once carried out against Dakota people. The book then explores the dilemmas this public pedagogy created for a group of majority-white college students co-authoring a traveling museum exhibit on the war during its 2012 sesquicentennial. Through close analyses of interviews, field notes, and course artifacts, this volume unpacks the racial politics that drive white justice as fairness, revealing a myriad of ways this common sense of justice resists critical social justice education, foremost by teaching citizens to suspend moral judgment toward symbolicwhite ancestors and their role in a history of genocide.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

R. LybeckCritical Social Justice Education and the Assault on Truth in White Public Pedagogyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62486-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: “Official Perspective” and the Two Senses of Justice

Rick Lybeck¹

(1)

Department of Educational Studies, Minnesota State University, Mankato, Mankato, MN, USA

Rick Lybeck

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

“Official Perspective”

For white Minnesotans working in historically colonial state institutions, suspending moral judgment about the U.S.-Dakota War rose to the level of an urgent collective need in 2012. Whether balancing perspectives from points of no perspective or presenting “the facts” so that majority-white audiences could decide for themselves what happened in 1862, empowered producers of public knowledge routinely modeled ways of remaining neutral on a situation of injustice and, thus, choosing the side of the oppressor.

Below are some examples of white justice as fairness at work:

We’re not going to get into who was right and who was wrong. We’re trying to stay as neutral as we can. (in Ojanpa, 2011)

—Jessica Potter, Blue Earth County Historical Society, December 22, 2011

There is no great benefit in trying to weigh who was more at fault during the times that led up to and during the conflict. […] Learning and discussing the facts, as best they can be found and as fairly as possible, should be the goal in this sesquicentennial year. (in “Dakota-U.S. War history,” 2012)

—Mankato Free Press, January 10, 2012

There’s still a lot of people looking for the villain here. But if we can move a little bit closer to recognizing that nobody came out of this well, everybody lost something, then I think we will at least have moved a little step in the right direction. (in Picardi, 2012)

—Kate Roberts, Minnesota History Center, July 10, 2012

I hope what people get out of this is there are lots of different perspectives. That doesn’t make someone right and someone else wrong — people just have differing perspectives about the same events. (in Krohn, August 12, 2012)

—Ben Leonard, Nicollet County Historical Society, August 12, 2012

We are not looking at this from the perspective of who’s right and who’s wrong, but simply what happened here. (in Ojanpa, 2012)

—Darla Gebhard, Brown County Historical Society, August 19, 2012

***

In January 2011, the Mankato Free Press printed an editorial “thumbs up” to a project going on at North Dakota State University (“Dakota Translations Welcome”). Retired Dakota Presbyterian ministers Clifford Canku and Michael Simon were translating selected letters written in 1863 by Dakota men originally sentenced to hang in 1862 but who had received pardons from President Lincoln. Prior to their eviction from Minnesota, these 265 men sat detained indefinitely in a Mankato prison. Approximately 120 of them ended up dying not long afterward in a prison in Davenport, Iowa (Meyer, 1967, p. 144). Canku and Simon’s work has since been published by the Minnesota Historical Society as The Dakota Prisoner of War Letters (2013).

Within a week of its “thumbs up,” the newspaper printed a rebuke from David J. Gray, a local who positioned himself as a descendant of a white who had fought against Dakotas in their siege on the town of New Ulm in 1862. Titled “Why is the White Side in Conflict Ignored?” Gray took issue with all the negativity being heaped on settler society in coverage of Canku and Simon’s work:

But let us not forget that those wonderful letters that were translated were written with Latin letters brought by white Christians. They would not be here today if not for those kind enough to have taught writing or transcribed the words spoken to them. I guess some people just tend to forget that when writing about “a terrible moment in Native American history.” (Gray, January 28, 2011)

In going back to the original Minnesota Public Radio News story about the translation project that had provided the Free Press occasion for its thumbs up, I learned of disappearances of Dakota prisoners who would not convert to Christianity and of rapes of Dakota women at the hands of white prison guards (Gunderson, 2011). Gray’s letter seemed to cast all this as part of a larger humanitarian effort.

The day this letter ran, I happened to be reading British professor Brian Street’s book Literacy in Theory and Practice (1984), an important text in Literacy Education, my field of study. In that volume, Street critiques the “autonomous model” of literacy where the capacity for abstract reasoning in a group of people is supposedly best evidenced by their development of alphabetic technology for Western-style reading and writing practices, what anthropologist Jack Goody once called “the technology of the intellect” (Street, p. 65). As Street points out, such cultural conceits have historically led to a failure among researchers to identify literacy practices already present among the allegedly “pre-literate” people they have studied.

Street’s book shows how Eurocentric notions of literacy tend to go hand in hand with other white conceits about civilization, Christianity, reason, and race that regularly cast nonwhite people in terms of their alleged deficiencies. Reading Gray’s letter to the editor on a morning when I was just beginning to absorb Street’s analysis made me wonder about the subtle ways old colonizing beliefs about race and literacy might still be circulating around me. On one level, the letter’s racism was easy to see. I didn’t need a doctorate to know that the “white side” to colonization had not been ignored in white American communities like Mankato. Growing up in Marietta, Ohio, a town that boasts of being the “first settlement in the Northwest Territory” despite its founding on an ancient village or “earthworks,” I had learned at an early age that the opposite was the case, that the Indian side to colonization had literally been graded over and its people all but erased from the official white public narrative. As I have come to understand more deeply, literacy provides some of the most powerful tools of conquest, a point underscored by the locations of the public libraries in my two hometowns—Marietta’s elevated on an ancient “Hopewell” mesa (White & White, 2004) and Mankato’s positioned at the hanging site.

The intersection of Street’s book and Gray’s letter invited me to consider white supremacy on more subtle levels, however, connecting it to aspects of literacy previously benign to me like the alphabet. Not even in my former days as an English teacher in the Minneapolis public schools had I really been urged to think this carefully about the relationship between race and letters. Finding it stated so starkly in the newspaper sparked curiosity for me in multiple directions. If I continued to collect pieces of public discourse about the U.S.-Dakota War as I studied, would other connections emerge as rich as this one? Was the literacy-racism link circulating among people seemingly more reasonable than Gray? On what felt like an entirely different front, why would the newspaper even bother to run a letter like Gray’s? The editor probably received racist letters and e-mails all the time, or so I figured. Why would he run this particular one just then, designed as it was to spread salt on the wounds of 1862? Put another way, why would the editor seem to take those wounds seriously in Saturday’s edition only to turn around and subject them to denigration the following Friday? This question grew more troubling to me as time passed. No further columns or letters were printed on the subject. Gray got the last word on the Dakota prisoner-of-war letters in Mankato.

The remainder of this Introduction chronicles the early part of my work actively pursuing these questions while witnessing high-profile commemorative events unfold during the sesquicentennial in Mankato. In the process, I continue to characterize the regional white public pedagogy on the war as one strongly urging citizen-scholars to take up “neutral,” “objective,” “fair,” and “balanced” positions indicative of those listed in the “Official Perspective” framing this Introduction. Analyzing more examples from the pubic pedagogy will enable me to identify two competing senses of justice in play: (a) critical social justice which is equity oriented, seeking educative redress and material reparations for ongoing injustices forged by the U.S.-Dakota War, and (b) white justice as fairness which is equality oriented, asserting notions of sameness or “balance” in the here and now and seeking no concessions of either the white psyche or white property, thus serving to uphold the unjust social status quo. Theorizing the two senses of justice will help me contextualize teaching-and-learning moments analyzed later in the book’s chapters where instructors and students negotiated choices between critical social justice and white justice as fairness and ultimately reconstructed racial dilemmas and divides historically rooted in both regional and personal white identities.

Getting Involved with the J-Term Course Conflict and Remembrance

Continuing to think through relationships between David J. Gray’s letter and Brian Street’s book on literacy, I began collecting everything I could find being written and said publicly about the U.S.-Dakota War. As a Mankato Free Press subscriber, I began clipping out everything relevant to 1862, amassing over 100 articles and letters printed between 2011 and 2013. As the largest daily newspaper in south-central Minnesota, the Free Press provided stories and reports on commemorative ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: “Official Perspective” and the Two Senses of Justice
• 2. J-Term Perspectives
• 3. Framing the Discussion
• 4. Reopening the Wounds of 1862
• 5. Regional Genocide Denial and Contradictory White Selves
• 6. The White Public Pedagogy I: Suspending Moral Judgment
• 7. The White Public Pedagogy II: Taking the Justice-as-Fairness View to History
• 8. Managing Perspectives, Keeping History “Good” and Safe
• 9. From Below in Theory, from Above in Practice: Whites Provide Dakota Perspectives
• 10. Conclusion
• Back Matter