Land-based pedagogy decenter the settler in discussions of redistribution. Erasing indigenous thought in debate and the misfocused debates around redistribution demands land-based pedagogies that center indigenous presence.

Indigenous scholars have suggested that moving toward educational self-determination3 requires the reclaiming, uncovering, and reinventing of our theoretical understandings and pedagogical best practices (e.g. Battiste 2002; Smith et al. 1999; Tippeconnic 1999). Trying to work within a methodological paradigm of decolonization (Smith 1999) we used several methodological tools to develop both theory and practice that empowered our community. We collectively worked to center Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies by (re)storying our relationships to Chicago as altered, impacted, yet still, always, Indigenous lands-whether we are in currently ceded urban territory or not. A critical dimension of the work was making visible the impacts of settler colonial constructions of urban lands as ceded and no longer Indigenous and concomitant views of naturalized settler futures (Tuck and Yang 2012) on our community and especially our youth. In this paper we will argue that the constructions of land, implicitly or explicitly as no longer Indigenous, are foundationally implicated in teaching and learning about the natural world, whether that be in science education, place-based education or environmental education. Learning about the natural world is a critical necessity given the socio-scientific realities (e.g. climate change) that are currently and will continue to, shape the lands and life that land supports, more specifically for present purposes the lives of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. For us science education, place-based education, and environmental education are critical sites of struggle because they typically reify the epistemic, ontological, and axiological issues that have shaped Indigenous histories (Brayboy and Castagno 2008). From a more hopeful perspective, we also see them as sites of potential transformings – forming a nexus between epistemologies and ontologies of land and Indigenous futurity. In our view, realizing this transformative potential will require engaging with land-based perspectives and desettling (Bang et al. 2012) dynamics of settler colonialism that remain quietly buried in educational environments that engage learning about, with and in the land and all of its dwellers. In our experience, explicitly reengaging land-based perspectives in the design and implementation of a place-based science learning environment, what we call an emergent form of urban Indigenous land-based pedagogies, enabled epistemological and ontological balancing that significantly impacted learning for urban Indigenous youth and families (Bang and Medin 2010; Bang et al. 2010). In the remainder of this paper, we aim to contribute to uncovering the ways in which settler colonialism is entrenched and reified in educational environments. To do this, we provide a critical reading of educational environments that position place and nature as central to their approaches and learning objectives (e.g. place-based, environmental, and science education broadly construed). We include these three broad areas of scholarship because the learning environments that we developed were informed by and make contact with each in various ways. Further, while we do not intend to equate these three forms of education, we suggest that each, to some degree, utilize knowledge about the natural world derived from western scientific systems and settler-colonial relations to land and Indigenous peoples. Our critique is at a grain size that we believe either holds across these bodies of work and does not require the flattening or equating of them or that there are commonalities across them we hope makes visible the still entrenched settler-colonial dynamics that are endemic to education more broadly. Settler-colonial informed readings of place in education Both place-based education and critical pedagogy have been bounded by dichotomous and some might say competing discourses. On the one hand, place- based education seems to focus on the environments and ecologies of outdoor rural spaces, and on the other, critical pedagogies often focus on the urban, multicultural context (Gruenewald 2008). To broadly elevate the importance of place and to bridge these two approaches, Gruenewald (2003) proposed a critical pedagogy of place. Critical place-based education and eco-justice work have amplified voices resisting destructive forms of globalization and neo-liberalism and have helped to create an intellectual space connected to Indigenous realities as well (Sutherland and Swayze 2012). However, we continue to wonder about the liberatory possibilities for Indigenous people in current forms of place-based education. As Bowers (2003) argues, there are reifications of western intellectual traditions in place-based pedagogies that further silence some cultural communities. The reification of western intellectual traditions is often made possible by the denial or erasure of ‘Indigenous points of reference,’ which, as Marker (2006) points out, is a form of epistemic violence. While the denial or erasure of Indigenous points of reference may not be intentional, educational environments that uncritically mobilize them and leave settler-colonial interpretations silenced are complicit in this erasure. In order to understand the effects of settler colonialism on place focused learning environments, we trace the ontology of settler colonialism and its subsequent impacts. Just as colonialism employs a grammar of race and inferiority; settler colonialism employs this grammar of race and inferiority but toward a logic of elimination (Veracini 2011). In settler-colonial societies, settler normativity is constructed through a set of dialectic relationships based upon circles of inclusion and exclusion in which the settler constructs himself as normative and superior vis-à-vis Indigenous and non-Indigenous others. This positioning of settlers is structurally maintained by employing a set of rules that are situated in and reify the circles of inclusion and exclusion (e.g. hypodescent and blood quantum). The core of the settler-Indigenous dialectical structure is defined by the desire to erase or assimilate Indigenous people alongside a continued symbolic Indigenous presence (Wolfe 2006). Scholars of settler colonialism have argued that the conceptual construction of uninhabited land, a form of Indigenous absence, opens the space for settler majorities to establish their ways of knowing, doing and being as normative and morally superior and begin attempts to indigenize settler majority identities (Veracini 2011). In short, settler majorities simultaneously develop identities defined by manifest destiny and genesis amnesia (Bourdieu 1977). The process of erasure and sustained symbolic presence codifies a binary logic often taking the form of ‘virtuous settler’ and ‘dysfunctional native’ (Wolfe 2006) or the historicized ‘Ecological Indian’ (Friedel 2011) which underpins the structure of settler identity and is often encoded in learning environments. In our view, pathways and pedagogies that make explicit and resist the epistemic and ontological consequences of settler colonialism (i.e. suppression and denial of Indigenous peoples’ lifeways or encoding settler identities in learning environments) will be necessary for viable, just, and sustainable change. Land education does just that, and, in our view, at minimum, demands attention to two critical and oscillating issues born of settler colonialism: (1) the reification of what Mignolo calls the ‘zero point epistemology’ (2007), upon which western knowledge of the natural world is predicated, its anthropocentric consequences, and its continued devaluing and/or attacks on Indigenous ways of knowing (e.g. Semali and Kincheloe 1999) and (2) the absence or presence of indigeneity and the subsequent effects.