The slow violence of colonialism has been historically displaced – recentering instances of colonial violence is necessary.

Walter Mignolo’s (2000a; 2011) work offers useful metaphors2 that explain[s] the difficulties of working pedagogically with the violences of modernity (see also Andreotti, 2012). One of these metaphors implies that modernity [has] is commonly defined in relation to a bright, shiny side associated with concepts such as seamless progress, industrialization, democracy, secularization, humanism, linear time, scientific reasoning, and nation-states, amongst others. These concepts, in turn, depend on subjectivities deeply invested in: the notion of universal reason and history; teleological, logocentric, dialectical, and anthropocentric thinking; the objectification and commodification of ‘nature’; and the Cartesian self. Modernity’s ‘shine’ is articulated in ways that hide its shadow, or the fact that the very existence of the shiny side requires the imposition of systematic violence on others. This violence can be articulated through what Quijano (2000) calls coloniality. Coloniality can be understood as a system that defines the organization and dissemination of epistemic, [and] material, and aesthetic resources in ways that reproduce modernity’s imperial project. In other words, coloniality represents the spaciality (expansionist control of lands), ontoepistemic racism (elimination and subjugation of difference) and geopolitics of knowledge production (epistemic violence) that are constitutive of modernity (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). Mignolo (2000b) therefore argues that modernity’s shadow of coloniality is both the hidden face of modernity (for those enchanted by its ‘shine’) and the condition of its possibility (p. 772). The link between deep investments in modernity and the role that these investments play in the systemic production of violence must therefore be denied (foreclosed) for those who want to continue believing themselves to be good, altruistic people progressing towards a homogeneous future of rational, consensual harmony. Thus, the project of modernity depends both on the fact of its violent shadow and on the foreclosure of this fact. This foreclosure is reproduced by the ‘ontoepistemological’ modern grammar (Silva, 2013, p. 50). This modern grammar is rooted in taken-for-granted metaphysical principles and supports deep investments in the ‘shine’ of progress, autonomy, innocence, and engineered futures (Ahenakew, Andreotti, Cooper & Hireme, 2014). For those enchanted with modernity’s shine, the shadow is interpreted as a lack of modernity and as something that can be fixed with more modernity. Hence, when exposed to critiques that implicate modernity’s shine in the creation of its shadow, those enchanted with the shine tend to resist and deny their complicity in harm. The pedagogical challenge is also formidable given the interdependence of the various violent social relations that constitute modernity’s shadow. Grosfoguel (2012) captures many of these in his description of a “Modern/Colonial Capitalist/Patriarchal Western-centric/Christian- centric World-System” (p. 82). Many other scholars have examined how nation-states in North America are made possible through Indigenous genocide and dispossession, Black slavery and subjection, as well as exploited labour, ecocide, white supremacist and heteropatriarchal immigration policies, compulsory heterosexuality, gendered violence, and war and imperialism abroad (Alexander, 2005; Coulthard, 2014; King, 2013; Lawrence & Dua, 2005; Sharma & Wright, 2008; Smith, 2006; Spade, 2011; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Walcott, 2011; Walia, 2013; Wilderson, 2010; Wynter, 2003). The cumulative effect of these and other violences has been what Wynter (2003) described as the overrepresentation of the White, bourgeois, male, who rationalizes his dominion over those he deems to be irrational, affectable, and inferior[.] (Silva, 2007). Thus, with the advent and continued maintenance of the modern/colonial system, Othered ways of knowing and being are “disavowed (displaced, negated, and engulfed)” (Silva, 2009, p. 42). For Alfred (2004), colonialism is therefore “a total relation of power”, and must be understood in “consideration of how we as Indigenous peoples have lost the freedom to exist as Indigenous peoples in almost every single sphere of our existence” (p. 91). Meanwhile, Alexander (2005) emphasizes the ways “colonization has produced fragmentation and dismemberment at both the material and psychic levels” (p. 281). While we do not mean to suggest that the modern grammar is [not] totalizing in the sense that it forestalls resistance, we emphasize that [but] it affects nearly all realms of life for those inhabiting both its shine and its shadow. Discussing modernity’s violence with those whose existence and imaginaries have been framed by modernity is therefore a challenging task both in terms of intelligibility and in terms of affective resistance. This is exacerbated in neoliberal educational contexts driven by the desires of educational consumers to feel good, to look good and to be affirmed as ‘doing good’ (see Andreotti, 2014a). Social cartography is one approach that has allowed us to begin these challenging conversations with audiences that have varied investments in modernity’s “shine.”