The western regime of copyrights, patents and trademarks upholds an ontological system of colonialism and advance the project of totalizing settler dominion, predicated on beliefs that racialized subjects are incapable of ownership of knowledge. This process of enclosure and racialization is sustained through epistemic constructions, which makes debate a uniquely key cite for disruption.

On Settler Traditions of Place and Obsessions With Ownership Tewa philosopher Gregory Cajete (1994, 1999) emphasizes the importance of place within Indigenous epistemologies (see also Basso 1996; Deloria and Wildcat 2001; Kawagley and Barnhardt 1999; Pena 1998). The significance of place ˜ is connected with “bodies of knowledge, and practices resulting from direct interaction with the natural world” (Cajete 1994, 39). Cajete’s epistemology of place provides an analytic model of how to assess place as a progenitor of knowledge within the Western world. As indigenous epistemologies are rooted in a particular conception of nature, so is Western epistemology. However, the Western bodies of knowledge have been developed out of a deeply rooted anthropocentrism and hierarchized vision of the world (Plumwood 2002). White supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and colonialism coexist with anthropocentrism in the Western body of knowledge to create settler traditions of place. This is seen in the history of the slave trade, plantations, conceptions of manifest destiny, and the many other forms of violence enacted in pursuit of ownership. The Western body of knowledge produces a fetish of ownership that sits at the foundation of settler traditions of place. The Western imaginary encourages ownership and domination of the land, while simultaneously curtailing the possibilities and parameters of ownership in a racialized and gendered manner, delimiting who can own, what can be owned, and how things should be owned. In the United States, historical and contemporary examples of white-settler epistemic constructions of the natural world help illustrate settler traditions of place and their intersecting components (racialized, gendered, and economized understandings of land, self, and others). Terra nullius and the settler colonial push westward serve this notion in the historical register. Terra nullius, or the belief that prospective land for colonizing/settling is in fact empty, was predicated upon an understanding that only so-called civilized societies/peoples can own land (Pateman and Mills 2007). Despite the presence of many Indigenous nations in North America, European colonizers perceived the continent as empty, because only so-called uncivilized peoples populated it. The ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands and the extreme reluctance of settlers operating with the prevailing epistemology to acknowledge this reality provides ample evidence of contemporary settler relations to place. But a more specific example of how the white settler knowledge regime encourages a continued drive toward ownership can be seen in industrial agriculture and the genetic modification and patenting of crops and other products. As part of settler traditions of place, industrial food production and genetic engineering exhibit white supremacist, capitalistic, and settler understandings of the world. In pursuit of property, the West plunders natural resources from around the world and has laid claim to ownership over vast swaths of nature through patents and copyrights. In Biopiracy, Vandana Shiva (1997) powerfully illustrates how the Western world has pirated the seeds, plants, and knowledge of Indigenous peoples across the globe. These actions are justified by racialized and gendered perceptions of Indigenous knowledge holders, marking them as uncivilized and incapable of owning or properly cultivating their knowledge, seeds, and plants. The stolen seeds and plants are cultivated and manipulated at the genetic level, and subsequently patented for continued ownership and profit. The actors participating in these actions are situated within the white settler epistemology as successful and rational. From this perspective, these settler actors are simply realizing their full potential. These acts of settling are not the simple accumulation of property to individually settle-down, but are part of a continuous drive to pursue and consume property of all kinds and add it to a settled dominion. Industrial agriculture is the byproduct of the dominant Western epistemology that has normalized and rationalized the aggressive accumulation of massive amounts of land and other properties. This remains the norm despite the fact that the actions resulting from this knowledge system have displaced, dispossessed, and exploited many—primarily Indigenous communities and communities of color, but also poor white settlers. But due to the racialized nature of the Western knowledge regime, epistemic conditions have been cultivated in such a way that this deleterious perception of reality remains the norm for many of those who are oppressed by its mass operationalization. The need for a full understanding of the logic of domination that flourishes across Western society has been emphasized by activists, scholars, and educators alike, making an argument that there needs to be an intimate examination of taken-for-granted assumptions about the world (Martusewicz et al., 2011). Settler traditions of place impact the possibilities of place-based education, and if this educational model is broadly oriented toward social and ecological justice, then the body of knowledge that emerged from settler interactions with the natural world must be understood in its entirety. THREE CAMPS OF PLACE-BASED EDUCATION The praxis and scholarship surrounding place-based education has dealt with these epistemic traditions, but in an inconsistent manner. In response, I see placebased scholarship as falling into several camps that utilize/understand place and epistemology in a variety of ways. To simplify things, practitioners and scholars tend to fall within one of three camps: (1) The liberal place-based education cohort, most notably represented by David Sobel, is primarily concerned with fostering an education that begins with the community and the environment. This relationship is facilitated through an ideal of enlightened localism that seeks to create greater balance between the human and more-than-human while developing an academically successful pedagogy rooted in one’s “homeground” while remaining aware of the relationships between places and the larger ecological and social world (Sobel 2004, ii; Smith and Sobel 2010). Liberal place-based education challenges the dominant culture’s relationship with the natural world, but does little to challenge the taken-for-granted knowledge at the foundation of their perception of reality, specifically how a community comes into being through settlement, or how a community might be economically and socially fractured by white supremacy and capitalism. (2) The critical place-consciousness camp finds its spokesperson in David Gruenewald (2003)/Greenwood (2009, 2013a, 2013b). The bridged socialecological education found in Sobel’s work is also at the foundation of Greenwood’s conception of a place-based education. But his conception of critical-place consciousness pushes the boundaries by emphasizing the socially constructed nature and inherent conflict of places that are wrapped up in issues of colonization, race, class, gender, as well as “the ideological and material legacy of our collective inhabitation and place-making” (Greenwood 2013a, 93). Critical place-conscious education differs from the liberal interpretation, because “while place-based education is often framed as a method to improve school outcomes, place-conscious education can be framed as a philosophy that challenges educators to rethink the assumptions of schooling in the context of the places we inhabit and leave behind” (Greenwood 2013a, 95). The critical position does offer an explicit epistemic critique within its framework (Greenwood 2013a), but in this process of unlearning and shifting one’s epistemic position, it must be understood that Western conceptions of place play a deeper role in maintaining social realities. As such, place-based education must not only focus on how previous understandings of place can limit one’s ecological knowledge, relationship, and future, but must also center the role of place in maintaining settler colonialism and other systems of domination (Calderon 2014). 3) The most longstanding place-based educational tradition can be found embedded in the multitude of indigenous epistemologies and models of education. Indigenous place-based education has been represented by the work of Gregory Cajete (1994, 1999), Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley and Ray Barnhardt (1999, 2005), and Vine Deloria, Jr. and Daniel Wildcat (2001). Often, Indigenous modes of education offer differing perspectives on place and education primarily due to the nature of their operative knowledge systems, which carry preexisting ethics of social and ecological sustainability (Barnhardt and Kawagley 2005; Cajete 1994, 1999; Kawagley and Barnhardt 1999). Critical place-based education’s goal to go against the epistemic grain works in tandem with many Indigenous scholars. Kawagley and Barnhardt (1999) illustrate one of the primary tensions that needs to be reconciled when attempting a place-based education in schools dominated by Western perceptions of reality—Indigenous cultures maintain that “humans have a responsibility for maintaining a harmonious relationship with the natural world”; Western cultures harbor an anthropocentric ethic that reinforces the perceived right to “exercise dominion over nature to use for personal and economic gain” (120). This ethic of dominion is intimately connected with racialized and gendered ideas of private/embodied property and what kind of person has the right to own places. Schools that are dominated by an Anglo-American perception of reality are not placeless, because particular conceptions of place are already engrained into schooled knowledge, and preexist contemporary pedagogies of place. A prefigured relation to place is enmeshed with social technologies used by white settler societies to make sense of the social world. Although place is geographically and culturally specific, common interpretations of place are transmitted through ideologies and knowledge systems that travel beyond geographic specificity. Guided by available knowledge, the places with which we identify carry ontological implications (Basso 1996); the social world that we exist in shapes who we are and how we know ourselves in relation to the world—we are all emplaced (Greenwood 2013a). Our emplaced lives are embedded with socio-political, -cultural, -economic, and socio-epistemic implications (Marker 2006; Medina 2013; Pena 1998). As ˜ David Greenwood (2013a) suggests, to “really know a place is to understand how environment, culture, and politics have worked to shape it, and to appreciate that any particular place may have diverse and competing meaning for different groups or individuals” (94). With this in mind, it is crucial for future theorizations of place education to consider the epistemic norms associated with the politics of place. This consideration requires place-based educators to contextualize ecology and domination within the colonial mind (Greenwood 2009, 2013a). Place-based education must attend to the traditions informing contemporary politics of place that remain infected with the logics of domination.