Colonization, Education, and Indigenous Peoples

Abstract

The devastation of colonialism has shaped our shared, but different, experiences as Indigenous people. From our natural environment and relational structures that enabled collective wellbeing to our cultural knowledge systems to our languages, and ceremonial practices, colonialism has disrupted and fragmented our ways of being. Education was both a target and tool of colonialism, destroying and diminishing the validity and legitimacy of Indigenous education, while simultaneously replacing and reshaping it with an ‘education’ complicit with the colonial endeavour. Schooling as a formalised colonial structure served as a vehicle for wider imperialist ideological objectives. This chapter provides a context for understanding the deep connections between colonisation, education and Indigneous peoples, and introduces the chapters in this section that exemplify the ways colonisalim has played out in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Hawaii, Chile and Africa. Subsequently, the diversity and the similarities in the colonial experiences of Indigenous communities is evident, as imported systems of schooling were deliberately and purposefully imposed upon Indigenous lands and Peoples.