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I finished up the school year where I work last week, said my goodbyes to kids and families, had my last interview with the director of the school, cleaned up the indoor and outdoor spaces I was responsible for, and handed in my keys. The end of the school year is always bittersweet, but June 2020 was particularly difficult and fraught for several reasons. The corona virus pandemic had forced us to put all of our offerings online, an unsatisfactory option for most institutions of teaching and learning, but particularly onerous for early childhood schools. The murder of George Floyd (one more Black human being in a long line of recent and historical killings of black men and women by white people in power); the national and world wide demonstrations and outcry against the killings, police brutality, and white supremacy; the debates around racism and “public” safety; and the reactionary efforts to crush and belittle these demonstrations: all of this oriented, galvanized and inspired some of us to action, but also exposed some of the rips in the social fabric of our cozy, little, private, with a sliding  scale tuition, progressive school.

There is also immense uncertainty about the upcoming school year in terms of all the changes we will have to go through to meet various corona virus protocols, how we respond to the challenges of being a truly progressive, caring, inclusive, sustainable, abolitionist, free educational community. At the moment we are not even sure which teachers will be coming back since layoffs were announced because of mandatory smaller classroom populations. So the usual opportunity, for however short of a time period, for some rest and relaxation before we get ready for the hustle and grind of teaching seems dubious at best. How can we best go about practicing self-care, rethink what we are doing, and recommit to the vocation of teaching and raising “our” children, when the whole cultural landscape is bristling with basic, pragmatic health and safety considerations, fundamental ethical, political and spiritual problems, and frightening personal and economic issues?

James Baldwin writes “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” We got (get) nowhere in dealing with the corona virus when (while) leaders had (have) their heads in the sand about the nature and extent of the problem. The savagery of police brutality against people of color will not go away until we confront white supremacy, privilege and power, and understand how education is inevitably implicated in both the reproduction of power and the status quo, and the dismantling, reimagining and reconstructing of society. Each one of us can only find a way to a happy adulthood, one where we can “make a living,” and live with dignity, grace and meaningful purpose, when we begin to acknowledge and deal with the individual obstacles, personal traumas, and inner demons that hold us back and drive us to despair. Facing up to what’s going on, showing up, being present, staying with the trouble, that is how we are going to change for the better, both as individuals and communities.

I am what is called a place based, outdoor educator. That has a lot of implications for what I do. Namely, I take the environment as the primary teacher, kids learn best when they are outside, and I orient my pedagogy around “sustainable” practices of reciprocity wherein the earth gives us everything we need and teaches us how to live, and we must in turn take care of and respect the earth as our benefactor and guide. I want to situate a place-based pedagogy in the ethical and spiritual crises of our times, and the most direct way to do that is invoke Vine Deloria’s classic book on spirituality, ethics, politics, environmentalism, the earth and Native American religion, God is Red.

In the book, Deloria contrasts the Black Civil Rights Movement with the American Indian Movement and asks the question why the two radical movements toward freedom and equality for subjugated peoples did not, have not, coalesced around a common core movement for social justice. His answer lies in discovering different spiritual and ethical sources and frameworks behind the two movements; Native American (Indian) spirituality grounded in a sense of place, the earth, specific sacred locales, and African American (Black) spirituality grounded in the avowed Christian goals of a universal brotherhood of “Man” under one God.

“The Civil Rights Movement was probably the last full-scale effort to realize the avowed goals of the Christian religion. For more than a century, the American political system had proclaimed the brotherhood of man as seen politically in the concepts of equality and justice equally administered under the law. Equality under the law, however, was a secularized and generalized interpretation of the Christian brotherhood of man—the universal appeal of individuals standing equally before God now seen as people standing equally before the law and secular institutions. While the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund fought a series of brilliant court battles leading up to the great Supreme Court decisions, in the background certainly lurked the great Christian message of the brotherhood of man. A majority of Americans rejected this secular version of the brotherhood and sought to prevent its realization because of long-standing attitudes that people of color were necessarily inferior.”

In this way Deloria pulls back the ideological curtain hiding the machinations of Western culture playing itself on the grand historical stage built in Europe, Africa, the Americas, Vietnam, the Middle East, and the rest of the world. While some might say that he does not give enough wait to the secular humanist traditions and autonomous spiritual and cultural sources that informed the Civil Rights movement, he states plainly “there had to be a point in Western history at which the avowed beliefs of the Christian religion were placed on the agenda to discover if they could become a reality.” From Deloria’s perspective, despite real victories and substantive changes because of the Civil Rights Movement, the avowed beliefs of Christianity ultimately folded into an increasingly desperate rationalizations of a material-psychic-symbolic society based on greed, fear, oppression, exploitation and racism.

“The collapse of the Civil Rights movement, the concern with Vietnam and the war, the escape to drugs, the rise of the power movements, and the return to Mother Earth can all be understood as desperate efforts of groups of people to flee abstract articulations of belief and superficial values and find authenticity where’ve it could be found. It was at this point that Indians became popular, and widespread and intense interest in Indians, as seen in fantasy literature and anthologies, seemed to indicate that Americans wanted more from Indians than they did from other minority groups. For many people, the stoic , heroic, and noble Indian who had lived an idyllic existence prior to contact with whites seemed to hold the key to survival and promised to provide new meanings for American life.”

Anyone who does work in outdoor and environmental education ( and everyone who sees transformative possibilities in the environmental movement around climate change) should educate themselves as to the role “Native Americans” as an idea have played/play in the (white) political cultural imagination involved with any “return” to Nature. The Boy Scouts, summer camps, James Fenimore Cooper’s “Last of the Mohicans” (and the leatherstocking novels), all the plastic shamans and wannabe Native nature guides, and the avalanche of misleading children’s literature around indigenous people, among many other things, combine to form an intense ideological bottleneck around the misappropriation of indigenous culture in the name of an avowedly good environmental educational movement. With incredible breadth of vision and clarity of insight, Deloria lays out the parameters for a rigorous analysis of the whole problem confronting we the people. “Camus has properly identified our real choices—history or nature, time or space. While we would like our personal preferences to be realized , if we have any sanity, we must admit the world outside our perspective has a bit of substance to it and must certainly be constructed on certain principles through which history and nature are related. It is therefore our task to examine with a great deal of seriousness the possible relationships that these two ideas have and the probable configuration that a new understanding of history and nature and time and space would give us.”

This is a call to arms, heart and mind. I challenge, I invite, anyone who is avowedly committed to the vocation of teaching, or is considering such a commitment, to take up this investigation, to walk this path, wherein we will examine, in a collaborative, awkward, stumbling, bumbling, heroic and humble way, “the possible relationships between these two ideas have and the probable configuration that a new understanding of history and nature and time and space would give us.” Deloria is not content with a superficial cultural analysis of ideas. Rather he initiates a direct facing up to, acknowledging, and reckoning with the cultural stories, traditions, ideologies and conditioning that have marked, privileged, propped up, protected, defaced and denuded the land and our bodies. By contrasting the domestic ideologies of the American Indian with the Western European immigrant he reveals a “fundamental difference” of “great philosophical importance.” “American Indians hold their lands-places as having the highest possible meaning, and all their statements are made with this reference point in mind. Immigrants review the movement of their ancestors across the continent as a steady progression of basically good events and experiences, thereby placing history—time—in the best possible light. When one group is concerned with the philosophical problem of space and the other with the philosophical problem of time, then the statements of either group do not make much sense when transferred from one context to the other without proper consideration of what is taking place.”

We have to come to grips with the real conditions of the place(s) from which we teach and the cultural aims of our pedagogies in relation to the past, present and future. The current events unfolding right now in our schools, our communities, in the United States, in the sovereign native nations, in North America are complicated strands of a general contestation from within, around, and for the cultural and material landscape of North America, and ultimately of the Earth. This struggle is playing out in the debates and actions around police violence, public safety, reallocating monetary resources, and the right to protest; the struggle around national and local monuments and indigenous sacred places; and the embodiment of place based education and the teaching of culture. People in thousands of local communities are protesting, organizing and doing the little things to develop a general political consciousness around an ethic of care and liberation. The House and the Senate have passed competing bills to respond to the demands for police accountability, the end of police violence, a whole new way of looking at public safety, and addressing structural white supremacy. The statue of Christopher Columbus was just taken down in Wooster Square by the city of New Haven, and as my brother and fellow earth educator Gamaliel Moses says, “New Haven big things a gwan, Columbus, I mean Com buss us statue, to be officially taken down, now to change the curriculum and the name of the school!” Now the real job of changing the curriculum and teaching the youth right has to start.

The Three Sisters Collective along with other groups is advocating taking down all statues monumentalizing the “achievements” of the infamously cruel ( as opposed to ordinary, every day of the mill cruel I suppose), Spanish conquistador Juan de Onate ([https://www.sfreporter.com/news/2020/06/17/a-shift-in-the-tide/]). He was known for among other things the Acoma Massacre where 800-1000 Acoma Indians were killed. The 500 survivors were “put on trial” and sentenced to personal servitude for 20 years and any man over 25 had a foot cut off. Educational historians are responsible for documenting and analyzing the material and symbolic violence that intertwines with the edifying, heroic narrative of the rise of the public schools in the United States. Teachers at every level, in every cultural site, need to reassess, as individuals, collaboratives and communities, what and how they teach and the ends of education. Meanwhile back on the ranch, Trump issued an order promising to punish protestors involved with defacing or removing statues and monuments with up to ten years in prison, and threatened to withdraw federal aid to states and municipalities that do not actively protect monuments in an effort to gin up support for his “law and order” presidency. In his 4th of July Speech in the shadow of Mount Rushmore (know to the Sioux Indians as Six Grandfathers) said “our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.”

Deloria emphatically intones “Western European peoples have never learned to consider the nature of the world discerned from a spatial point of view ….The very essence of Western European identity involves the assumption that time proceeds in a linear fashion; further it assumes that at a particular point in the unraveling of this sequence, the peoples of Western Europe became the guardians of the world. The same ideology that sparked the Crusades, the Age of Exploration, the Age of Imperialism, and the recent crusade against Communism all involve the affirmation that time is peculiarly related to the destiny of the people of Western Europe. And later, of course , the United States.” White Americans need to, ought to, if they would be on the side of the people and the earth, open their eyes to a place based, nature, earth oriented value system, ethics, politics, pedagogy, and spirituality. We all need to come to a reckoning with our shared historical past in the context of where we come from, where we live on the earth, and where we are going.

And here’s a twist for educators that is fundamental to the whole problem of cultural and existential identity, earth based spirituality and overcoming white supremacy and class exploitation. Children are not born racist. They learn to be that way and how to operate in a world centered around white supremacy, patriarchy and economic exploitation. Nor are children born, and this might be a little more controversial, born Black or white, Native, “boy” or “girl,” rather they are immediately introduced into the sexual, imaginary, psychological, social, cultural, symbolic orders and orderings of the communities of which they are a part. Nor are they born alienated from the earth. As creatures of the earth, and particularly human creatures, children are born into this world with a body, a mind, feelings and a spirit that is open to the world and its interconnectedness. Their natality acts as counterpart to the evolutionary conditioning which they bring into the world. And then, and when, they are subjected to conditions of care and abuse, education and miseducation, conditioning and liberation they are caught up in a lifelong drama of me-not me, us-them, trauma-healing, alienation-reconciliation. So what part in this enculturation, world building and earth living educational drama are teachers and caretakers to play?

James Baldwin, in “Talk to Teachers,” makes a distinction that will help us to proceed. James Baldwin argues that children who are white are indoctrinated to both believe in, and be buttressed by, their supposed superiority, whereas black children are subjugated to both believe in and be trapped by their supposed inferiority. We can extend this distinction to clarify and explore different forms of superiority and subjection to include class exploitation, patriarchy, heteronormativity, alienation from the earth, and their intersectionality. Insofar as we participate in reactionary, racist, oppressive institutions, structures, practices, patterns and actions, we engage in, simultaneously, indoctrination and subjugation. But insofar as we align ourselves with the earth, with compassion and understanding for one another, with anti-racist, abolitionist teaching, with practices, stories, and ways of living and forms of community that honor our interconnectedness and dependence on one another and the earth, we engage in the transformative educational practices of liberation and care.

To critically interrogate our teaching and schooling practices we need to examine the place(s) from which we teach, where we live, where our students go to school and where they live, in relation to the cultural and natural geographies that shape the education of desire. We need to examine how different historical narratives and different groups of people have treated the land, explain the present, and envision the future. Children are trying to figure out who they are in relation to their families, their communities, their teachers, their schools, their “peers,” fashion, music, movies, tv, toys, video games, food, drugs, alcohol, police, the criminal justice system, hospitals, banking institutions, stores, corporations, money, their homes, the streets, the parks, the plants, the animals, the trees, the woods, the air, the rivers, lakes, rain and oceans, the weather, the rocks, the elements, the sources of energy, the sun. Children are trying to figure out who they in relationship to other people, the plants, the animals, and the world.

Children, whether they come from privileged backgrounds and are being indoctrinated, or come from abjected backgrounds and being subjugated, all children are being enculturated into a society. “The crucial paradox which confronts us here is is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. The boys and girls who were born during the Third Reich , when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians” (James Baldwin). But the paradox is that “as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself and make his own decisions…to ask questions… to decide whether there is a god or not….and then learn to live with those questions, this is the way he achieves his own identity.” But a society that desires to reproduce itself is “not really anxious to have that sort of person around.”

Both Vine Deloria and Baldwin certainly agree that “what passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors.” To establish the legitimacy of American democracy involves among other things to radically transform our schools so that children, all children, can both develop the ability to look at the world for themselves, ask questions, make decisions, and reconnect with the earth and each other in civilized, humane, caring and compassionate ways. Baldwin, after humbly acknowledging that he is not a teacher, writes that if he were a teacher he would to try to make his students “know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger—and that it belongs to him. …I would suggest to him that he is living , at the moment, in an enormous province. America is not the world , and if America is going to become a nation , she must find a way—and this child must help her to find a way, —to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy.”

Vine Deloria writes “Sacred places are the foundation of all other beliefs and practices because they represent the presence of the sacred on our lives. They properly inform us that we are not larger than nature and that we have responsibilities to the rest of the natural world that transcend our own personal desires and wishes. This lesson must be learned by each generation; unfortunately the technology of industrial society always leads us in the other direction…Who will find peace with the lands? The future of humankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things. Who will listen to the trees, the animals and the birds, the voices of the places of the land?” The curriculum thread that must weave through all the subjects, and the grades, and all “progressive” teaching and learning is how we can come to understand our lives, in relation with, and as a part of, the rest of the natural world. How can we learn to love, honor, respect and take care of the natural world, and ourselves and each other as part of this natural world, and take up our responsibilities to all living things?

Baldwin in summoning up what he would do as a teacher rhetorically addresses a young black male student while indirectly addressing teachers and students of all races. Vine Deloria doesn’t put much stock in the idea that the children of European settler colonists, and the newer immigrants to this country will rise to his challenge to listen to the voices of the places of the land, but he asks the question anyway because he doesn’t see any other way to turn things around. We are at a reckoning. Each day when the sun rises we are called to be present to the earth and each other. Children can be indoctrinated and subjugated into the machinery of unjust, ultimately unsustainable society; or children can be cared for and educated to listen to the ways we are all connected with each other and the earth. The land “calls for the integration of lands and people in harmonious unity. The lands wait for those who can discern their rhythms. The peculiar genius of each continent—each river valley, the rugged mountains, the placid lakes—all call for relief from the constant burden of exploitation.” Will we listen ? Will we listen to each other? Will we heed the call?

Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural  History of Mosses, talks about the “web of reciprocity” that connects us to one another and with all living things, and all the “small, everyday ways” we can honor, respect, give thanks, and fulfill our “caregiving responsibilities” to the people and to the earth. “It’s important that we honor the different paths that lead to knowledge, the teachers in the oral tradition, the teachers in the written tradition, and the teachers among the plants. It’s the time we should also turn our thoughts to our own responsibilities. In the web of reciprocity, what is our special gift, our responsibility that we offer to the plants in turn? Our ancient teachers tell us that the role of human beings is respect and stewardship.” Let us live up to our responsibilities, rise to the challenge of each new day, approach each moment with an enthusiastic curiosity, and learn how to live harmoniously with each other and the earth.