Colonization, Education, and Indigenous Peoples

Building back better: Imagining an occupational therapy for a post‐COVID‐19 world

“…Motivated by greed and entitlement and justified by a perverted sense of racial and religious superiority, colonialism—in the past and in the present—involves the systematic use of power to exert control over other people; appropriate and commodify their territories, waters, and resources; settle their lands; exploit their labour; erase their cultural and spiritual practices and languages; and establish and preserve inequitable access to opportunities and services (Hammell, 2022 ). Colonialism constructed hierarchical classificatory systems that positioned White people as superior to all others, imposed binary genders and positioned men as superior to women, and established class hierarchies that ranked groups according to their proximity to capital (Pihama, 2019 ). These constructed hierarchies continue to determine occupational opportunities in settler‐colonial nations, unfairly advantaging straight, able‐bodied White people (and especially cis‐men) from middle and upper classes while disadvantaging poor people, Indigenous people, people of colour, people with disabilities, queer, trans and gender diverse people, and people from a diversity of religious, ethnic, and cultural traditions.…”

“…Fundamental to colonial ideology is the Judeo‐Christian belief that humans are entitled to dominion over nature and that the natural environment is a commodity, or “resource” that people are entitled to subdue, manage, and exploit (Pihama, 2019 ). This deeply rooted belief is visible within the occupational therapy literature, wherein Anglophone theorists have portrayed all people as having an innate and irresistible urge to achieve mastery and superiority over the environment (for discussion, see Hammell, 2020a ).…”

“…In the service of this neoliberal agenda, governments cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy, reduce spending on the social programmes that assist those forced to the margins, privatise public resources and services, depress wages and worker benefits, and slash the regulations and oversights that constrain the ability of private businesses to maximise profits (Esposito & Perez, 2014 ; Hammell, 2020a , 2020b ). Neoliberalism is regarded by scholars as being a form of covert colonialism (e.g., Gruber & Scherling, 2020 ; Pihama, 2019 ) that effectively entrenches existing inequities of power and perpetuates White dominance. In so doing, it has simultaneously widened existing economic inequalities both within and between nations and has had a catastrophic impact on the natural environment, which is viewed by colonialists and neoliberals alike as a resource to be exploited for private profit.…”

The Promise of Education: Schooling Journeys in the Southwestern Pacific

“…In the 1960s and 1970s, as more young men traveled for tertiary education, many established more radical networks of anticolonial thought and activism. Although these networks linked the southwestern Pacific to Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and even North America, local histories of schooling in the independent states of the southwestern Pacific contrast dramatically with histories of schooling in settler-colonial contexts, where school was an overt part of genocide, linguicide, and the cultural elimination of Indigenous peoples (Battiste 2004;Ka'ai-Mahuta 2011;Morgan 2019;Pihama and Lee-Morgan 2019). In countries including Canada, the United States, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, residential mission schools played a shameful part in settler domination and dispossession of Indigenous groups.…”

Sustainable Community Health

“…The disruptions to indigenous ways of life in the process of colonization and its precursor, racism (Axelsson, Kukutai, & Kippen, 2016a;Pihama & Lee-Morgan, 2019), have contributed to health disparities affecting indigenous communities. The intergenerational marginalization experiences of indigenous people by (1) income, (2) education, (3) employment, (4) housing, and (5) community infrastructure further negatively impact their utilization of public healthcare services (Reading & Wien, 2009;Kolahdooz et al, 2015).…”