Chapter 26: Working to Unsettle Settler Colonialism: (While) Tripping Over My Whiteness

Through a critical race and anti-colonial lens, social studies education is understood to serve as a hegemonic tool (re)inforcing settler colonialism including the maintenance of whiteness and white supremacy through the perpetuation of nationalist narratives, dominant discourses, and other normalizing logics as well as through ongoing attempts to eliminate Indigenous peoples, histories, and knowledge systems. Within this two-pronged qualitative inquiry, the author considers her identity as a white settler and the ways her nuanced racialized understandings have developed over time. Second, she examines how as a white settler teacher, she contributes to and is implicated in her students’ perceptions of their racializations in both critical and non-critical ways. Insights from this inquiry have the potential to inform the broader work of social studies education as teachers work to unsettle settler colonialism through the dismantling of whiteness and white supremacy and the authentic integration of Indigenous voices, histories, and knowledge systems.