Chapter 8: Confronting Colonial Blindness in Citizenship Education: Recognizing Colonization, Self-Determination, and Sovereignty as Core Knowledge for Elementary Social Studies Teacher Education

While important work has been done to bridge multicultural and citizenship education, very little has been done to challenge colonial thinking and actions in citizenship education. The call for more inclusion of identities related to races, ethnicities, religions, and languages is not new; but while we acknowledge social studies scholars have worked against “color blindness” in citizenship education, we draw on the work of Mexican/Tigua scholar Dolores Calderón to interrogate the ways such approaches remain “colonial blind” by refusing to interrogate the settler colonial context in which citizenship education takes place. In this chapter we wonder how rights and responsibilities might be reconfigured if citizenship education recognized Indigenous sovereignty? In addition, what possibilities emerge if citizenship education attended not only to civil rights, but to treaty rights as well, or if social studies educators recognized that all democratic education takes place on Indigenous lands?