Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T11:06:44.944Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Uprooting Narratives: Legacies of Colonialism in the Neoliberal University

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2020

Melanie Bowman Open the ORCID record for Melanie Bowman [Opens in a new window]  and
María Rebolleda-Gómez Open the ORCID record for María Rebolleda-Gómez [Opens in a new window]
Melanie Bowman*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Minnesota, 831 Heller Hall, 271 19th Ave. South, Minneapolis, Minnesota55455
María Rebolleda-Gómez*
Affiliation:
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, 840 West Campus Drive, West Haven, Connecticut06516
*
Corresponding authors. Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
Corresponding authors. Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Two intertwined stories evince the influence of colonialism on Western universities. The first story centers on a conflict about wild rice research between the Anishinaabe people and the University of Minnesota. Underlying this conflict is a genetic notion of biological identity that facilitates the commodification of wild rice. This notion of identity is inextricably linked to agricultural control and expansion. The second story addresses the foundation of Western universities on the goals of civilization and capitalist productivity. These norms persist even in diversity efforts through a focus on individualized notions of difference rather than socially contextualized and politically significant identities. The tendency to produce both knowledge and knowers as commodities results in the alienation, individuation, and abstraction of objects of research and researchers themselves. Decolonial change demands that we learn the specific histories of our universities and disciplines, break disciplinary boundaries, and contest commodification in knowledge production.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 35 , Special Issue 1: Indigenizing and Decolonizing Feminist Philosophy , Winter 2020 , pp. 18 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © by Hypatia, Inc. 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1854 Treaty Authority—Grand Portage and Bois Forte bands of the Lake Superior Chippewa. 2018. Traditional harvesting and finishing. http://www.1854treatyauthority.org/wild-rice/traditional-harvesting-and-finishing.htmGoogle Scholar
American Indian Studies, University of Minnesota. 2019. History. https://cla.umn.edu/ais/about/history.Google Scholar
Baena, Victoria A. 2011. The Harvard Indian College. The Harvard Crimson, March 24. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/3/24/harvard-indian-american-native/Google Scholar
Beaulieu, David L. 1984. Curly hair and big feet: Physical anthropology and the implementation of land allotment on the White Earth Chippewa reservation. American Indian Quarterly 8 (4): 281–314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berlan, Jean-Pierre, and Lewontin, Richard C.. 1986. The political economy of hybrid corn. Monthly Review 38 (3): 35–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowman, Melanie. 2017. Institutions and solidarity: Wild rice research, relationships, and the commodification of knowledge. In Food justice in US and global contexts, ed. Werkheiser, Ian and Piso, Zachary. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cahill, Cathleen. 2011. Federal fathers and mothers: The United States Indian Service, 1869–1933. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Castree, Noel. 2003. Commodifying what nature? Progress in Human Geography. 27 (3): 273–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Charnley, Berris, and Radick, Gregory. 2013. Intellectual property, plant breeding and the making of Mendelian genetics. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44 (2): 222–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chirimuuta, Mazviita. 2015. Outside color: Perceptual science and the puzzle of color in philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarke, Ellen. 2010. The problem of biological individuality. Biological Theory 5 (4): 312–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cochrane, Willard W. 1993. The development of American agriculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Code, Lorraine. 1991. What can she know? Feminist theory and the construction of knowledge. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman.Google Scholar
Davenport, Charles B. 1911. Heredity in relation to eugenics. New York: Henry Holt and Company.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Dawn Rae. 2002. (Love is) the ability of not knowing: Feminist experience of the impossible in ethical singularity. Hypatia 17 (2): 145–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dews, C. L. Barney, and Law, Carolyn Leste, eds. 1995. This fine place so far from home: Voices of academics from the working class. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Doerfler, Jill. 2015. Those who belong: Identity, family, blood, and citizenship among the White Earth Anishinaabeg. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.Google Scholar
Edman, F. Robert. 1969. A study of wild rice in Minnesota. Minnesota Resources Commission.Google Scholar
Epstein, Steven. 1996. Impure science: AIDS, activism, and the politics of knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google ScholarPubMed
Fabricant, Florence. 1985. Reaping wild rice by machine or hand. New York Times, October 30. https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/30/garden/reaping-wild-rice-by-machine-or-hand.html.Google Scholar
Foster, Jane A., and Neufeld, Karen-Anne McVey. 2013. Gut-brain axis: How the microbiome influences anxiety and depression. Trends in Neurosciences 36 (5): 305–12.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Foster, Ken, and Zhu, ZanHua. 1999. Hybrid wild rice production utilizing cytoplasmic-genetic male sterility system. US Patent 5,955,648. Filed September 21.Google Scholar
Geniusz, Wendy Makoons. 2009. Our knowledge is not primitive: Decolonizing botanical Anishinaabe teachings. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press.Google Scholar
Gudbjartsson, Daniel F., et al. 2015. Large-scale whole-genome sequencing of the Icelandic population. Nature Genetics 47 (5): 435–44.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hays, W. M. 1905. Breeding problems. In Proceedings of the American Breeders’ Association, vol. 1, ed. Hays, W. M., Hansen, N. E., and Mumford, F. B.Washington, D.C.: American Breeders Association.Google Scholar
Hu-DeHart, Evelyn. 2000. The diversity project: Institutionalizing multiculturalism or managing differences? Academe 86 (5): 38–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hull, David L. 2001. Science and selection: Essays on biological evolution and the philosophy of science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Iverson, Susan VanDeventer. 2007. Camouflaging power and privilege: A critical race analysis of university diversity policies. Educational Administration Quarterly 43 (5): 586–611. DOI:10.1177/0013161X07307794.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, David R., and Percich, James A.. 1992. Wild rice domestication, fungal brown spot disease, and the future of commercial production in Minnesota. Plant Disease 72 (12): 1193–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kennard, C., Phillips, L., and Porter, A.. 2002. Genetic dissection of seed shattering, agronomic, and color traits in American wildrice (Zizania palustris var. Interior L) with a comparative map. Theoretical and Applied Genetics 105 (6–7): 1075–86.Google Scholar
Key, Scott. 1996. Economics or education: The establishment of American land-grant universities. Journal of Higher Education 67 (2): 196–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kimmelman, Barbara A. 1983. The American Breeders’ Association: Genetics and eugenics in an agricultural context, 1903–13. Social Studies of Science 13 (2): 163–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kokotovich, Adam. 2014. Contesting risk: Science, governance and the future of plant genetic engineering. PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota.Google Scholar
Kuokkanen, Rauna. 2007. Reshaping the university: Responsibility, indigenous epistemes, and the logic of the gift. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.Google Scholar
LaDuke, Winona. 2005. Wild rice: Maps, genes, and patents. In Recovering the sacred: The power of naming and claiming. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press.Google Scholar
LaDuke, Winona. 2007. Ricekeepers. Orion Magazine. https://orionmagazine.org/article/ricekeepers/.Google Scholar
Lewontin, Richard C. 1983. The organism as the subject and object of evolution. Scientia 77 (18): 63–82.Google Scholar
Lewontin, Richard C. 2000. The triple helix: Gene, organism, and environment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Longino, Helen E. 2004. How values can be good for science. In Science, values, and objectivity, ed. Machamer, Peter K. and Wolters, Gereon. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Meissner, Shelbi Nahwilet, and Whyte, Kyle. 2018. Theorizing indigeneity, gender, and settler colonialism. In The Routledge companion to the philosophy of race, ed. Taylor, Paul C., Alcoff, Linda Martín, and Anderson, Luvell. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Minnesota Legislature. 2016. Senate. Omnibus Supplemental Appropriations Bill. HF 2749. May 3, 2016. https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/text.php?session=ls89&number=HF2749&session_number=0&session_year=2016&version=listGoogle Scholar
Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians. 1999, 526 172. US Supreme Court.Google Scholar
Mohajeri, M. Hasan, La Fata, Giorgio, Steinert, Robert E., and Weber, Peter. 2018. Relationship between the gut microbiome and brain function. Nutrition Reviews 76 (7): 481–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mohanty, Satya. 1997. Literary theory and the claims of history: Postmodernism, objectivity, multicultural politics. Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Moya, Paula M. 2002. Learning from experience: Minority identities, multicultural struggles. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Moss, Lenny. 2003. What genes can't do. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Nagar, Richa. 2014. Muddying the waters: Coauthoring feminisms across scholarship and activism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oyama, Susan. 2000. Evolution's eye: A systems view of the biology–culture divide. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. n.d. The Harvard Indian College. https://www.peabody.harvard.edu/node/477.Google Scholar
Preserving the Integrity of Manoomin in Minnesota. 2011. http://www.cfans.umn.edu/diversity/webtext/Wild-Rice/WhitePaper-FinalVersion2011.pdf.Google Scholar
Radick, Gregory. 2013. The professor and the pea: Lives and afterlives of William Bateson's campaign for the utility of Mendelism. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44 (2): 280–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robbins, Jim. 2018. Native knowledge: What ecologists are learning from Indigenous people. Yale Environment 360, April 26. https://e360.yale.edu/features/native-knowledge-what-ecologists-are-learning-from-indigenous-people.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, Charles E. 1967. Factors in the development of genetics in the United States: Some suggestions. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 22 (1): 27–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sangtin Writers Collective and Richa Nagar. 2006. Playing with fire: Feminist thought and activism through seven lives in India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Saount, Claudio. 2014. Invasion of America. ehistory. http://usg.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=eb6ca76e008543a89349ff2517db47e6.Google Scholar
Scheman, Naomi. 2012. Toward a sustainable epistemology. Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture, and Policy. 26 (3–4): 471–89. doi:10.1080/02691728.2012.727194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scheman, Naomi. 2014. Empowering canaries: Sustainability, vulnerability, and the ethics of epistemology. International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. 7 (1): 169–91. DOI:10.2979/intjfemappbio.7.1.169.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silva-Zolezzi, Irma, et al. 2009. Analysis of genomic diversity in Mexican Mestizo populations to develop genomic medicine in Mexico. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (21): 8611–16.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999/2012. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. 2d edition. New York: Zed Books Ltd.Google Scholar
TallBear, Kim. 2003. DNA, blood, and racializing the tribe. Wicazo Sa Review 18 (1): 81–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
TallBear, Kim. 2013. Genomic articulations of indigeneity. Social Studies of Science. 43 (4): 509–33. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43284191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thurtle, Phillip. 1996. The creation of genetic identity. Stanford Electronic Humanities Review. volume 5, supplement: Cultural and technological incubations of fascism. https://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/5-supp/text/thurtle.html.Google Scholar
Tuck, Eve, and Wayne Yang, K.. 2012. Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1): 1–40.Google Scholar
Wade, Peter. 2017. Comparing genomic narratives of human diversity in Latin American nations. Ethnic and Racial Studies 41 (6): 1074–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, Rachel Durkee, and Doerfler, Jill. 2009. Wild rice: The Minnesota legislature, a distinctive crop, GMOs, and Ojibwe perspectives. Hamline Law Review 32: 499–527.Google Scholar
White, Désirée and Rabago-Smith, Montserrat. 2011. Genotype–phenotype associations and human eye color. Journal of Human Genetics 56 (1): 5–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Whyte, Kyle Powys. 2018. What do Indigenous knowledges do for Indigenous peoples? In Traditional ecological knowledge: Learning from indigenous practices for environmental sustainability, ed. Nelson, Melissa K. and Shilling, Dan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, Shawn. 2008. Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Winnipeg: Fernwood.Google Scholar