The whiteness of green: Racialization and environmental education

Abstract

Numerous research studies have explored how institutions such as schools are produced as white spaces. Whiteness is a socio‐spatial process that constitutes particular bodies as possessing the normative, ordinary power to enjoy social privilege. Within the Canadian colonial context, whiteness has been produced historically through the violent confiscation of land and resources from Indigenous Peoples. This violence has been silenced through grand narratives of Canadian “tolerance,” and white‐settler fantasies of the Canadian landscape as empty and wild. Many environmental education programs continue to rely upon and reproduce these colonial ideas of race and space. Escaping the classroom, Canadian environmental education programs propose to advance personal and educational decolonization through experiential land‐based learning. Integrating the discussions in anti‐racist, anti‐colonial education with the literature on race and nature, this qualitative article draws from student interviews and artefacts to interrogate how whiteness continues to be normalized within environmental education through various dominant narratives of Canadian nation building, such as: the disaffiliation of whiteness from the violence of colonialism, reifying Canadianness as goodness and innocence; the ongoing erasure of Indigenous Peoples and histories from the land; and the reification of wilderness as an essentialized, empty space. These narratives continue to entitle white people to occupy and claim originary status in Canada, signifying wilderness and the environment as a white space.

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