Teaching Slavery and Settlement: Plantation Pedagogy in Currents of Conquest

Bayley Marquez

This study examines the interconnection between Black and Native American educational history through a focus on the Industrial education model of the Hampton Agricultural and Normal Institute. Scholars have noted that this model was highly influential, shaping education in the Black South, Indian country, and internationally, in Africa as well as in locations in the Pacific such as Hawaii and the Philippines. Through an archival analysis, I examine the way teachers, administrators, staff, and policy makers who supported the Hampton model of education discussed industrial education for different racial groups in comparison to each other. I argue that this model of education rested on racist language that tried to reframe slavery in the South as having educational benefits to slaves. By justifying slavery as educational, the Hampton Industrial education model focused on teaching Black, Indigenous, and other people of color to value labor and proximity to white civilization as a means of learning. This form of pedagogy was linked to policies that resulted in the dispossession of Indigenous land, for example in the use of allotment as an both a redistributive tactic and aspirational educational program. These connections between justifying slavery and land dispossession as educational, inform my analysis of the interrelated processes of slavery and settlement and how they are constituted in educational spaces.

About Bayley Marquez

Bayley J. Marquez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park and an Indigenous scholar from the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians. As an Indigenous scholar, she acknowledges that her work and scholarship takes place on Piscataway land, former plantation land, and within a land grant university funded by the seizure and sale of Indigenous lands. With a focus on space, land, material relations, and schooling, this acknowledgement is necessary to position her work within the structure of settler colonialism and her own lived experiences. Her research interests include settler colonial theory, Indigenous education, Black education, the history of education, abolitionist university studies, and critical ethnic studies. Her academic work is positioned at the intersection of settler colonialism, imperialism, conquest, and other instantiations of racialized power. Her research underscores the connections and intersections between Indigenous education and Black education, particularly the pedagogical projects that affected both groups and became a part of commonsense understandings of schooling. Her archival research has been supported by the Ford Foundation and the Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues. She has received a number of awards including the College of Arts and Humanities Junior Faculty Summer Fellowship and a UMD Independent Scholarship, Research, and Creativity Award. Her co-written work has been published in the edited volume Health and Social Issues of Native American Women and she has articles forthcoming in American Quarterly and Feminist Formations.