Wrong Rocks Counterstorying a Curriculum of Erasure in Manahatta/n

Abstract

This study examines the public curriculum of settler colonial mythology told by monuments and memorials in New York City. We discuss the role these monuments play in the normalization of settler ignorance (Pewewardy et. al., 2018), of particular relevance now as teachers prepare to teach students in 2024 about what happened in 1624, celebrating Dutch settlement of New York City. Curriculum is not limited to schools and other sites of formal education, it exists in narratives that perpetrate Lenape erasure through public place based miseducation including ways in which a settler colonial curriculum of place is immortalized in the digital fabric of the internet that supports learning about these memorials by way of non-profit, and government-funded educational resources, and even video games. We center our work in these spaces, the public pedagogy that exists outside of formal school contexts. We curated these inherently pedagogical spaces (Simon, 2014) and through this curation, we aim to unsettle a dysconscious, settler colonial, public curriculum (Sandlin, 2010) which permeates many spaces in and near Manahatta/n.