"Oklahoma was empty"

Storying Land in Oklahoma Land Run Settler Memory

Abstract

Schooling as an institution has long been looked to as sites that construct and reproduce social inequities. This work of schooling as an institution is partly rooted in the reproduction of cultural memory, especially that of whiteness, capitalist patriarchy, and settler colonialism as a way to justify ongoing settler presence. In this paper, one such example is examined to illustrate the ways in which Oklahoma elementary school Land Run re-enactments do particular work to reify whiteness and settler colonial memory. I draw on Bruyneel’s conceptual framing of 'settler memory' to understand how adults who participated in Land Run re-enactments as children remember and make meaning of this event now, particularly in the storying of land. In utilizing a critical ethnographic inquiry with adult Oklahomans’ experiences and meaning-making, I find that adults 1) look to the ways this curricular experience instilled an affective belonging or othering rooted in white spatialization, 2) make meaning from Indigenous erasure, and 3) make connections around land theft rooted in whiteness. The Oklahoma Land Run re-enactments serve as one contextual example of a larger narrative of Indigenous dispossession, producing particular narratives in the storying of land and settler presence that call for greater interrogation.