I can think of about 100 other things I’d rather be doing than writing about someone ‘gamifying’ settler colonialism in their classroom, but here it is. I encountered the description of the game through an ironic twist when I asked educators to scan the edu influencers they follow to see what they do - and don’t - tweet about. Someone tagged in just such an influencer, and so I scanned his timeline.
John Meehan created Dream Rush as “welcome” game that begins on the first day of class to “empower” students, and then the game continues throughout the year. The game begins by dividing students into “five competing ‘wagon trains’”, clearly placing them in the settler colonialist role. The icons for teams seem to depict a cowboy with a gun, a nun with a bible, and other settlers who fish and farm. Meehan recently published “EdRenaline Rush” with Dave Burgess’ press, a brand and marketing network I’ve previously critiqued here and here. Alice Keeler, an edu influencer with 150k followers, featured Meehan’s game on her blog. The book also contains similar passages, so these ideas have been approved by an editor and promoted by a powerful marketing network.
Meehan presents the continent as “uncharted” (above), a “vast, unexplored frontier of the American wilderness” (see the slide about rope). Historically, that reasoning fueled the logic of colonial conquest. It’s also completely false. The ‘unexplored’ continent was full of Indigenous Nations, which you can begin to get a sense of by exploring the resources Dr. Debbie Reese has gathered here. (Note: the first published draft of this piece featured a map that Dr. Reese advised me was inaccurate, so I removed it.)
In Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes “By the time of European invasions, Indigenous peoples had occupied and shaped every part of the Americas, established extensive trade networks and roads, and were sustaining their populations by adapting to specific natural environments, but they also adapted nature to suit human ends.” Dunbar-Ortiz goes on to quote David Wade Chambers: “the Pre-Columbian Americas were laced together with a complex system of roads and paths which became the roadways adopted by the early settlers and indeed were ultimately transformed into major highways.”
Depicting the land as uncharted and unexplored erases the very existence of Native peoples. “Invisibility is the modern form of racism against Native people,” Rebecca Nagle writes.
I honestly don’t see any non-oppressive option for dealing with the genocide of Native peoples when you frame colonialism as a game. How would a game like this deal with the massacres of Indigenous people? If it ignores them, then historical truth is overlooked. If it makes massacres part of the game, how does that treat Indigenous peoples with dignity?
I also have to ask how Indigenous students would feel on a first day of school when they are asked to take up the role of a settler. Dr. Debbie Reese argues that we should “Never assume you don’t have Native kids in the classroom.” We may not be visible - and we are still here! As a Native person (Haudenosaunee, Oneida Nations of the Thames), I find it painful just reading these slides. I don’t think I would have had the skills to contest such as game back when I was a teenager. And I know my identity was negatively impacted by never seeing another living Native person in school curriculum until university.
In the case of Dream Rush, the teacher further restricts the agency of students by enrolling them in the game itself. Imagine having to publicly question or reject the very mission and quest your teacher has told you is the path to success in their classroom. In Neil Selwyn’s analysis of gamification more broadly, he notes how “the realities of game-based play are often structured and constrained in nature.” Schools need to teach about oppression if they want to accurately teach history, and gamification does not allow marginalized students the necessary agency in the classroom in these cases.
Given how the various tools in Dream Rush are described, it seems like Meehan went with ignoring the existence of Indigenous peoples. They make no appearance in his slides. One slide depicts the game as allowing students to form characters around “action, surprises, thrills” and “explosives, chaos, and mayhem”. A fun theme-park approach leaves no room for empathy with the Indigenous peoples and their experience.
One tool we can pick up is a “well-sharpened axe” which will “help you gather firewood, repair your shelter, and clear large areas of brush and tree cover in order to set up camp anywhere you’d like. In a pinch, this axe can also be used against predators!”
In a pinch, axes - “an explorer’s best friend” - were also used to massacre Native peoples, especially when explorers wanted to save shot. Clifford E. Trafzer and Michelle Lorimer cite such a case when they write about how social studies textbooks have silenced the genocide that happened in California:
“On February 29, 1860, famed Western writer Francis Bret Harte wrote about the massacre with the title “Indiscriminate Massacred of Indians, Women and Children Butchered” (Lindsay, 2012, p. 327). The volunteers hacked to death the women and children. “Little children and old women,” Harte wrote, “were mercilessly stabbed and their skulls crushed with axes.” The militiamen beat the brains out of old women and used axes and hatches to drive a wedge into the faces of small babies. Women and children could not resist but “huddled together for protection like sheep.” Soldiers saved their shot and simply smashed in the heads and faces of women and children, killing all of them. The murderers went unpunished, the common result of the murder, rape, and kidnapping of Indian men, women, and children (Lindsay, 2012, p. 327).”
Another item students need to collect is the Bible because a theme of the year is “using one’s faith as a guide.” It’s impossible to ignore the ways that religion was integral to the “Discovery Doctrine”, “a concept that had been born at the very beginning of the Judeo-Christian tradition, on the first page of the Bible, in the Book of Genesis.” (Indian Country Today) This doctrine helped make ‘legal’ the confiscation of land.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues that “In the United States, the founding and development of the Anglo-American settler-state involves a narrative about Puritan settlers who had a covenant with God to take the land.” While the Bible was used justify conquest, Christianity was also central to the mission of cultural genocide. Captain Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, argued the U.S. needed to “Kill the Indian in him , and save the man”, while only paragraphs later, he invokes the Bible. Abigail Winston writes “Pratt saw his desire to assimilate Native Americans as a religious calling, and viewed assimilation as a form of religious conversion.”
A similar logic also played out in Canada. The Truth and Reconciliation report features personal stories of how religion was part of cultural genocide. Jeanette Basile Laloche recounts beatings she received in a residential school from a priest for asserting her own understanding of her spiritual beliefs. She was beaten until she spoke what the priest told her to. Hazel Ewanchuk recalls religion with irony: “we had Bible study every night. I didn’t mind that. I thought, what are they preaching here about love? Where is that love?”
I have written about the Pirates as a marketing network, a kind of bubble. Ironically, if people were engaged in less self-promotion and more listening to critical educators, they could have found many conversations on Twitter this year about the harms of using role play to address history. Val Brown, Tricia Ebarvia, Dulce-Marie Flecha, Kelly Wickham Hurst, and Christie Nold have all taken on this topic several times this past year. Cases of role-playing history have even made news headlines. Writing for Slate, Rebecca Onion states, “One danger of poorly executed simulations of the darkest parts of our history is that white or otherwise privileged students may revel in what they see as the dramatic aspects of these situations—they may actually enjoy themselves.”
Common response to criticisms like mine include people calling for kindness - towards the person whose ideas are being criticized! Or, these criticisms get called ‘pushback’, as if someone else made a first original move in coming up with an idea for a classroom, and then someone else has come along and done something unhelpful and destructive. I think that is entirely the wrong way of viewing the situation. The creation of a game like Dream Rush is actually move 1,543,323 in a longer game of settler colonialism. Instead, it’s better to view the construction of the game itself as a move that does not take into account all the work and scholarship people have done about the genocide of Indigenous peoples. If ‘pushback’ feels unkind, try to imagine erasure.
As always, I owe a huge debt to Julie Fellmayer for her constant and critical companionship.