Land-based art intervention: Disrupting settler colonial curriculum of public parks

Abstract

US public parks are ideological sites where settler-colonial curriculum of territoriality is enacted through their organization and design. However, public parks and the rhetorics of nature and democracy that often frame them are rarely problematized as White settler projects occupying the colonized land. Drawing on the scholarship of decolonial, land-based education, this article critiques the narratives of US urban parks’ undergirding settler-colonial curricula and discusses a student-developed artistic intervention executed in a local public park. The ‘Lederer Park Placards Project’ is explored as both pedagogical gesture and art-based research, which engages in settler-colonial critique through site-specific installation to surface the erasure of Indigenous realities and to divert the existing settler-colonial narratives of public places. This art-in-action is discussed as a decolonial gesture intended to disrupt the White, Eurocentric, colonial curricula embedded in US public parks.