"No Women Involved": Settler Colonial Racial Grammars in Black and Indigenous Education

Abstract:Through a discussion of the first Indigenous women students at the Hampton Agricultural and Normal Institute's Indian Program in 1879 and the rhetoric surrounding their enrollment, this essay analyzes how raced and gendered discourses were highlighted in different ways at Hampton after Indigenous women began attending. I argue that settler colonial racial grammars underpin the discussion of race and education by Hampton teachers, administrators, and staff. Settler colonial racial grammars are structures and patterns of meaning that relate racial and ontological discourses to domination of land through settler conquest, hinging on the process of gendering and ungendering. These grammars work through defining Black and Indigenous women in relation to space, time, and ontological condition. Using Christina Sharpe's theorization of anagrammatical Blackness in concert with my own concept of Indigenous hyperpunctuation, I lay out the ways that Black and Indigenous women were at the center of Hampton's industrial education project. I contend that settler colonial racial grammars reveal the process by which educational comparison can contribute to material structures of settler colonialism and anti-Blackness.