Ballantyne uses Dechinta, 'Bush University,’ as an example of a decolonizing space, and comments on the responsibilities of settlers interested in decolonization theory. The author begins by addressing her own settler roots, then turning to the history of oil development in the Northwest Territories. She discusses the Berger inquiry, the land claim processes, and the diamond boom, and argues that the sense of inevitability with which resource exploitation is treated is counterintuitive to decolonizing efforts. Inevitability is inculcated in the early space of youth education, and Ballantyne reflects on experiences working in Fort Good Hope that helped her realize that a contextualized, land-based, collaboration-based pedagogy could be far more transformative for youth than classroom-based education.

From Abstract: 

This article explores Dechinta Bush University as an Indigenous place-based movement that contributes to personal and collective transformation through mobilizing land-based knowledge and learning within a comprehensive strategy of resistance to settler capital. Through the production of a knowledge economy intervention, the pedagogical and political strategies of Dechinta are explored as a proven example of multi-scalar transformational decolonization that has far-reaching personal, collective, institutional, political and economic impacts. Through a detailed exploration of the five-year process of collective imagining, mobilizing and operating Dechinta Bush University, this article gives critical insights into closing the gap between the call for mass-scale decolonization and the dismantling of settler capitalism by exploring pathways which orient the land and Indigenous knowledge as relationships and core values mobilized towards a resurgence reality. Dechinta is herein conceived as a pathway movement of arming oneself with knowledge to fight the hierarchical scales of settler politics, a movement where collective and personal transformation through learning on the land is part and parcel of a strategy of resistance to settler capital, producing an alternative knowledge economy centered around the value of land as an infinite producer of health, knowledge, and sustainable, self-determining communities.

Read more about Dechinta on this database, or consult its website.

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Ballantyne, Erin Freeland. “Dechinta Bush University: Mobilizing a knowledge economy of reciprocity, resurgence and decolonization.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 3 (2014): 67-85.