ABSTRACT
The American Southwest is a region with a more visible continuity of the settler-colonial hierarchy than most places in North America; its racial wounds have never healed. In terms of both life outcomes and educational attainment, the population displays the transmission of patterns laid down by the processes of successive waves of settler colonialism, including the effects of ethnic cleansing, cultural genocide, and generational trauma. The content of both manifest and latent curricula in the educational systems of the American Southwest reflects the colonial mentality and produces what we term a racialized false consciousness, especially within the primary and secondary education systems. We propose decolonization of the educational curriculum and identify specific indicators of the current colonial mentality in the education system. Our recommendations for decolonizing the curriculum in the American Southwest include an inclusion of tribal nations in curriculum design, the abandonment of cartographic prejudices, the promotion of cosmopolitanism, and the demilitarization of career paths and instruction.
