The Breaks — Julietta Singh
opens with a scene of clashing pedagogies. Julietta Singh’s daughter returns home with a kindergarten lesson that tries to conceal its violence under the veneer of childhood education: “a whitewashed story […] about how the first peoples of this land were happy to give their sacred spaces to the consumptive force of European men in the name of civilization and progress.” It’s a dangerous but familiar tale––resonant with others that deform history in service of a settler, white-supremacist, extractive capitalist project. It has also been pulled into increasingly painful shapes by recent discoveries of murdered Indigenous children’s unmarked graves at former residential “school” sites. As Singh writes, only white children […] […]
