« Settler colonialism as spectacle: Sandy Grande, ‘Refusing the Settler Society of the Spectacle’, in Elizabeth Ann McKinley, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (eds), Handbook of Indigenous Education, Springer, 2017
Biocultura as anticolonialism: Yessica Dahiana Rostan, Towards Pedagogies of the Living: An Anticolonial Biocultura Approach to Settler Colonialism, Land Movements and Community Re-organization, MA Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2017 »

Settler colonialism as play: Katharine Slater, ‘Who Gets to Die of Dysentery? Ideology, Geography, and The Oregon Trail’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 42, 4, 2017, pp. 374-395

16Nov17

Abstract: This article examines the co-constitutive relationship between ideology and geography in three editions of the educational computer game The Oregon Trail, arguing that the game reinforces a colonialist worldview through representations of place, space, and time. Despite seeming to accommodate players of any race or gender, The Oregon Trail imagines its protagonist—the “you” traveling the Trail—as white and male, a construct that reinforces the supremacist narrative of nineteenth-century settlement. Through a rapid in-game compression of time and space that urges progress, the game encourages child players to perform the spatialized worldview that codifies manifest destiny.


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