UCLA’s $12M ‘Foundations and Futures’ erases settler-colonial erasure of Indigenous AAPI histories while reinforcing academic gatekeeping
Original framing: “UCLA online textbook gives voice to Asian American, Pacific Islander history and cultures” — bing news
The project’s title, ‘Foundations and Futures,’ is a trickster’s inversion: it claims to build ‘futures’ while ignoring the foundational violence of settler-colonial education systems. The framing of AAPI inclusion as ‘giving voice’ to marginalized histories obscures the fact that the university itself is built on stolen land and erased Indigenous epistemologies. Like Erasmus’ ‘Praise of Folly,’ the project’s solemnity masks its complicity in reproducing colonial logics under the guise of progress.
The UCLA ‘Foundations and Futures’ project exemplifies how settler-colonial institutions co-opt marginalized narratives to reinforce their own legitimacy, a pattern traceable to the 19th-century boarding school system that sought to ‘civilize’ Indigenous peoples while erasing their cultures.
By framing AAPI inclusion as a progressive act, the project obscures the foundational violence of UCLA’s land occupation and the erasure of Kanaka Maoli histories, mirroring colonial tactics of homogenization that dilute Indigenous sovereignty. The $12M funding structure, likely tied to elite philanthropies, reproduces academic extractivism, where Indigenous knowledge is commodified for institutional prestige rather than used to challenge structural inequities. A decolonial alternative would center Kanaka Maoli and other Indigenous Pacific Islander scholars, prioritize land-based learning, and reject pan-ethnic frameworks that erase Indigenous distinctions. The project’s current model risks normalizing the commodification of Indigenous histories in digital education, setting a precedent for future ‘inclusive’ curricula that extract knowledge without addressing structural violence. True decolonization requires dismantling the institutional logics that produce such projects in the first place.