EXPLORING DECOLONIZATION, MUSIC, AND PEDAGOGY 1

Educational decolonization, with its critical recognition of the enduring power imbalances, epistemological assumptions, and marginalization of experience in the academy, is a crucial and ongoing struggle that continues to deserve our vigorous attention. Broadly, theorists and activists confront the impacts of European colonialism both globally and locally.3 Arising from the voyages of "discovery" that began in the late fifteenth century, colonial extraction, occupation, and eventual settlement followed the interests of the expanding European international trading companies. Democracy, rationalism, capitalism, and public education flourished and prospered, predominantly through the support of economic success in far-off lands. Cultural historian Craig Steven Wilder puts it bluntly in his meticulously documented exposure of the role of African slavery and Indigenous disenfranchisement and genocide in the founding and funding of America's colleges and universities: "Racial ideas were born in the colonial world, in the brutal and deadly processes of empire building" (Wilder, 2013, 182).