to STEM-based disciplines, wherein job security and economic gain are perceived to be readily available . By emphasizing practicality, these mainstream discourses suggest that the purpose of higher education is to produce "good workers"...
moreto STEM-based disciplines, wherein job security and economic gain are perceived to be readily available . By emphasizing practicality, these mainstream discourses suggest that the purpose of higher education is to produce "good workers" who will comply with the demands of North American capitalist economies; at the same time, other perspectives have recognized and aimed to censor the critical potential of the arts and humanities. For example, in January 2023, Florida governor Ron DeSantis proposed a state-level plan to transform New College of Florida, a small liberal arts school, from a "progressive" educational environment to "a beacon of conservatism" (Mazzei 2023). These actions are part of an ongoing effort from several Republican state politicians who aim to limit liberal arts education and its emphasis on disrupting white supremacist, patriarchal, settler colonial, and cisnormative US societies, ultimately restricting what can and cannot be taught in the undergraduate classroom (Gabriel and Nehamas 2023; Kang 2023). 5 Dance education holds significance within these debates: at one level, it might be considered superfluous in relation to "useful" STEM fields; at another, it can provide an opportunity to interrogate racist, colonial, patriarchal, and anthropocentric imaginings of the body and its surroundings, which some politically conservative perspectives intend to stifle . This article intervenes into these mainstream dialogues, examining strategies for resisting expectations of "utility" in dance education through community-engaged pedagogies, specifically between collaborators who self-identify as Indigenous and as non-Indigenous. 6 Reflecting on the Dance and Decolonization course, we identify three "learning goals" that are alternative to those of practicality and career readiness: through not-dancing, and subsequently listening to the collective, and working-for our community partners, we offer a pedagogical approach that can challenge the settlercapitalist underpinnings of mainstream higher education and work toward reciprocal relationships. Standard dance pedagogies are not inherently settler-capitalist; their prioritizing of the body and its movement can be understood to disrupt the Eurocentric, colonial valuing of the written word in knowledge production ). Yet some approaches to the dance classroom can also obscure or even directly contribute to appropriation and expropriation, actions associated with settler-capitalist structures (Speed 2019, 19). Courses that expect students to demonstrate "mastery" of different dance styles can, at times, replicate cultural appropriation, especially when detached from discussions of community histories, broader cultural practices, and attention to students' positionalities (C. Davis 2018; Johnson 2020). While these pedagogies can "prepare" students for dance careers as versatile performers (Foster 2019), they might also train them to embody historically, politically, and culturally specific movement forms without attention to their communities of origin. We therefore argue for the potential and even necessity of not-dancing in undergraduate dance classes to offer students alternative ways to connect with, absorb, and critique their dominant dance education. In the context of the Dance and Decolonization class, not-dancing was imperative: the course, which explored Indigenous dances with a majority of non-Indigenous students, implicated long histories of Indigenous knowledge appropriation by settler scholars, choreographers, and dancers. Dance studies scholars have shown how many revered white choreographers have appropriated Native American dances in both popular and concert dance forms . While many of these dance professionals were capitalizing on Indigenous knowledge for their own success, the US government formally barred Indigenous people from performing their own dances from 1883 to 1934 and did not formally protect dance and other ceremonial practices until 1978. 7 US colonizers have targeted Native American dance for many reasons, including that these movement practices have many decolonial possibilities-such as