?I don?t think you?re going to have any aborigines in your world?: Minecrafting terra nullius

The myth that justified the takeover of a continent lives on both in classrooms and in popular media. Drawing from classroom observations in an urban primary school in Australia, this article enters the technology in education conversation, more specifically through the use of videogames for learning. Based on classroom exchanges between teachers and students, we interrogate how the school?s use of Minecraft, a best-selling commercial videogame, continues to reproduce myths of settler colonialism in the twenty-first century. Specifically, the curriculum mobilizes structures inherent to both Minecraft and modern Australia?s treatment of its Indigenous populations. That is, both classroom and videogame interactions reproduced the myth of terra nullius: the doctrine which determined that land, prior to colonization, was empty and unowned, and therefore available for settlement by the colonizer. We conclude that within videogames and classrooms, students? voices manage to interrogate the curriculum, resisting the reproduction of erasive coloniality in school.