Education with Duna Haller and Alex Mikinaak

Is American education a tool of liberation or assimilation? In this episode of WTF USA? The Astrology Behind the Madness, historian-astrologer Alex Mikinaak and punk astrologer Duna Haller join me to dig into the third house (basic education) and ninth house (higher education/ideology) of the Sibley chart. We trace Indigenous boarding schools' brutal history alongside the Native lawyers and leaders they inadvertently produced, connect Mars-Uranus in Gemini to the WWII code talkers and compare American gun violence in schools to Duna's experience growing up in Spain. Heavy history, real astrology, but we are left with genuine hope by the end.

Biggest Takeaways

• Duna and Alex's core framing: the third house (basic/mandatory education) and ninth house (higher education/ideology) are in constant conversation in the Sibley chart — the norms universities set filter down into what children get taught
• Alex's history: Indigenous boarding schools were built to strip culture and language from Native children through real abuse. And those same schools produced the first Native lawyers, doctor and leaders who later rebuilt tribal sovereignty from the inside
• My own family history: as a third-generation master's degree holder on my Black side, descending from a formerly enslaved great-grandfather who became a successful businessman and invested in HBCUs — education as both a wound and a genuine path to survival
• Alex's read on Mars-Uranus in Gemini: knowledge as literal weapon of war, most strikingly embodied by the Navajo code talkers of WWII, beaten for speaking their language in school, then called on by that same government to win a war with it
• Duna's parallel between the Black Panthers' community education programs and the May 1968 student movements in France, both emerging under a similar Uranus-Pluto signature that's echoing again right now
• My addition: the US's high 5th and 12th harmonics point to education as both creativity/invention and a place where society's outcasts can finally receive real care — the hopeful flip side of everything else discussed

Want to go deeper into harmonics?

The 5th and 12th harmonics came up again in this one — creativity, invention, and care for the overlooked. Harmonic Astrology 101 walks you through finding these layers in your own chart. Self-paced, $155, yours forever, 15% off for podcast listeners with code WTFUSA15. Harmonic Astrology 101

Connect with Duna Haller: dunahaller.pb.studio

Connect with Alex Mikinaak: ishpimingastrology.com

Connect with me: clarissadolphinexplainsitall.com

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