Foreword: Weaving Indigenous Words and Worlds and the Work of Everyday Hope

Multilingual Matters eBooks · 2025-06-14

Indigenous and Tribal Nation scientists and universities

Critical Internationalization Studies Review · 2025-11-17

Remembering Putis

2025-01-23

On December 13, 1984, 123 Quechua community members were executed by the Peruvian military and left in a mass grave in the community of Putis in the region of Ayacucho, Peru. They were among the approximately 70,000 lives (the majority of whom were Indigenous) estimated to have been lost during the Shining Path-Peruvian state conflict, escalating through the 1980s and 1990s. This chapter is a commentary on the relationship between Indigenous community members, specifically Quechua people, and the state, fraught since colonial and independence eras. As a Wanka and Quechua educational researcher, the author links Putis with contrasting ideas of humanity, selective citizenship, and the disposability of Indigenous bodies. Inspired by Aziz Choudry’s work on learning from history and each other, the author proposes the Indigenous ordinary as an ontological-pedagogical frame for contesting colonial capital and recognizing human life as a process of embedded earth relations that rethink nationhood along Indigenous terms.

Ethical environmental, community, and research engagement in times of crisis: reflections from Cayambe, Ecuador

AlterNative An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples · 2025-08-11 · 1 citations

We use a critical incident from Indigenous educational fieldwork on global environmental shift with Kichwa—Indigenous communities in, Ecuador. A community leader’s question, “Who will replace you?” becomes a point of entry to reflect on the many dimensions of community engagement in interdisciplinary weather systems change research. We examine how guesthood and mink’a (obligatory community work) help reframe the roles and responsibilities of researchers working in remote, rural, and Indigenous territories experiencing environmental disruption. Rather than positioning collaboration as a supplement to scientific inquiry, we consider how community expectations around continuity, care, and accountability challenge extractive research paradigms and promote more durable and reciprocal forms of engagement. By attending to the temporal, structural, and epistemic tensions that shape these collaborations, we argue for an approach to research that is future-oriented, relationally-grounded, and responsive to the realities of people in places where land, weather, and water are inseparable from daily life.

Indigenous knowledges and collective learning: interepistemic Earth-relationing with places and for the planet

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-04-15

This chapter reflects on this critical moment regarding human impact on Earth, one of many other moments that humanity will increasingly face in coming generations. In this time, our challenge as educators may be to unlearn and prepare to learn, as Indigenous scholars like Cora Weber-Pillwax (2009) have offered. Drawing from comparative Indigenous educational research and the work of Indigenous scholars, this chapter highlights questions for educational design that center the many layers of human engagement with place. Prominent in this discussion is the adaptive role of the human educator and resilience of Indigenous places in the context of global development while transcending racialized/culturalized/borderized fixations toward interepistemic Earth-relationing models. Shifting comparison from peoples and the local, cultural, and national contexts of formal education to cross-learning that prioritizes stewardship in places, this chapter offers a rethinking of comparative education as a frame that is deep and dynamic (mindful of the internal human ecosystem) and expansive and historical (thoughtful of people and places across time and genealogies).

Indigenous and decolonial approaches to environmental learning

AlterNative An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples · 2025-09-01

The 2025 Special Issue of AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples —“ Living a Life that Feels Just Right”: Indigenous and Decolonial Approaches to Environmental (Re)learning for Planetary Care in a Time of Climate Uncertainty , envisioned by guest editors Elizabeth Sumida Huaman and Sharon Stein, goes beyond merely describing ecological precarity in different places around the world. It brings together diverse learning interventions, many of which unfold outside of formal classrooms, that explore how people are talking about, researching, and teaching approaches to environmental engagement that seek to mend the separation between humans and the rest of nature. The Guest Editors share their motivations for assembling the special issue, observe major tensions in decolonial climate education work, and provide an overview of the contributions. We present key questions we are asking ourselves and key challenges we are observing, and we invite readers to consider these in their own learning contexts.

Kawsaypaq (for life): Indigenous research for the <i>freedom to become</i>

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education · 2024-02-19

This article is emboldened by two queries that Indigenous researchers confront—first, of what use are conversations and debates about decolonial research apart from our communities, and second, how do we frame and practice responsibility to places and peoples through research that is energized by Indigenous autochthony? Focusing on research methodologies that are informed by Quechua knowledge, I discuss what Indigenous research might mean for the human who is witness to the loss of nature and playing a part in attempting to restore and protect good earth relationships. I offer provocation regarding how researchers might rethink and re-language our humanity by learning from and with Indigenous worlds that are long contextualized through their environmental stewardship. I center kawsaypaq, translated from Quechua Collao to English as "for life," which I apply to research that works for the freedom to become.

“The heavy burden”: Indigenous knowledge systems, biocultural diversity, and transknowledging in sciences education

Cultural Studies of Science Education · 2024-11-02 · 1 citations

Sumaq Kawsay and Indigenous Educational Dignity in the Peruvian Highlands

2023-07-10

Drawing from collaborative ethnographic research rooted in Indigenous research methodologies, this chapter focuses on the nature of a small Indigenous school in the region of Cusco, Peru, and the ways in which schooling is constructed as a reflection of Quechua epistemology exemplified through the Andean agricultural calendar. The focus is on the educational philosophies of school founders and creative Quechua pedagogy expressive of “nature-mediated education” established through recognition of the centrality of Indigenous relationships to the environment. The development and evolution of this school are traced amidst tensions with Peruvian educational policy, the state, and international academic performance pressures rooted in (Western) modernization. The educational leaders at the school are asked how Quechua communities situated outside of the European hegemonic world order envision education and life achievements for their children and how Indigenous epistemologies can contribute to student well-being and ecologically sustainable educational practices in the Andes.

Beyond sustainability: Indigenous Knowledge Systems for locally and globally renewing earth relations

International Journal of Educational Development · 2023-11-01 · 8 citations