Nicholas L. Padilla, Geography, UW-Milwaukee
“Decolonizing Indigenous Education: Reawakening Mother Nature and Sowing the Seeds of Harmony”

Wednesday, March 4, 2015, 3:30pm
American Geographical Society Library (UWM Libraries, Third floor)

The Universidad Autónoma Indígena Intercultural (UAIIN, Autonomous Intercultural Indigenous University) in Popayán, Colombia is not a university, in the Western sense of the word. In this paper, I argue that the indigenous university challenges the epistemic foundations of the University by opening the classroom to the world, fostering a spiritual connection between students and the earth and cosmos, and taking seriously the plurality of indigenous worldviews of enrolled students. Through five lines of formation (worldview, life plans, food security and sovereignty, administration and the economía propia, and community investigation), the Program for the Revitalization of the Mother Earth at the UAIIN begins its pedagogical foundations from a point of cultural difference and deconstructs the lines between educator and student.

The UAIIN destabilizes notions of the university by redefining the disciplinary boundaries between humans and nature, biology and life, and markets and household economies. The Revitalization of the Mother Earth reawakens indigenous dreams, unites the cosmos with earth, connects the spirits in humans, animals, water, air, and land through poetry, philosophy, politics of resistance, and popular pedagogy. In this setting, knowledge is not possessed and cannot be traded as currency, but knowledge is co-created, shared, and reflective of the specific realities of a community. Participants in the program are expected to be instructors as well as students, working with their peers to weave together their community’s experience in the multicultural context of the university. The UAIIN reasserts indigenous identities by appropriating a western educational model and returns education to the processes of cultural reproduction among peers by requiring all students to engage in community investigation and popular education within their own communities.