Pedagogies of Water: Restoring and Restorying the Traditional Knowledge of Tejas

• In Event: 58.065 - This Is Yanaguana: Reframing Indigenous Texas for Environmental Education

Abstract

For many generations, the population along the Mexico- U.S. border has been fluid, and long before the Rio Bravo Rio Grande became an international border, the river nourished life and guided migrations through the changing and difficult terrain. Different eras of colonization, settler occupation, and (ongoing) violence have made identity a fraught territory for fronteriza/os, who often find much more in common with each other travelling lengthwise along the river, than with those populations living in the interior of either neighboring country. Each community along the nearly 2,000 miles of border is a distinct mixture of cultures, identities, and languages, shaped by the specific local ecology.
However, dominant narratives of the border are steeped in racist stereotypes, fear-mongering, and broad generalizations that flatten the various voices and normalize the actual patterns of violence faced by border residents. Castillo & Tabuenca Cordoba (2002) have suggested that the displacement of borderland voices occurs in three primary ways: 1) Historically, as peoples are physically displaced from their traditional territories. 2) Local place-based knowledges are displaced by “expert” knowledges, in which homogenized generalizations are valued over first-hand, embodied experiences. 3) Conceptually, material realities are displaced by theoretical abstractions. In combination, these displacements result in intellectual colonialism (Castillo & Tabuenca Cordoba, 2002) of the U.S.-Mexico borderland and people.
My research project explores a fourth displacement, examining how colonization has been internalized, obscuring the Indigenous ancestry of many frontera residents, many of whom share a deep-time, many-generations-relationship with the river. My research project challenges the misrecognition/nonrecognition of traditional ecological knowledge (LaDuke, 1994) through a methodology that draws from collective memory and oral history. I went to my home community in Laredo, Texas, and asked my elders to share stories our river, the Rio Bravo-Rio Grande. The stories I have collected work to restore the relationships between identity, land, and water specific to our community, examining how forces such as colonization, environmental racism, and exploitation, have shaped both the land and the people who live in relation to it (Ybarra, 2009).
In this paper, I examine the implications of using our river stories as part of an intergenerational pedagogy. I consider the ways in which practices of storytelling and storylistening can work to restore and restory who we understand ourselves to be in relation to our local ecologies. I seek to understand how environmental education may be used to frame the teachings differently than Indigenous and/or ethnic studies education, for what purposes, and to whose benefit.

Castillo, B., & Tabuenca Cordoba, M. S. (2002). Border women: writing from La Frontera. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
LaDuke, W. (1994). Traditional ecological knowledge and environmental futures. Colorado Journal of International Environmental Law and Policy, 5(127), 127-148.
Ybarra, P. S. (2009). Borderlands as bioregion: Jovita González, Gloria Anzaldúa, and the twentieth-century ecological revolution in the Rio Grande Valley. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., 34(2), 175-189.

Author

• Marissa Munoz, The University of British Columbia