Texas Water Stories: Children's Everyday Encounters With an Austin Creek

• In Event: 21.040 - Children's Common Worlds in Times of Climate Change and "Post-Truths"

Abstract

There is significant evidence that current times of environmental precarity are inequitably distributed across ethnicity, race, class and gender (Nixon 2011; Pulido 2016). This includes disproportionate impacts on Indigenous peoples who have experienced hundreds of years of displacement and dispossession from the lands and waters with which they are in specific co-constitutional relationships (Tallbear 2017; Whyte 2017). There is also a growing recognition of the insights that Traditional Knowledges of Indigenous peoples can contribute to climate change mitigation in conversation with perspectives from the environmental humanities and sciences (Smith & Sharp 2012; Hammer et al 2013). Traditional Knowledges are articulated in multiple place-specific ways including, but not limited to: creation stories, land and water use protocols, land-based elder teachings and Indigenous science – all of which can provide alternatives to extractive and hierarchical relationships between human and more-than-human life. However, Indigenous perspectives remain absent in dominant environmental education approaches (Todd, 2016; Whyte 2017; Brugnach Craps & Dewulf 2017).

The purpose of this research is to contribute to disruptions of these erasures. Our particular interest is in disrupting normative water pedagogies in early childhood settings, which remain tethered to anthropocentric child-centered practices, where water is viewed as a resource for young children’s physical/sensory, socio-emotional, and cognitive development. In this research we are interested in what kinds of anti-colonial water relations might emerge from foregrounding Indigenous presences, stories and knowledges in young children’s everyday pedagogical encounters with a creek that borders their school. Water is central to the Indigenous peoples of Central Texas; Yanaguana, the Coahuiltecan name for these territories; translates to water of the spirit/spirit of the water. In addition, four water springs in central Texas are integral to the onto-epistemologies of the Indigenous peoples of Texas (Indigenous Cultures Institute, 2018).

In this study, a group of kindergarten children, educators and researchers spent time, once a week over the course of the school year, engaged in pedagogical encounters at the creek that runs alongside the school. Data sources included video recordings, photographs, children’s art work and field notes. Our research methodology was drawn from common world approaches which focused our ethnographic attention on children’s entangled relations with the creek and its more-than-human inhabitants.

In this poster we focus our discussion on children’s multimodal water curriculum that included: (1) Indigenous water stories using children’s picture books, (2) children’s drawings in relation to the Coahuiltecan creation story, (3) relational encounters with the creek through Coahuiltecan songs sung to the water. Importantly, our analysis of these encounters also makes visible the potentials and the tensions of this work within ongoing conditions of settler colonial dispossession; amidst ongoing unevenly distributed inheritances of current and future watery precarities; and within current conditions of ongoing racial and economic inequalities in the kinds of learning experiences young children have access to in Texas schools. A key significance of this work is in demonstrating the inadequacies of dominant developmental child-centered water pedagogies in current times of ecological precarity.

Authors

• Fikile Nxumalo, The University of Texas at Austin

• Marleen Villaneuva, UT Austin NAIC (Native American and Indigenous Collective)

• Pablo Montes, The University of Texas at Austin