Pedagogy-Making as a Response-ability: Revitalizing Ancestral Water Knowledge

• In Event: 25.058 - Pedagogy as Resilience for Indigenous Youth and Schools

Abstract

To Indigenous peoples, rivers serve as arteries, connecting diverse communities and ecologies in/with/through vital, interdependent relationships. In my community of Laredo, Texas, our Rio Grande/Rio Bravo is the main source of clean water, and is also a militarized, international border between Texas and Mexico. In this paper, I discuss my response-ability to honoring my ancestral river as an Indigenous activist educator scholar, and the process of pedagogy-making that unsettles and Indigenizes the colonial borderlands. I created an Indigenous Fronterizx Pedagogy of Water using testimonios of community knowledge keepers as the living archives of our community's collective memory. The resulting pedagogical model engages youth to develop new approaches toward the restor(y)ing our relational ecologies and ancestral intellectual traditions.

Author

• Marissa Munoz, The University of Texas - San Antonio