The Urgency to Center Indigenous Community, Youth, and Educational Research in the Andean World

• In Event: Accepting Responsibility and Navigating Research Tensions: A Relational Praxis

Abstract

In the past two decades, research methodologies rooted spatially and epistemologically in
Indigenous communities (Oliveira & Wright, 2016) have emerged as critical responses to research linked with projects of colonization and development that have historically silenced, misrepresented, and marginalized Indigenous peoples. At the same time, beyond responses to imperialism, positivism, and neoliberalism, Indigenous research methodologies anchor broader community-based movements to affirm, protect, and reclaim local cultural practices, languages, and places. Based on educational research in the highland Andes of Peru, both in and out of school, and reflexivity from the field focusing on our positionalities, we consider Quechua worldviews regarding inquiry and exploration, community and relationship, and children and youth in the Andean world. As runakuna, we take up Indigenist research (Rigney, 1999) and inspiration from Kaupapa Maori research frameworks towards advancing discourse on Quechua- centered research that honors Andean histories, experiences, and endurances. We consider research in service to Andean people as a love letter that recognizes the struggle and wisdom of centering Quechua epistemologies and reclaiming cultural practices in postcolonial, post-conflict, and pandemic times, as we witness the deepening of injustice and the resilience of
Indigenous responses. This dynamic reveals continuous violence against Indigenous and historically marginalized communities under a failing global hegemony sustained by greed.
Despite a hegemony that actively seeks to annihilate Indigenous ways of knowing and caring, we consider the role of research with youth and communities in order to rethink strategies of protection and transformation within a system of coloniality through reclaiming Indigenous worldviews.
In this presentation, we discuss the knowledge we have gathered from our decades work as education scholars who engage in ethnographic and qualitative research with Indigenous communities, particularly with youth and educators in Indigenous programs in formal and non-formal settings in the Andean Quechua region. We take a reflective stance in our intent to share what we have learned from Indigenous youth as well as our own identities and commitments as scholars with Indigenous and mixed ancestry and family ties. In our discussion, we analyze our learning, relationships, and identities in order to generate five principles of research framework that centers the Andean Indigenous community (Sumida Huaman & Valdiviezo, 2012), and youth in educational research. In this effort we respond to traditional enquiry that has pervasively labeled, exoticized, silenced and dispossessed Indigenous people while allowing the justification of colonial relationships that continue to damage Indigenous communities and antagonize their relationship with society. At the base of the five principles is the recognition and respect for
Quechua knowledges, cultures, ways of being in and with the world, and ways of learning, caring and protecting the community and the natural world. While firmly rooted in the Andes, our presentation highlights the interconnectedness of Quechua ways of knowing to what takes place in the overall society as we present how Indigenous approaches offer valuable insights and practices for times of unprecedented challenge and urgency in today’s world.

Authors

• Elizabeth Sumida Huaman, Arizona State University

• Laura A. Valdiviezo, University of Massachusetts-Amherst