Land education

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Indigenous epistemology, sustainability, and adult education

Proposal

Directly relevant to the theme of “sustainability” and the “Indigenous Knowledge and the Academy” SIG, the construct of place has played a considerable role in contemporary curricula, pedagogy, and learning with students within many academic disciplines, including “environmental” and “sustainability” education. While important strides have been made within the domain of place and its theoretical and operational impact on students’ learning, there remain fundamental constraints of the notion of place, particularly with regard to historically marginalized students and communities such as Indigenous peoples throughout the world. One area of scholarship that contextualizes this theoretical contribution, and which not only offers a compelling critique of place for such underserved communities but also a socially and environmentally sustainable proximal solution, is the growing field of land education, which from an Indigenous perspective is the learning of deep social, political, and ethical relationships on and with land, and the approach of land-as-pedagogy, which is the understanding that the primary and ultimate teacher is precisely the land itself.

This paper builds upon existing work by drawing upon Indigenous scholarship and examples of Indigenous relationships to land in the U.S., in addition to four case studies from Indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon, New Zealand, the Rift Valley of Africa, and the Arctic. Land, for many Indigenous communities, is life. Central to Indigenous relationships on and with land is the understanding that land itself defines a people, their language, perceptions, behaviors, social values, epistemology, and ontology. Unlike place, land is beyond and much more: it can be considered the origin from which communities build and extend relationships, reciprocity, respect, and relevance to other aspects of their lives, within and beyond the land (Kirkness and Barnhardt, 2001). Unlike family, relatives, and other loved ones, the land endures and for that Indigenous communities are grateful (Basso, 1996, p. 61).

I borrow from Tuck and Yang (2012) and Tuck, McKenzie, and McVoy (2014) in their use of land as that which is composed of the earth—including the urban, a point which I address in the paper—water, air, and subterranean earth that, cumulatively, are much more than just the material concerns of space but also the consideration of spiritual, emotional, and intellectual aspects (see also McKenzie, 2008). Hereafter in reference to these convergent aspects, I use the term “Land.” A cosmological, ontological, and epistemological conceptualization and embodiment of Land (Cajete, 2015 p. 29) entitles it to a position that Cajete (2015, p, 46) calls “the first and most essential teacher and community member.” By this account, it is the Land that “looks after” Indigenous communities and makes them “live right” through the social, emotional, spiritual, and biological lessons that it has culturally accumulated; the alternative, of course, is quite dire: for eschewing the teachings of the Land would run counter to Indigenous communities’ commitment to doing everything, in a very literal sense, for life’s sake (Cajete, 2015, p. 51).

As a result, the implications of land education and land-as-pedagogy for future educational policy and practice suggest that curricula, pedagogy, and learning environments ought to center such ideas into all curricula and pedagogy irrespective of academic “subject” or discipline. Acknowledging where events, relationships, experiences, and understandings happen communities and learners are afforded the opportunity to reassess and reaffirm the ontological and epistemological basis that all knowledge is contextualized, and that contextualization starts with/in land. Moreover this acknowledgement allows space for the questions that Land unceasingly evokes: what relationships, reciprocity, respect, and relevance are afforded here? This reflexivity comes in full recognition and shift away from what Tuck (2008) identifies as a “damage-centered” framework of work and research with/in Indigenous communities: by suspending our collective narratives of Indigenous communities as “broken” or “damaged,” one allows space and room for energy to re-vision our theories of change, establish better tribal and community ethics guidelines, and reassess and create mutually beneficial academic roles in community research.

One potential positive educational outcome of such curricular, pedagogical, administrative, and educational policy change around Land is the affirmation and strengthening of Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty, self-determination, and self-education, as well as the larger enculturation of non-Indigenous learners to more applied, responsible, responsive, and explicit solidarity and interdependencies with Land and other communities. In all, the importance of this research repositions Land education and land-as-pedagogy from a marginal to indispensable place and space within all learning and curricula, which initiates the logical consequence of such pedagogy: the complex, ethical, and historically informed process of Indigenous Land rematriation (Smith, Tuck, & Yang 2018). To that end, one premise and assumption behind such foregrounding of Land and its role in learning and educational contexts—Indigenous, “sustainability,” or otherwise—is the commitment to decolonization. As many scholars have argued (Shirley, 2017; Wilson, 2004; Garcia & Shirley, 2012; Manuelito, 2004), decolonization within Indigenous communities is complex and occurs in various forms, timelines, scales, and across space. Most importantly, Tuck and Wang (2012) assert that decolonization is not a metaphor, but is rather the specific attention to Indigenous Land rematriation, Indigenous sovereignty, the abolition of all forms of slavery, and must always be understood as a historical process specific to Land and place (Tuck, McKenzie, and McCoy, 2014, p. 20). When viewed from the latter lens, any claims about, from, or for Land must also be conceptualized and discussed in material rather than just abstract, metaphorical socio-political conditions and realities.

Author

• Austin R. Cruz, University of Arizona