"Microfragmentos" of reparation and reinvention

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Decolonising Development in Education: Rethinking, Reframing and Reimagining Possibilities

Proposal

This paper offers "microfragmentos" of reparation and reinvention. The "microfragmentos" — small, broken, and irregular fragments that remain incomplete — are a modest local political initiative growing from a pedagogical project among Cañari women and children in the high Ecuadorian Andes who are confronting the incursion of capitalist and neocolonial threats. Three microfragmentos on growing, on cooking, and on eating relate reparation and reinvention around food practices. As the women collectively work their ch’ixi (that is, drawing from the Indigenous side of their subjectivities), their practices of growing potatoes, making meals together, and introducing children to their childhood meals are expressions of affection, hope, dreams, and joy that transform dimensions of their daily living, allowing them to find small moments to repair the colonial tragedies they have collectively inherited as they reinvent their lives in the modernized Ecuadorian Andes.

Author

• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Western University The University of Western Ontario