Land, learning, and dreams: Examining the development of place-based and community-oriented educational infrastructure among an afrodescendent indigenous community in Karnataka, India

• In Event: Roundtable Group 6
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Addressing the need for change through educational infrastructure, equity and inclusivity

Proposal

The Indian Forest Rights Act of 2006 grants indigenous people exclusive access to protected public lands across India. The development of educational infrastructure in indigenous communities promises liberal equality and economic growth. Yet, the process through which infrastructures are actually made reveals the underbelly of progress and democratic liberalism. Schools themselves are infrastructural projects, many of them being greatly underresourced in the Siddi community, an afrodescendent indigenous community in India. Although education development in the global south is often equated to infrastructure, the Siddi community – like many indigenous communities – has historically benefited the least from infrastructure growth while being the most affected by its environmental impacts. Yet, the development of educational infrastructure itself is a violent process, predicated on the theft of indigenous land and its subsequent privatization by non-governmental educational agencies in the name of the community's own economic development. This process also renders Siddi people as encroachers on their own land, ironically and tragically, barring them from accessing infrastructure such as running water and electricity. Critique, while useful, offers only a naming of the issue. Reimagining, on the other hand, what educational spaces and learning infrastructure can be requires understanding the historical relationships that indigenous communities have with their lands and waters, and centering, remembering, and re-membering these relationships. Additionally, phenotypic and outward differences between the Siddi community and the majority of the Indian population means that they are subject to colorist and anti-Black treatment even by fellow members of other marginalized groups who may see themselves as being more 'Indian,' complicated by a history of caste-based violence. Despite the fact that Siddi people trace their ancestry to the Bantu and Luhya peoples of southeastern Africa, they are as strongly woven into the South Asian story as any indigenous community and represent a strong challenge to dominant ideas of a racialized and ethnocentric national identity and of indigeneity itself. Adopting a microethnographic approach to understanding how learning occurs in the natural world initiates the act of taking seriously the forms of knowledge and learning that are present in the Siddi community, outside of institutional educational spaces. While this type of work may typically belong in a learning sciences conference, I maintain that relationships to land and water and their association with learning tells us something about what is means to experience the natural and non-human world as a human, thus very much contributing to an anthropological conversation about international development, indigenous knowledge systems, and learning environments. Recognizing the community's sense of collective agency as people whose histories and practices can inform their own developmental goals resists deficit narratives about indigenous people and their ways of life. Making development a more participatory and action-oriented process means transferring ownership of these infrastructural projects into the community's hands and taking seriously their longstanding forms of learning, knowledge, and visions for the future, and ethnography gives us a vibrant way to affirm and reaffirm these forms.

Author

• Arjun Krishna, University of California Los Angeles