Building Decolonial Praxis: Participatory Action Research for Reclaiming Yaakthung Indigenous Knowledge

• In Event: Plurilingual, translanguaging, and asset-based pedagogies across contexts

Proposal

Research has shown that Indigenous knowledge across the globe are increasingly threatened due to neoliberalized educational policies and practices (Phyak & De Costa, 2022). As a global political economic ideology, neoliberalism promotes profit-oriented, competition-based and free market policies (Harvey, 2005). Scholars have been critical about how neoliberalism construct unequal educational policies and practices that reproduce colonial ‘deficit ideologies’ (Gorski, 2010) about Indigenous peoples and their knowledge, identity and language. Deficit ideologies position Indigenous peoples as knowledgeless subjects by misrecognizing their epistemologies, values and languages in education. More importantly, such ideologies blame Indigenous communities as the people who lack awareness, activism and interest in learning and promoting Indigenous knowledges and languages. In the dominant discourse, Indigenous knowledge systems are not embraced as an integral part of educational policies. Consequently, Indigenous youths are deprived of learning and embracing the value of Indigenous knowledge in the mainstream education. Against this backdrop, the purpose of this paper is to discuss how Indigenous youths in Nepal can learn and reclaim Yaakthung epistemologies through community-based participatory action research. Yaakthung, also known as Limbu, is one of the major Indigenous communities in Nepal. About 1.46 percent of the country’s total population are Yaakthungs. They speak Yaakthung paan as their mother tongue and live with the principles of Mundhum, a totality of philosophies and cultural practices performed orally.
Drawing on the theory of ‘decolonial praxis’ (Mignolo, 2007; Pitts, 2017), I present how Yaakthung youths develop critical agency and activism to resist unequal knowledging and reclaim Yaakthung epistemologies through a participatory project. Informed by the Yaakthung philosophy of tangsing (Subba, 2003), this participatory action research (PAR) (Tuck, 2009) engages Yaakthung youths to learn the Yaakthung language and epistemologies from the community elders, Tumyaangs, in a community-based plantation project. First, the youths learn about various plants that are key to performing Mundhum, the guiding philosophy of the Yaakthung community, culture, value, and spirituality, from the community elders in a tangsing ritual. Second, they go to the forest to collect saplings and plant and fence them. Third, the community elders teach them the values and meanings of each plant, in Yaakthung, for the Yaakthung people and nature. The findings of the study shows that plantation serves as a decolonial praxis to build Indigenous youths’ agency and activism to learn and connect Indigenous language with land, nature and epistemologies. Overall, I argue that through the community-based plantation project, Yaakthung youths become critical subjects to assess how unequal language policies affect their identity and language learning trajectories and reclaim their Yaakthung language and epistemologies.

Author

• Prem Phyak, Teachers College Columbia University