Beyond inclusion: Walking in the forest as a liberatory pedagogical practice

• In Event: In the news, still on the margins: LGBTQ, Indigenous, and environmental inclusion efforts in education

Proposal

The Indian Forest Rights Act of 2006 grants tribal communities exclusive access to protected public lands across India. The development of educational infrastructure such as schools in Indigenous communities promises liberal equality and economic growth. Yet, the processes through which infrastructures are made reveals the underbelly of progress and democratic liberalism. (Anand et al., 2018) Schools themselves are infrastructural projects, many of them being greatly underresourced in the Siddi community, an Afrodescendent Indigenous community in Karnataka, India. Like many Scheduled Tribe (ST) communities in India, the Siddis have historically been excluded from the benefits of infrastructure growth while being the most affected by its environmental impacts. The privatization of forest land for school development purposes by non-profit organizations has rendered Siddi people as ‘encroachers’ on forest land they once enjoyed access to, ironically and tragically, barring them from accessing running water and electricity as their homes are now considered illegal encroachment units. While there is growing political discourse about the need for governments to act in service of Indigenous communities, I instead focus on the actions that Indigenous communities like the Siddis are taking themselves.

In this study, I adopt a microethnographic method called interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995; Rymes, 2015) to understand how walking through contested land is an act of resistance and reclamation. Rather than waiting to be included and heard by larger systems and structures, I focus my attention on how communities are exercising their agency to maintain relationships to land despite their contested legal status. Although, legally speaking, land may have entered private ownership, Indigenous relationships to land are unchanged, regardless of legal ownership. Accompanying Siddi people on several forest walks as encroachers on newly privatized forest land, I pay attention to how Siddi people use linguistic practices such as indexicality and multilingualism to talk about land, and what that reveals about caste, class, and land. I use a theoretical approach called ‘Refiguring Presences’ (Nxumalo, 2016) to show how walking through the forest with contested political status can be a liberatory pedagogical tool to re-member and re-story the land to revive and maintain Indigenous relationships to land, despite a shifting legal landscape of privatization, land ownership, and access.
Rather than viewing inclusion as a set of benevolent efforts to allow previously excluded and marginalized communities to enter the mainstream, I focus on inclusion as the political struggle of the marginalized to persist and find alternatives for themselves, even if through illicit means.

Author

• Arjun Krishna, University of California Los Angeles