Forest walks as a liberatory pedagogical activity for re-storying and re-membering relationships to the natural world

• In Event: Encountering the pluriverse through Indigenous pedagogies

Proposal

Background and significance

The Siddi community in Karnataka, India, is an Afrodescendent Indigenous community that is currently navigating issues in land tenure due to ongoing privatization of their traditional forests, ushered in by neoliberal development. As descendents of Bantu and Luhya peoples of eastern Africa, Siddi people arrived in the Indian state of Goa across several centuries of the Portuguese slave trade (Pinto, 2019), finding emancipation from enslavement by walking into the forests of Karnataka which is now their home (Prasad, 2005). The Indian Forest Rights Act of 2006 grants Scheduled Tribe (ST) communities such as the Siddies exclusive access to protected public forest lands, however public forest lands are threatened by weakening regulations and increasing privatization of forest lands by extractive industries, rendering ST communities as ‘encroachers’ and their homes as ‘encroachments’ on newly privatized land. This study asks how walking through the forest, especially with contested legal or political status, can be a liberatory pedagogical practice of remembering colonial histories, making pasts, presents, and futures visible, and re-membering relationships to land in an era of ongoing dispossession of Indigenous people from their land.

Theoretical framework

The natural world is saturated with political and cultural histories. Land education, as a theoretical grounding for this study, offers an opportunity to make these histories and relationships visible through learning activities designed to foreground Black and Indigenous relationships to land. Some of these movements have taken the form of ‘refiguring presences’ (Nxumalo, 2016) and family forest walks (Marin & Bang, 2018). Walking as a pedagogical activity offers opportunities for learners to experience the world by moving through it and build meaning through place and with place (Ingold, 2004; Marin et al., 2020). As walking through the forest was a path to emancipation for Siddi people, forest walks are deeply enmeshed with Siddi identity and concepts of liberation. Marin & Bang (2018) note that forest walks offer opportunities for Indigenous learners to story the land using Indigenous ways of knowing about place and land. At the same time, forest walks offer opportunities to contest hegemonic narratives about land use, legal definitions of ‘encroachment’ and ‘ownership,’ and build alternative relationships to land that go beyond viewing land as property.

Methods and data corpus

In this study, I adopt a microethnographic approach called interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) based on video data from forest walks to understand how walking through contested land is an act of resistance and reclamation for Indigenous communities in the era of neoliberal development. Specifically, I accompany Siddi people on forest walks as ‘encroachers’ on newly privatized forest land, using participant-generated video to document speech, action, and interaction with the natural world on four forest walks of approximately two hours each. Participant-generated video of forest walks were collected during the monsoon season of 2022, which provides additional context for the way that participants understand their relationships to forest and water ecosystems.

Data analysis

Videos from forest walks were content logged and transcribed three-dimensionally (Mondada, 2016; Rymes, 2015) to include human action, speech, and the sonic landscape with sights and sounds of the natural world such as water, birds, wind and trees. Videos from multiple perspectives were placed side-by-side to understand how participants experience the natural world in dialogue with each other, simultaneously. Transana v.5.32 was the qualitative data analysis software used to analyze videos, generate candidate selections of clips for analysis, and generate transcripts. Birds chirping, the wind blowing, leaves ruffling, the natural world provides a discursive context in which humans make meaning about the world while moving through it (Ingold, 2007, 2010; Ingold & Vergunst, 2008). Codes generated from transcript analysis were raised into categories and themes using a grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2001).

Results

An analysis of this data corpus reveals that walking through the forest as a pedagogical act (1) offers opportunities to interrogate identity in the context of caste and capitalism, for example as participants talked about the privatization of forest land for large-scale plantations by upper-caste communities upon encountering newly erected boundaries in the forest; (2) can be a liberatory pedagogical tool to re-story the land and maintain Indigenous relationships to land, despite a shifting legal landscape of land tenure, as participants shared stories of encounters with deer, native bird and plant species.

Author

• Arjun Krishna, UCLA