Decolonizing Water Pedagogies: Learning With Indigenous Presencing and Relationality

• In Event: Decolonizing Water Pedagogies: Centering Indigenous Knowledges in Educational Approaches to Climate Catastrophe

Abstract

Objectives
There is significant evidence that vulnerability to current times of environmental precarity is highly inequitably distributed (Pulido, 2016). This includes disproportionate impacts on Indigenous peoples who have experienced hundreds of years of displacement and dispossession from the lands and waters with which they are in specific co-constitutional relationships (Tallbear, 2017; Whyte, 2017). Indigenous communities have invaluable insights into the impacts of environmental change on relations with specific lands, waters and animal life (Todd, 2016). However, in dominant forms of environmental education, Indigenous knowledges remain marginalized, relegated to the past or superficially included (Whyte, 2017; Brugnach, Craps & Dewulf, 2017). At the same time, environmental education of young people in North America is often limited by prevailing anthropocentric (human centric) and romantic discourses of nature that are disconnected from the specific environmental challenges that young people face in their particular geographic places (Author, 2015, Taylor, 2013). In seeking to disrupt both the marginalization of Indigenous knowledges and the prevalence of anthropocentric discourses in environmental education, the purpose of this paper is to center the decolonial potentials that emerged from an Indigenous Summer Camp led by Coahuiltecan elders that included a focus on situated water pedagogies.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Indigenous knowledges are articulated in multiple place-specific ways including, but not limited to: creation stories, land and water use protocols, land-based elder teachings and Indigenous science – all of which can provide alternatives to extractive and hierarchical relationships between human and more-than-human life. In this paper, our focus is on the ways in which the camp foregrounded Indigenous knowledges in relation to two concepts-practices. The first is radical relationality which foregrounds relationality and reciprocity with the more-than-human world (Kimmerer, 2013; Author, 2019; Recollet, 2015; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). Radical relationality also recognizes the agentic sociality of land and waters and their more-than-human inhabitants (Cajete, 2000; Todd, 2016). The second concept-practice is refiguring presences which refers to the presencing (Simpson, 2011) of Indigenous land, knowledges and lives as a pedagogical orientation as an emplaced mode of resisting settler colonial erasure of Indigenous presences (Author, 2019).

Modes of Inquiry
Working with video data of the elders’ storied teachings with the youth, as well as the camp’s performing and visual arts activities, we attend to moments when situated Indigenous presences and radical relationality were enacted by camp instructors and elders. We focus on the ways in which relationality and presencing emerged through situated pedagogies on, from, and with water, including ajehuan sohuetiau, the sacred springs of San Marcos, where the camp was held.


Scholarly Significance
We discuss the scholarly significance of this work in relation to what it might offer to teachers seeking possibilities to counter the coloniality of environmental education. This work underlines the importance of interdisciplinary teaching and learning as important sites of enacting environmental pedagogies that matter for young people growing up amidst the challenges of escalating and unevenly distributed environmental precarity.

Authors

• Fikile Nxumalo, University of Toronto

• Nnenna Odim, University of Texas at Austin