Learning Across Lands and Languages: Indigenous Latina Design Circles for a Garden Education Project

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 1:45 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Learning Across Places and Cultures (Table 1)

Abstract

Indigenous land education prioritizes relationships between people, land, water, and More-Than-Human kin (Tuck, McKenzie, & McCoy, 2014). I ask what happens when a community garden project and its accompanying educational projects are done by displaced Indigenous people outside their homelands on other sovereign territories.
In this paper I examine the design process of a community garden education program with Mayan mothers living as refugees in the Greater Los Angeles area, or Tovaangar. While there are differing ways to think of displaced Indigenous people on lands that are not theirs, with the rise in Mayan migration to the U.S., it is increasingly important to attend to how land-based relationships and values transfer, and how environmental educational projects take up these relationships.

Author

• Jackson Gzehoviak, University of California - Los Angeles