"A GREAT TREE HAS FALLEN": COMMUNITY, SPIRITUAL ECOLOGY, AND AFRICAN EDUCATION

In African communities, the spiritual connections to the land and the Indigenous wisdom used to nurture it have been subjugated by Western development and the Eurocentric knowledges that buttress it. The Indigenous frameworks which inform the daily life of communities as they interact with their environments, have largely been replaced by Western scientific discourses which frame the individual as the primary social unit and which commodify the environment for consumption. This article examines how it may be possible to re-imagine the community in relationship with its environments, especially as it pertains to education in African contexts. In this process, community participation is a necessity and cannot be a sort of superficial bandage solution, but must involve the interrogation of the larger structures and discourses that underpin development and education in Africa. Development and education must meet the needs of the communities in a holistic way; not only in the daily physical sense, but also in terms of spiritual connections, knowledge production, and the valuing of history. This article takes up the example of carbon credit projects, especially those of community forests in Africa, as an example of the way that development in Africa has broken communities and distanced African Indigenous peoples from their sacred knowledge of the land. The article explores what this commodification means for African education and how a critical pedagogy based on Indigenous knowledges might be used to resist and disrupt Western educational discourses

Microsoft Word - Waziyatawin (Final).docx

Abstract In the twenty-first century, we are facing the unprecedented convergence of human-created crises. Climate chaos, fossil-fuel resource depletion, overpopulation, and the ongoing destruction of ecosystems threaten the very foundation of colonial empire, both creating emancipatory potential for Indigenous societies struggling against colonial subjugation and wreaking devastating havoc on the lands, waters, and ecosystems upon which our people must survive. While the vulnerability and unsustainability of empire is clearly exposed, Indigenous people must wrestle with the continued cooptation of our people into civilization's fallacies and destructive habits as well as the increasing threats to our homelands that jeopardize our capacity for a land-based existence. Thus, just when liberation may be within our grasp, the ecological destruction may be so complete that Indigenous lifeways may be impossible to practice. In this context there is a simultaneous and urgent need for both the restoration of sustainable Indigenous practices and a serious defense of Indigenous homelands

Speaking truth to power: Indigenous storytelling as an act of living resistance

In our preparation for this issue, we had particular expectations and beliefs about what it meant to theorize and map out decolonization. We saw decolonization as under theorized and needing more attention. What the authors of this issue reminded us of is that decolonization does not fit the demands and expectations of the Western Euroversity – it is alive and vibrant, being theorized and enacted in Indigenous communities around the globe through practices such as story telling. In this editorial we examine the role that Indigenous storytelling plays as resurgence and insurgence, as Indigenous knowledge production, and as disruptive of Eurocentric, colonial norms of ‘objectivity’ and knowledge. As the authors in this issue explore the specific and located knowledges that work to decolonization, we finish by asking what the role of the reader is in bearing witness to these profound, powerful, and complex articulations of decolonization and Indigenous being

Towards the 'tangible unknown': Decolonization and the Indigenous future

On the occasion of the inaugural issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, we examine the many contradictions, contestations and possible pathways to decolonization. In working to explore the many themes that the articles in this issue bring forth, we recognize that, despite our certainty that decolonization centers Indigenous methods, peoples, and lands, the future is a ‘tangible unknown’, a constant (re)negotiating of power, place, identity and sovereignty. In these contestations, decolonization and Indigeneity are not merely reactionary nor in a binary relationship with colonial power. Decolonization is indeed oppositional to colonial ways of thinking and acting but demands an Indigenous starting point and an articulation of what decolonization means for Indigenous peoples around the globe. This editorial works towards the possibility of a global Indigenous movement that strengthens and supports local moments for decolonization, and does so by exploring some of the many layers and questions that this necessarily entails