Indigenous Pedagogies in a Global World and Sustainable Futures

FINA CARPENA-MÉNDEZ University of Gdańsk PIRJO KRISTIINA VIRTANEN University of Helsinki KARLA JESSEN WILLIAMSON University of Saskatchewan The relationship between Indigenous learning systems and sustainability pedagogies has not been sufficiently elaborated despite the recognition of Indigenous peoples as stewards of the world’s biological, cultural and linguistic diversity. Indigenous pedagogies are intergenerational, relational, and land-based. This special section addresses intergenerational efforts to regenerate local biocultural knowledge in settings that extend beyond the classroom and proposes that educators support these processes by cultivating relational learning through new sensory, perceptive, and affective capacities throughout life. [Indigenous pedagogies, sustainability, intergenerational knowledge, more-than-human futures, biocultural regeneration, hope] For thousands of years, Indigenous societies have supported the reproduction and diversification of life in different bioregions, including lands and waters. However, schools in the very same bioregions rarely offer differentiated educational plans that attend to the interdependence between language, culture and territory, even if these are protected and recognized by international law and national legislation. At the same time, the ancestral lands of Indigenous societies are highly vulnerable to current global extractive projects promoted by state agencies and transnational corporations. Such projects result in massive environmental destruction that affects Indigenous societies’ livelihoods and sustainability, including sustainability pedagogies and the inter-generational re-creation of knowledge. Linear economic growth based on colonial projects of dispossession and natural resource extraction disrupts the integrity of Indigenous land and territories, the integral ecosystems of all beings that coexist in the world, both living and those who have passed away (human beings, animals, plants and other beings that animate soil, water, air and the rhythms of cyclical natural processes), encompassing epistemological and ontological dimensions (see e.g. Cajete 1999; Jackson-Barrett and Lee-Hammond 2018; McCoy et al. 2016; Nigh and Rodriguez 1995). Dispossession through global development and economies of predation and abandonment is technically and discursively linked to the everyday colonial violence encoded into educational policies and immediate educational environments created by the West-centric education systems (Alim and Paris 2017; Bertely 2016; Bertely et al. 2015; Peña 2005; Sabzalian 2019). These systems and policies affect the experiential and practical sources [Correction added on December 20, 2022 after first online publication. The author biography section has been updated to include Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen’s and Karla Jessen Williamson’s biographies.] Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 53, Issue 4, pp. 308–320, ISSN 0161-7761, online ISSN 1548-1492. © 2022 American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aeq.12447 308 15481492, 2022, 4, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aeq.12447 by University Of Helsinki, Wiley Online Library on [25/12/2022]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Indigenous Pedagogies in a Global World and Sustainable Futures 309 of knowledge and values through daily activities and different understandings of time, space, place, and the relationality of all beings. Despite the development of Indigenous education in different continents, global development and educational policies propagate a type of “abyssal thinking” (Santos 2007, 2014) that divides the human from the more-than-human and scientific knowledge from other forms of knowing. At the same time, Indigenous and local knowledges are actively framed as irrelevant and untrue in global development and educational policies and practices. Educational programs based on post-abyssal thinking would recognize the existence of an ecology of knowledges. Building upon recent interrogations of anthropocentric and colonial complicities in educational systems (see Battiste 2013; Grande 2015; Sabzalian 2019; Simpson 2014), the decolonial turn toward epistemic and socio-environmental justice, as well as current debates on the relationship between autonomy, territory, and culturally sustaining education, we argue that “territorial literacies” (Nigh and Bertely 2018) cultivate primarily relational cognition and learning as a basis for generating sustainable ways of life. These relational literacies allow the development of sensory, perceptive and affective states of respect and reciprocity with other human and more-than-human beings. This form of relationality recognizes the agentive and communicative capacities of diverse beings that are capable of understanding and responding to others. The term ‘more-than-human beings’ is used here to overcome humans’ exceptionality, or what the dominant society usually understands by “environment” and “nature,” attending to multispecies relations. Official Indigenous education policies and practices incorporated from above rarely involve unconventional territorial literacies (Barnhardt and Kawagley 2005; McCune et al. 2016; Nigh and Bertely 2018). Literacies that establish a close relationship between education, ancestral values, and care for the diversity of life in specific ecological systems and territories are more often cultivated in autonomous educational projects designed and controlled from below, such as the community educational projects in Chiapas, designed in the interstitial spaces made possible by government policies (Bertely et al. 2015). After the Zapatista uprising, many Indigenous communities in Chiapas dismissed their federal teachers and elected young people from the community as school teachers, who subsequently sought additional training. They formed a collective that pioneered reforms in their local schools considering the daily practical and productive activities of families as both a means of instruction and as sources of knowledge for the achievement of situated learning and collective well-being (Nigh and Bertely 2018). These autonomous projects constructed from below by community agents in collaboration with ethnic-political movements responded to the demands raised by the Latin American Indigenous movement regarding an education that promotes the good life (Sumak Kawsay, el Buen Vivir) both in Indigenous communities and in the transformation of subjectivities and values in the dominant societies. Some of these educational experiences have proven influential in the Latin American region (Bertely et al. 2015). Teachers and research collaborators committed to decolonizing practices seek to respond pedagogically to environmentally damaged places by formalizing Indigenous and community-based pedagogies implicit in daily activities (see Nxumalo 2019). The articles in this special section provide ethnographic inquiry into Indigenous sustainability pedagogies that support biocultural regeneration (Apffel-Marglin 1998, 2019) and inclusive sustainable futures in the context of eroded local livelihoods. Ethnographic attention to Indigenous sustainability pedagogies, beyond the distinction of formal and informal education (both in the classroom and in the creation of alternative insitu educational spaces), contributes to our understanding of the maintenance and renewal of bodies of knowledge and practices that make nurturing and caring relationships possible with 15481492, 2022, 4, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aeq.12447 by University Of Helsinki, Wiley Online Library on [25/12/2022]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Indigenous Pedagogies and Sustainability Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 53, 2022 all life forms beyond the human. This is crucial for the development of learning practices that encourage and develop the sense of mutual dependence among beings, thus guaranteeing more sustainable societies locally and globally. This special section of Anthropology & Education Quarterly showcases ethnographic fieldwork regarding the complexities of Indigenous sustainability pedagogies in Latin America (Ecuador and Brazil) and their contributions to rethinking sustainability education with a decolonial intentionality, in its potential also to transform dominant attitudes, practices and subjectivities in non-Indigenous societies. This special section emerged from the session “Ethnographic engagements with pedagogy and the re-creation and re-discovery of knowledge” in the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in Minneapolis in 2016. Subsequent discussions continued to consider the relationship between Indigenous pedagogies and sustainability transformations. The researcher positionality of the guest editors and contributors in this special section derives from Indigenous studies and engaged anthropology, shaping co-learning relationships with the communities we work with as well as our research journeys. Guest editors Fina Carpena-Méndez and Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen are European white women whose work is based on long term collaborations with their Indigenous interlocutors as research partners, while guest editor Karla Jessen Williamson is a Kalaaleq woman from Maniitsoq with an extensive experience in Indigenous education. The authors of the articles, Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen and Kathleen Fine-Dare, are non-Indigenous White women who have reflected upon the ethnographic process as a cultivated learning relationship composed of encounters and dialogue that maintain divergence among perspectives from worlds that are partially connected (De la Cadena 2015, 27). Indigenous values motivated and informed the topic of this special section and the authors’ shared research approaches; recognition of Indigenous values is a crucial step toward more ethical research. Indigenous Education as an Effective Way of Reproducing Diversity The current global environmental crisis has deep cultural and historical roots (Simpson 2004). Western cultural assumptions that are the basis of models of global development undermine cultural and biodiversity interdependence (Toledo and BarreraBassols 2008), while we consider, based on our own fieldwork experiences, biocultural approaches to be at the core of Indigenous governance structures. Colonial capitalist modernity is based on imaginaries of linear progress and the nature-culture divide which produce forms of rationality that privilege monocultural, Eurocentric scientific knowledge premised on notions of objective truth, mechanistic efficiency and productivity (see Apffel-Marglin and Marglin 1996; Santos and Aguiló 2019) and have resulted in practice in the environmental devastation that we experience at a global level. This instrumental rationality has allowed the looting of territories, the destruction of communities, and the disruption of diverse knowledges, leading to the commodification of life in the name of progress. Indigenous and peasant youth in the global South give meaning to and shape their life trajectories in the context of climate chaos, ecological disasters, failed rural livelihoods promoted by neoliberal models of development, and exclusionary and authoritarian politics. Both schools and migration, which were imagined as sources of hope, have failed to deliver on their promises for a better future for rural populations (see CarpenaMéndez 2007, 2014, 2015). What and how children and youth learn about their immediate environment and territories is largely restructured in the context of schooling as the cognitive processes of learning are also reshaped by prevalent Western-based written and digital literacy. Yet Indigenous perspectives and struggles for cognitive and epistemic 15481492, 2022, 4, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aeq.12447 by University Of Helsinki, Wiley Online Library on [25/12/2022]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 310 311 rights and for biocultural regeneration provide new insights into these global processes as they reconfigure Indigenous and non-Indigenous young lives around the world (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2011). Indigenous ways of knowing have been theorized as complex knowledge systems with an adaptive integrity of their own, which hold lessons for stewarding healthy ecosystems of biological and cultural diversity (Athayde et al. 2016; Berkes 2018; Fa et al. 2020; Fernández-Llamazares et al. 2021; Schusler et al. 2019; Turner et al. 2022). Yet the diversity of the ontological dimensions of knowledge, and the experiences that underlie Indigenous peoples’ adaptive responses to environmental changes, need to be understood in the chaotic contexts of lived experience (Howitt 2020). The question that has oriented much educational research is how (and for what purpose) to embrace dynamic flows of knowledge and practice which are embedded in contentious sociopolitical processes, thus incorporating these flows into pedagogical possibilities that sustain Indigenous and local knowledge and practices rather than essentializing or trivializing them. Even though Indigenous knowledge systems are considered to be essential for planetary sustainability (Virtanen et al. 2020), the connection between Indigenous learning systems and sustainability pedagogies has not been sufficiently elaborated. From the different national, ethnic and environmental contexts, the articles in this special section present Indigenous children and young people’s lives and sustainability pedagogies in a globalizing world, which reveal processes and forms of creation and transmission of knowledge that are different from the ones that have been allowed in the dominant society’s education system. Indigenous scholars working on educational research and practice, as well as critical developments in the anthropology of education that draw on Indigenous epistemologies, have generated conceptions and practices of education that disrupt the colonial education that undermines Indigenous people’s struggles for autonomy and self-determination (Battiste 2013; Dean 2003; Grande 2015; McCarty et al. 2005). Incorporating Indigenous linguistic and cultural content into the formal education system through curricular changes, in the absence of structural changes, does not lead to significant transformations in the purpose and experience of schooling; these institutionalized spaces reconfigure time, space, cognition, knowledge production and the social relations of learning (Alim and Paris 2017; McCarty et al. 2005; Rockwell and Gomes 2009). The purpose of state-sanctioned schooling has been to forward the capitalist colonialist project by forcing students and their families to lose or deny their histories, languages, literacies, stories, art, knowledges and lifeways, and measuring achievement “solely against White middle-class norms of knowing and being” (Alim and Paris 2017, 2). In reimagining the purpose and practice of education, we conceptualize culturally sustaining pedagogies that explicitly call for schooling to be a site not only for valuing but for sustaining the different ways of knowing and lifeways (Alice and Paris 2017; Keskitalo 2019; Manu’atu 2000). By drawing on contemporary understandings of dynamic and fluid youth practices and knowledge to meet their current cultural and political realities, culturally sustaining pedagogies do not only consider enduring patterns of knowing and practice passed down from elders but also the cultural reworkings of young people (Alice and Paris 2017). Debates on the relationship between intercultural education and demands for autonomy, territory and Buen Vivir (the good life) frame educational proposals in Latin America that seek to reintegrate the society-nature relationship and make effective the 15481492, 2022, 4, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aeq.12447 by University Of Helsinki, Wiley Online Library on [25/12/2022]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Indigenous Pedagogies and Sustainability Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 53, 2022 right to self-determination (Bertely et al. 2015). From epistemic and political perspectives from the South (Santos 2014), Nigh and Bertely (2018) theorize territory and natural resources as essential resources to make Indigenous knowledge explicit in the design of an intercultural education under the control of Indigenous communities. In contrast, state promoted intercultural education throughout Latin America separates issues of quality of life and the cultural and linguistic rights of Indigenous students from the conditions of territory and economic production in which they live; as a result, Indigenous societies become enmeshed in relationships of power and political confrontation (see Nigh and Bertely 2018). In mobilizing place-based education within the field of environmental education, there has been a lack of meaningful engagement with colonial legacies, including conceptualizations of place as culturally and politically neutral, thus perpetuating forms of European universalism (Friedel 2011; Tuck et al. 2014). Working in suburban settings, Nxumalo (2019) has pointed to the necessity of politicizing place relations by unsettling taken-for-granted nature pedagogies for young children who are learning within settler colonial logics of knowing particular places. This would result in putting into practice pedagogical encounters with more-than-human beings through radical relationality rather than encountering them as objects of scientific discovery and naming. Sustainability Education and Indigenous Pedagogies Indigenous knowledges draw from relational underpinnings (Cajete 1994, 1999; Holmes and Gonzalez 2017; Kovach 2009). Understanding Indigenous knowledges and pedagogies also requires knowledge of specific relational ontological frameworks (Mika 2017; Stucki 2012). Indigenous pedagogies are informed by an ancestral collective value system that emphasizes care, attention, and perception born out of relationship and reciprocity. Understanding relationality encompasses intimate, reciprocal relations with land and all its diverse beings (Watts 2013). Within Indigenous consciousness, knowledge emerges out of a worldview of interconnectedness, engaging in responsible and respectful ways with all of life by being a good relative, in order to enhance possibilities for human-ecological continuance and regeneration. Indigenous pedagogies strive toward the ethical development of the person situated within a collective of human and other-than-human relatives, contributing to the survival and well-being of all. In addressing the question of which knowledge is relevant, appropriate and sustaining, Holmes and Gonzalez (2017, 2016) state that from Indigenous worldviews, this knowledge is what contributes to the survival of the collective of human and other-than-human relatives. Rethinking sustainability education from the perspectives gained from Indigenous pedagogies is not limited to learning processes of sustainable environmental practices in specific biospheres, but also involves consideration of the globalization of recent technological and ideological developments that contribute to cultural colonization (Ellen and Harris 2000; Kulnieks et al. 2013). A knowledge-based global economy requiring constant skill upgrading over the life course to fulfill the shifting needs of the labor market frames policies and practices of lifelong learning at the national and global level. In the current lived transition from industrial to bio-cognitive capitalism (Fumagalli et al. 2019), unending technological innovation penetrates and reconfigures not only sociality and labor, but also the cognitive activity and the vital faculties of human beings, which become objects of control, accumulation and valorization. Constant technological innovation also often exacerbates global environmental crises which in turn impact local livelihoods around the world (Weston 2017). 15481492, 2022, 4, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aeq.12447 by University Of Helsinki, Wiley Online Library on [25/12/2022]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 312 313 Global educational reforms promoting learning through the use of digital technologies and media literacy do not employ a neutral system of communication but a whole cultural system that contributes to ongoing colonization, reshaping cognition, attention and perception, the process of knowledge transmission and renewal, and intimate relations with place. These Western cultural and cognitive transforming technologies perpetuate assumptions about universal development and require an individually-centered and collective consciousness that may undermine awareness of how all life forms are sustained in embodied dialogue, sensory and affective intimacies, and reciprocities (Bowers 2014; Manu’atu and Kepa 2016). Drawing on critical approaches to the globalization of digital technologies and learning experiences based on constructivist educational reforms (Bowers 2005, 2014, Breidlid 2013), as well as our own fieldwork experiences, the guest editors ask for statesponsored approaches to sustainability education to rethink the learning processes that are endangering biocultural regeneration and sustainable governance, education, and livelihoods. We expand this interdisciplinary body of work in order to bring forward the significance of Indigenous pedagogies for sustainability and hope as intergenerational relations and knowledge production respond in dynamic ways to a transforming world, decentering schooling as a site of everyday pedagogical encounters. The Intergenerational Basis of Lifelong Learning Indigenous pedagogies are relational, intergenerational and fundamentally oriented toward biocultural regeneration and survival. In this intergenerational pedagogy, elders have a critical place as they embody Indigenous ways of knowing, values, sensibilities, diverse disciplines (Holmes and Gonzalez 2017; Merculieff and Roderick 2013) and calls for holistic perspectives (Jessen Williamson 2011). In the present time of longer distance mobility and larger circulations, the contexts today extend beyond ancestral places. Moreover, as shown in the articles in this special section, in complex ecologies of Indigenous pedagogies, learning is not an imposed process organized in stages, as it depends on the agency, self-motivation and pace of the individual learner. Also, youth’s coming-of-age affects what, how, and where one can learn (Virtanen 2012). In this approach, learning is considered a life-long process, where knowing cannot be separated from doing and the diversity of persons. Learning, therefore, is experientially rooted and learner driven throughout life. Earlier anthropological studies have analyzed children’s and youth’s agency and the intergenerational basis of lifelong learning and knowledge transmission (Bloch 2005; Ellen et al. 2013; Hasse 2015; Lancy 2018; Lancy et al. 2010; Lave 2011), which are also central to Indigenous approaches to learning. Recent theoretical developments in anthropology on the shared production of knowledge-making stemming from the indissoluble relationship between environment, body, and thought have contributed to understanding knowledge as a dynamic process rather than as a static cognitive, symbolic and ideological corpus (Ingold 2011; Marchand 2010). As Marchand (2010) contends, far from being unidirectional processes of cultural transmission, learning processes require an act of recreation on the part of the learner. Learners are expected to observe and listen carefully, and to experience through active participation without much direct instruction and questions being asked (see Virtanen in this special section). As described in the Mesoamerican context, the learning experiences of Indigenous children are shaped by a pedagogy of sensing, observing, and accompanying that does not seek mastery of specific knowledge or skills but instead flexible approaches that adapt to shifting circumstances and tasks for which no previous training has been received (see e.g. Chamoux 1991; Flores et al. 2015; Ortiz Báez 2013, Rogoff et al. 2014). 15481492, 2022, 4, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aeq.12447 by University Of Helsinki, Wiley Online Library on [25/12/2022]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Indigenous Pedagogies and Sustainability Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 53, 2022 What is intergenerationally transmitted to young people is a mode of being that implies a specific attitude to learning which reproduces and actualizes a largely practicalcognitive logic of knowledge production. These learning practices are based on cultural patterns and values of long-standing duration that remain valuable to Indigenousheritage peoples in Mexico and persist as Indigenous and Indigenous-heritage communities increasingly migrate to the United States (see Flores et al. 2015 on the historicity of Indigenous pedagogies in Mesoamerica that continue to extend into contemporary Mexico and the United States today). Indigenous communities’ everyday processes of intergenerational transmission and renewal of knowledge shed light on the possibilities for resilience, perseverance and hope for other forms of life that could offer spaces of refuge in these current hegemonic economies of predation and abandonment. Contemporary sustainability challenges invite us to reconsider dominant pedagogies and forms of learning to enable young people to deal with accelerated change, inheritable uncertainty, and contested knowledge claims. Indigenous youth in different parts of the world grow up transculturally between traditions of sustainable practices in local bioregions and the cultural forces that are promoting new technological and economic globalization, which often are built on the onto-epistemological foundations that undermine local cultural commons. One of the systems that have eroded local knowledge has been the dominant society’s in-class teaching approach. The integration of digital technologies into teaching practices further reshapes learning as a cognitive process produced in intimate, sensory and embodied relationships with human and non-human others. Scholars have explored the intergenerational recreation of knowledge and biocultural memory under contemporary conditions of spatial and temporal displacement, transculturality, and articulation with other globally circulating forms of knowledge production and practices. Carpena-Méndez (2007, 2014) documents the youth-centered transnational migration of Indigenous farming communities. Indigenous learning systems allow Nahua youth to excel in jobs in the United States for which they had no previous training, and to re-generate agricultural knowledge when returning to their rural communities. Through sustained relationships across the US-Mexican border with youth and their families based on dialogue, inter-learning and mutual nurturance, multi-sited and multi-temporal research questions the common assumption that rural youth do not have an interest in agriculture and that schooling and transnational migration disrupt the process of intergenerational transmission of gathering, caring, and agro-ecological knowledge. Youth’s experiences of circular migration and work in the opposite extremes of the global food system (as subsistence farmers in their childhood and later in restaurants in the US) have facilitated the re-appropriation of traditional knowledge and re-creation of agricultural practices, processes that in turn hinge on cognitive introjection (see Ortiz Báez 2013, 244–51) which is cultivated by Indigenous pedagogies (Carpena-Méndez 2014). These cognitive introjection processes, as described by Ortiz Báez (2013), entail the development of a flexible and intuitive capacity to perceive and comprehend “all of a sudden” the procedures involved in new tasks and situations and to do them proficiently at the first attempt without the need for much trial and error corrections or specific instructions by an expert. Ortiz Báez (2013) points out that the cultivation of these cognitive processes is vital to the sustainability of Indigenous pedagogical practices and knowledges as it promotes mastery in new tasks for which one was not specifically trained when faced with changing environmental and work 15481492, 2022, 4, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aeq.12447 by University Of Helsinki, Wiley Online Library on [25/12/2022]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 314 315 conditions. In Indigenous migrant communities, the shared quotidian efforts between elders and youth to respond to the current challenges for sustainability (see e.g. Robson et al. 2018), renew biocultural heritage, and invest in Indigenous quality of life (rich in social relations and care practices) are central to the production of hope in the context of the failed promises of transnational migration. Local and Land-Based Pedagogies of Relatedness How children and young people acquire knowledge and norms of sustainability and how this knowledge is practiced (or not) in everyday spaces was the focus of a special issue of Local Environment (Horton et al. 2013). The editors argued that the tendency to limit policy and educational interventions with young people to smallscale behavior change (e.g. not littering, recycling) and to focus on learning in the classroom precludes consideration of the complex interconnections between everyday spaces and global processes. Local and land-based forms of knowledge are maintained and renewed through culturally-specific pedagogies that are not necessarily adopted by existing social institutions. Indigenous societies have educated their children through community-based pedagogies prior to the colonial establishment of school institutions (Balto 1997; Child and Klopotek 2014). Relational ontologies and epistemologies extrapolate community through engagement and learning with the diverse other- and more-than-human beings of their environments, which are actualized by a practical-cognitive logic of sensing, reflecting, caring, guarding, and reproducing (e.g. Kohn 2013; see Virtanen in this special section). The various forms that teaching and learning take in particular localities are oriented toward situating oneself in the cultural and environmental conditions of one’s life. Human-environment inter-collectivities engage in practices of reciprocity and nurturance to provide continuity to local biocultural patrimony. By focusing on ancestral relations in specific contexts, diverse Indigenous societies have created a deep understanding of relations and interactions between humans and more-than-human beings. In this special section, Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen addresses pedagogies of learning and inter- and intra-dependency relations. Conducted in the Purus Basin in Brazilian Amazonia, this work is a result of her collaboration with the Apurinã communities. The article examines land- and context-based learning in which each learner is introduced to the human and more-than-human actors, their histories, and how learning these dependency relations requires a long experiential education from an early age, activation of emotions, and reflection on ancestral values, both with others and alone. In the process of learning to interact with and learning from different more-thanhuman and human actors, a learner also acquires knowledge specific to the well-being and sustainability of the location as well as of society at large. The article shows how Indigenous pedagogies have some shared characteristics, but are locally composed, as well as locally altered. Also, in this special section, Kathleen Fine-Dare analyzes the significance of Indigenous pedagogical practices, conducted outside of formal classroom contexts by a self-described Indigenous organization in Quito, Ecuador. This organization aims to revitalize Indigenous cultural identity in an urban neighborhood characterized by ethnic and social class diversity. Formed by descendants of hacienda servants before the 1964 agrarian reform who might not have belonged to territorially grounded ethnic groups, the Indigenous organization Casa Kinde uses counter-hegemonic pedagogical strategies to recuperate ancestral knowledge in order to create harmonious co-existence 15481492, 2022, 4, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aeq.12447 by University Of Helsinki, Wiley Online Library on [25/12/2022]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Indigenous Pedagogies and Sustainability Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 53, 2022 (Sumak Kawsay), self-determination, and internal decolonization for their children. FineDare develops a collaborative approach with Casa Kinde, employing decolonizing methodologies in which relationality and maintenance of oral history, water, agricultural and artistic practices are central. The definition of Indigeneity or place-based learning that the pedagogical praxis in her case creates is not dependent upon territory and language. She argues that these place-based, historically grounded pedagogical strategies through a diversity of spaces and public activities involving the connection to the natural world and its spiritual forces are potentially sustainable as they occur without the intervention of the state and become part of ongoing daily practices related to the production of clean food, water and alternate histories. Sustainability Pedagogies beyond Schools and throughout Life Global responses to the risk of losing Indigenous knowledge focus on the processes of universalizing the state school curriculums (e.g. Battiste 2013; Keskitalo 2019), as well as on economic interests in Indigenous lands, and consumption-driven globalization (Fernández-Llamazares et al. 2021). These factors continue to construct the coloniality of nature, and the devaluation and marginalization of other forms of knowing (Mignolo and Walch 2018; Santos 2014). Also affected are different social articulations and organizations with more-than-human beings, which are intimately related to activities that sustain life. In times of global ecological uncertainty and inequalities, understanding the importance of Indigenous epistemologies and cognitive sovereignty for sustainability is part of a larger struggle for inclusive and epistemologically diverse education systems (MacPherson 2011) and a more sustainable future, including these more-than-human futures. Indigenous children’s and youth’s everyday processes may produce spaces of hope through the active generation of alternatives to a consumer-dependent society. These spaces of hope are based on sustaining intergenerational relations whereby biocultural knowledge is renewed. It is crucial to note that currently, everyday processes related to intergenerational and land-based learning in Indigenous societies (McCoy et al. 2016; Simpson 2014) are affected by the dominant society’s policies, which often undermine local subsistence economies and result in the dispossession of common goods (land, water, biodiversity) by largescale extractive industries, in precarious environments and in massive internal and international migration. The global extension of compulsory schooling privileges hegemonic modes of learning that are intrinsically at odds with the diverse Indigenous social organization of learning which is rooted in particular ecosystems and ways of life. Furthermore, these Indigenous forms of learning include linguistic and embodied practice, ritual, and the recreation of morality, values and beliefs. Indigenous societies engage in processes of inter-generational renewal of biocultural memories inside and outside of school settings, which are at the core of their resilience and capacity to respond to rapid globalization and environmental degradation. We take Indigenous knowledge and pedagogies as central to advancing and rethinking sustainability education, and in so doing we attend to the significance of the continuous transmission and renewal of Indigenous knowledge in the (re)creation of sustainability in a globalized existence. The study of Indigenous pedagogies and sustainability education contributes to the theory and praxis of decolonial pedagogies, as well as to educational self-sufficiency (Mignolo and Walch 2018). The articles of this special issue section provide evidence of the recreation of local knowledge, the endurance and current transformations 15481492, 2022, 4, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aeq.12447 by University Of Helsinki, Wiley Online Library on [25/12/2022]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 316 317 in local pedagogies and learning processes across cultural-historical contexts affected by rapid globalization, environmental degradation, migration and hypermobility, ethnic flexibility and transculturality. They provide evidence of how youth and adults together can integrate the preservation and renewal of traditional knowledge in order to produce specific forms of sustainability. We propose the integration of Indigenous knowledge into the school curriculum in order to promote cultural and environmental sustainability by supporting local efforts to regenerate intergenerational biocultural knowledge. In order to better generate learning experiences for environmental sustainability in school contexts, educators also need to pay attention to ongoing processes of intergenerational regeneration of biocultural knowledge outside of school settings. In addition, engaging in the simultaneous processes of transmission and renewal of intergenerational knowledge to care for more-than-humans can have a different significance in different stages of life, in different contexts, and for different learners. By decentering schools in the process of sustainability education in its in-class taught content, we propose changing the focus by directing it toward the dynamics of intergenerational relational learning, cultivating new sensory, perceptive and affective capacities throughout life, and lengthier time scales for actions. To this end, a better understanding of the continuance and renewal of Indigenous knowledge is crucial. In conclusion, ethnographic evidence of Indigenous sustainability pedagogies can support innovative approaches to lifelong learning for the construction of a sustainable and democratic globality in policy and practice. State discussions and policies on sustainability education are still lacking in the elaboration and planning of strategies for the preservation and regeneration of biocultural knowledge and memories in and out of school settings. Studies on diverse power relations and historical backgrounds around epistemological hierarchies can also create better and more inclusive pedagogies for sustainability transitions. A more sustainable future for all would be possible only through epistemological plurality and context-based knowledge-production that considers healthy biocultural regeneration—that is, the need for the continuous renewal of respectful relations with the entities that give us life. Acknowledgements. We thank associate editor Brendan O’Connor and editors in chief Lesley Bartlett and Stacey J. Lee for their valuable comments, as well as the anonymous reviewers of the contributions in this special section. European Union’s Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions: 665778. Academy of Finland: 339234. Fina Carpena-Méndez is a Polonez Fellow and visiting researcher at the University of Gdansk, Poland. ([email protected]). Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen is an Associate professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. ([email protected]). Karla Jessen Williamson is an Associate professor of Educational Foundations at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. ([email protected]). References Alim, Samy H., and Django Paris. 2017. “What Is Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and why Does it Matter?” In Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World, edited by D. Paris and H. S. Alim, 1–24. New York: Teachers College Press. Apffel-Marglin, Frederique, and Stephen Marglin. 1996. Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue. Oxford: Clarendon. Apffel-Marglin, Frederique. 1998. The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development. New York: Zed Books. 15481492, 2022, 4, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aeq.12447 by University Of Helsinki, Wiley Online Library on [25/12/2022]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Indigenous Pedagogies and Sustainability Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 53, 2022 . 2019. “The Spiritual Politics of Biocultural Regeneration.” In Practical Spirituality and Human Development: Creative Experiments for Alternative Futures, edited by A. Kunar Giri, 403–21. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Athayde, Simone, Stepp John Richard, and Ballester Wemerson. 2016. “Engaging Indigenous and Academic Knowledge on Bees in the Amazon: Implications for Environmental Management and Transdisciplinary Research.” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 12: 26. https://doi. org/10.1186/s13002-016-0093-z. Balto, Asta. 1997. Sámi mánáidbajásgeassin nuppástuvvá [Sámi Upbringing in Change]. Oslo: Notam Gyldendal. Barnhardt, Ray, and Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley. 2005. “Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Alaska Native Ways of Knowing.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 36 (1): 8–23. Battiste, Marie. 2013. Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit. Saskatoon: Purich. Berkes, Fikret. 2018. Sacred Ecology. Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge. Bertely, Maria. 2016. “Políticas neoliberales y afectaciones territoriales en México. Algunos “para qués” de “otras” educaciones.” LiminaR XIV (1): 30–46. Bertely, Maria, María Elena Martínez, and Rubén Muñoz. 2015. “Autonomía, Territorio y Educación Intercultural. Actores Locales y Experiencias Comunitarias Latinoamericanas.” Desacatos 48: 6–11. Bloch, Maurice. 2005. Essays on Cultural Transmission. London: Berg. Bowers, Chet. 2005. The False Promises of Constructivist Theories of Learning: A Global and Ecological Critique. New York: Peter Lang. . 2014. The False Promises of the Digital Revolution. New York: Peter Lang. Breidlid, Anders. 2013. Education, Indigenous Knowledges, and Development in the Global South: Contesting Knowledges for a Sustainable Future. New York: Routledge. Cajete, Gregory. 1994. Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education. Durango, CO: Kivaki Press. . 1999. Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers. Carpena-Méndez, Fina. 2007. “‘Our Lives Are like a Sock inside-out’: Children’s Work and Youth Identity in Neoliberal Rural Mexico.” In Global Perspectives on Rural Childhood and Youth: Young Rural Lives, edited by R. R. Panelli, S. Punch, and E. Robson, 41–56. London: Routledge. . 2014. “Transnational/Indigenous Youth: Learning, Feeling, and Being in Globalized Contexts.” In Child and Youth Migration: Mobility-in-Migration in an Era of Globalization, edited by A. Veale and G. Dona, 44–66. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. . 2015. “Jóvenes Rurales, Memoria y Futuros Agrícolas en América Latina.” Carta Económica Regional 115: 5–34 Guest Editorial to the Special Issue: “Rural Youth and Agricultural Futures in Latin America”. Chamoux, Marie-Noëlle. 1991. Trabajo, Técnicas y Aprendizaje en el México Indígena. Mexico: CIESAS. Child, Brenda, and Brian Klopotek. 2014. “Comparing Histories of Education for Indigenous Peoples.” In Indian Subjects: Hemispheric Perspectives on the History of Indigenous Education, edited by B. Child and B. Klopotek, 1–15. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School for Advanced Research Press. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 2011. Theory from the South. Or, how Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa. New York and London: Routledge. Dean, Bartholomew. 2003. “Indigenous Education and the Prospects of Cultural Survival.” Cultural Survival Quarterly 27 (4): 14. De la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Ellen, Roy, and Holly Harris. 2000. “Introduction.” In Indigenous Environmental Knowledge and Transformation: Critical Anthropological Perspectives, edited by R. Ellen, P. Parkes, and A. Bicker, 1–29. Amsterdam: Harwood. Ellen, Roy, Stephen Lycett, and Sarah Johns, eds. 2013. Understanding Cultural Transmission in Anthropology: A Critical Synthesis. New York/Oxford: Berghahn. Fa, Julian E., James E. M. Watson, Ian Leiper, Peter Potapov, Tom D. Evans, Neil D. Burgess, Zsolt Molnár, Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, Tom Duncan, Stephanie Wang, Beau J. Austin, Harry Jonas, Cathy J. Robinson, Pernilla Malmer, Kerstin K. Zander, Micha V. Jackson, Erle Ellis, Eduardo S. Brondizio, and Stephen T. Garnett. 2020. “Importance of Indigenous Peoples’ Lands for the Conservation of Intact Forest Landscapes.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 18 (3): 135–40. Fernández-Llamazares, Á., D. Lepofsky, K. Lertzman, C. G. Armstrong, E. S. Brondizio, M. C. Gavin, P. O. B. Lyver, G. P. Nicholas, N. J. Reo, V. Reyes-García, and N. J. Turner. 2021. “Scientists’ Warning 15481492, 2022, 4, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aeq.12447 by University Of Helsinki, Wiley Online Library on [25/12/2022]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 318 319 to Humanity on Threats to Indigenous and Local Knowledge Systems.” Journal of Ethnobiology 41 (2): 144–69. Flores, Rubén, Luis Urrieta, Marie-Noëlle Chamoux, David Lorente Fernández, and Angélica López. 2015. “Using History to Analyze the Learning by Observing and Pitching In Practices of Contemporary Mesoamerican Societies.” Advances in Child Development and Behavior 49: 315–40. Friedel, Tracy. 2011. “Looking for Learning in all the Wrong Places: Urban Native Youths’ Cultured Response to Western-Oriented Place-Based Learning.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 24 (5): 531–46. Fumagalli, Andrea, Alfonso Giuliani, Stefano Lucarelli, and Carlo Vercellone. 2019. “New Form of Exploitation in Bio-Cognitive Capitalism: Towards Life Subsumption.” In Cognitive Capitalism, Welfare and Labour: The Commonfare Hypothesis, edited by A. Fumagalli, A. Giuliani, S. Lucarelli, C. Vercellone, S. Dughera, and A. Negri, 77–93. London: Routledge. Grande, Sandy. 2015. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Hasse, Cathrine. 2015. An Anthropology of Learning: On Nested Frictions in Cultural Ecologies. New York and London: Springer. Horton, John, Sophie Hadfield-Hill, Pia Christensen, and Peter Kraftl. 2013. “Children, Young People and Sustainability: Introduction to Special Issue.” Local Environment 18 (3): 249–54. Holmes, Amanda, and Norma González. 2017. “Finding Sustenance: An Indigenous Relational Pedagogy.” In Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World, edited by Django Paris and Samy Alim, 207–24. New York: Teachers College Press. Howitt, Richard. 2020. “Decolonizing People, Place and Country: Nurturing Resilience Across Time and Space.” Sustainability 12: 5882. Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description. New York: Routledge. Jessen Williamson, Karla. 2011. Inherit My Heaven. Naalakkersuisut/Government of Greenland. Inussuk: Nuuk. Jackson-Barrett, Elizabeth M., and Libby Lee Hammond. 2018. “Strengthening Identities and Involvement of Aboriginal Children through Learning on Country.” Australian Journal of Teacher Education 43 (6): 86–104. Keskitalo, Pigga. 2019. “Place and Space in Sámi Education.” Policy Futures in Education 17 (4): 560–74. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kovach, Margaret. 2009. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kulnieks, Andrejs, Dan Longboat Roronhiakewen, and Kelly Young, eds. 2013. Contemporary Studies in Environmental and Indigenous Pedagogies: A Curricula of Stories and Place. Rotterdam: Sense. Lancy, David. 2018. Anthropological Perspectives on Children as Helpers, Workers, Artisans, and Laborers. New York: Palgrave. Lancy, David, John Bock, and Suzanne Gaskins, eds. 2010. The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood. Walnut Creek, Lanham, New York, Toronto, Plymouth, UK: Altamira Press. Lave, Jean. 2011. Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. MacPherson, Seonaigh. 2011. Education and Sustainability: Learning across the Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Divide. New York and London: Routledge. Manu’atu, Linita. 2000. “Katoanga Faiva: A Pedagogical Site for Tongan Students.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 32 (1): 73–80. Manu’atu, Linita, and Mere Kepa, eds. 2016. Ofa, Alofa, Aroha, Aro’a, Love in Pasifika and Indigenous Education. Saarbrücken: Lambert. Marchand, Trevor. 2010. “Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relation between Minds, Bodies, and Environment.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16 (s1): 1–21. McCarty, Teresa, Tamara Borgoiakova, Perry Gilmore, Tsianina Lomawaima, and Mary Eunice Romero. 2005. “Indigenous Epistemologies and Education: Self-Determination, Anthropology, and Human Rights.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 36 (1): 1–7. McCune, Nils, Peter Rosset, Tania Cruz Salazar, Helda Morales, and Antonio Saldívar Moreno. 2016. “The Long Road: Rural Youth, Farming and Agroecological Formación in Central America.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 24 (3): 183–98. 15481492, 2022, 4, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aeq.12447 by University Of Helsinki, Wiley Online Library on [25/12/2022]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Indigenous Pedagogies and Sustainability Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 53, 2022 McCoy, Kate, Eve Tuck, and Marcia McKenzie, eds. 2016. Land Education. Rethinking Pedagogies of Place from Indigenous, Postcolonial and Decolonizing Perspectives. London: Routledge. Merculieff, Ilarion, and Libby Roderick. 2013. Stop Talking: Indigenous Ways of Teaching and Learning and Difficult Dialogues in Higher Education. Anchorage: University of Alaska Anchorage. Mignolo, Walter, and Catherine Walch. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Mika, Carl. 2017. Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence: A Worlded Philosophy. London: Routledge. Nigh, Ronald, and Nemesio Rodriguez. 1995. Territorios violados: indios, medioambiente y desarrollo en América Latina. México: Consejo Nacional de la Cultura/Instituto Nacional Indigenista. Nigh, Ronald, and Maria Bertely. 2018. “Indigenous Knowledge and Education in Chiapas, Mexico: An Intercultural Method.” Diálogos sobre Educación 16: 395. Nxumalo, Filike. 2019. Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education. New York: Routledge. Ortiz Báez. 2013. Conocimientos Campesinos y Prácticas Agrícolas en el Centro de México. Hacia una Antropología Plural del Saber. Mexico: Juan Pablos Editor. Peña, Guillermo. 2005. “Social and Cultural Policies toward Indigenous Peoples: Perspectives from Latin America.” Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 717–39. Robson, James, Dan Klooster, and Jorge Hernández Díaz, eds. 2018. Communities Surviving Migration: Village Governance, Environment and Cultural Survival in Indigenous Mexico. London: Routledge. Rockwell, Elsie, and Anna Maria Gomes. 2009. “Rethinking Indigenous Education from a Latin American Perspective.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 40 (2): 97–109. Rogoff, Barbara, Lucía Alcalá, Andrew Coppens, Angélica López, Omar Ruvalcaba, and Katie Silva. 2014. “Children Learning by Observing and Pitching In their Families and Communities.” Human Development 57 (2–3): 65–171. Sabzalian, Leilani. 2019. Indigenous Children’s Survivance in Public Schools. New York: Routledge. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2007. “Para Além do Pensamento Abissal: Das Linhas Globais a una Ecologia de Saberes.” Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 78: 3–46. . 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. London and New York: Routledge. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, and Antoni Aguiló. 2019. Aprendizajes Globales: Descolonizar, Desmercantilizar y Despatriarcalizar desde las Epistemologías del Sur. Barcelona: Icaria. Schusler, Tania, Amy Krings, and Melissa Hernández. 2019. “Integrating Youth Participation and Ecosocial Work: New Possibilities to Advance Environmental and Social Justice.” Journal of Community Practice 27 (3-4): 460–475. Simpson, Leanne. 2004. “Anticolonial Strategies for the Recovery and Maintenance of Indigenous Knowledge.” American Indian Quarterly 28 (3&4): 373–84. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2014. “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3 (3): 1–25. Stucki, Paora. 2012. “A Māori Pedagogy: Weaving the Strands Together.” Kairaranga 13 (1): 7–15. Toledo, Victor, and Narciso Barrera-Bassols. 2008. La Memoria Biocultural: La Importancia Ecológica de las Sabidurías Tradicionales. Barcelona: Icaria. Tuck, Eva, Marcia McKenzie, and Kate McCoy. 2014. “Land Education: Indigenous, Post-colonial, and Decolonizing Perspectives on Place and Environmental Education Research.” Environmental Education Research 20 (1): 1–23. Turner, Nancy, Alain Cuerrier, and Leigh Joseph. 2022. “Well Grounded: Indigenous People’s Knowledge, Ethnobotany and Sustainability.” People and Nature 4: 627–51. Virtanen, Pirjo Kristiina. 2012. Indigenous Youth in Brazilian Amazonia: Changing Lived Worlds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Virtanen, Pirjo Kristiina, Laura Siragusa, and Hanna Guttorm. 2020. “Introduction: Toward more Inclusive Definitions of Sustainability.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 43: 70–82. Watts, Vanessa. 2013. “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2 (1): 20–34. Weston, Kath. 2017. Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 15481492, 2022, 4, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aeq.12447 by University Of Helsinki, Wiley Online Library on [25/12/2022]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 320