Educate to perpetuate: Land-based pedagogies and community resurgence

Abstract

Indigenous youth today are in a precarious position. The elders who guided their grandparents and parents often suffered from direct racism and dislocation from cultural practices, land, medicine, language, knowledge and traditional lifeways. Family and community kinship networks that provided emotional, spiritual and physical support have been brutally and systematically dismantled. When perpetuation is discussed within an Indigenous context, it often refers to the transmission of Indigenous knowledge to future generations and how they act on and regenerate it. This perpetuation of Indigenous knowledge and nationhood occurs every day, often in the shape of unnoticed or unacknowledged actions carried out within intimate settings, such as homes, ceremonies and communities. Focusing on everyday acts of resurgence shifts the analysis of the situation away from the state-centred, colonial manifestations of power to the relational, experiential and dynamic nature of Indigenous cultural heritage, which offers important implications for re-thinking gendered relationships, community health and sustainable practices. The authors of this article examine ways in which land-based pedagogies can challenge colonial systems of power at multiple levels, while being critical sites of education and transformative change. Drawing on a multi-component study of community practices in the Cherokee Nation conducted by the second author, this article examines strategies for fostering what have been termed “land-centred literacies” as pathways to community resurgence and sustainability. The findings from this research have important implications for Indigenous notions of sustainability, health and well-being and ways in which Indigenous knowledge can be perpetuated by future generations.