Dr. Regina Cortina is a Professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York. Dr. Cortina was the President of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) in 2018-2019 and was the Academic Chair of CIES 2018 which took place in Mexico City, Mexico. This is a transcript of her speech at CIES 2021 on April 28, 2021.
Indigenous Knowledge and Comparative Education
CIES Special Interest Group on Indigenous Knowledge and the Academy
Regina Cortina
CIES 2021–April 28, 2021
I am joining from my homeland, Mexico. I am in the territory of the Mayas, one of Mesoamerica’s most lasting cultures. In this territory, people still identify as Mayan. Their culture and language are alive. My office at Columbia University is located in the territory of the Lenape, Manhattan. Their lush lands and lakes were appropriated by the colonizers. Most of the land and its ecosystems were destroyed to create the present-day Manhattan.
I was delighted to receive the invitation to participate in the Semali Symposium in honor of our esteemed colleague Dr. Ladi Semali on the topic of Indigenous Knowledge and Social Responsibility.
I argued that there is a great need for our academic field to value Indigenous knowledge, culture and ways of knowing. Ladi Semali, on the contrary, had a different point of view. He asked us to rethink the term “Indigenous”. He argued that the use of the term “Indigenous” has caused harm in the academy, since “Indigenous knowledge” is contrasted with other valued knowledge systems, especially Western knowledge.
As requested by our symposium organizers, my short presentation today is centered on the meaning of Indigenous knowledge and its vitality in our academic work. Secondly, I will address the issue of Indigenous knowledge and social responsibility.
In Epistemologies of the South, Boaventura de Sousa Santos coins the term “cognitive injustice,” by which he means that Western science does not recognize and value the knowledge, wisdom and cultures by which people and communities all over the world give meaning to their daily lives.
Santos argues for “cognitive justice” as the recognition of other ways of knowing of people and communities in the Global South. His scholarship is a call to recognize the vitality of Indigenous knowledge in the world today and in our academic work.
If we would like to proclaim “cognitive justice,” our work as educators needs to be built upon our respect for other cultures and the recognition of the diversity of knowledge that exists in the world.
For comparative education scholars, decolonial theories open up new perspectives for considering all kinds of knowledge and worldviews, not only those produced from Western and colonial perspectives. In my research, I argue that decolonial theory is relevant to our field because of the many students and educators across the world whose knowledge, language, and culture have been left out of schools and universities.
An example of decolonial projects that I have explored in my research is the development of Intercultural Universities in Latin America. It is important to highlight that the advocacy of Indigenous leaders is central to efforts to decolonize the university. In Latin America, intercultural bilingual education is an arena in which the struggle to recognize the rights of young people to culturally and linguistically relevant education is being played out. This struggle has led to the recognition of the pluricultural nature of our societies.
The knowledge and understanding of Indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants have been made invisible by colonialism and its subsequent formations in contemporary states. Theories derived from Indigenous epistemologies often do not find their place in traditional academic publications.
Decolonial theories challenge both Western knowledge and the North-South directionality of knowledge. Decolonial theory, in essence, creates the possibility that educators, by contesting discriminatory hierarchies, can promote equality and justice in the local and global community.
In his book on decolonizing the university, Boaventura de Sousa Santos describes the pluriversity as a model for refocusing of research for and with the community and recognition of epistemologies of the Global South. This concept of pluriversity highlights how theories and practices of the Global South contribute to diversify and decolonize higher education. Decolonial theories promote not only an alternative way of interpreting the world, but they present a call for action to change it.
As I concluded in my Presidential address in 2019 for the Comparative and International Education Society, our role in the university is “to increase the range and type of knowledge production in education, to broaden the scope of curricula, to diversify who teaches in educational systems to ensure equality and equity for all students; and, finally, to question the initial knowledge systems upon which education systems were built.”
In summary, I would like to emphasize that Indigenous knowledge does have a place in the academy today. It is also important to stress that Western knowledge and science are fundamental. The central point of Southern theories is to recognize other ways of knowing, to avoid seeing the world from only one perspective, and to affirm that not all knowledge is based on Western epistemologies. We need to reclaim the diversity of knowledge in schools and our field of study, comparative education.
On the second topic of my presentation today, Indigenous knowledge and social responsibility, I will focus on what Indigenous knowledge can teach us about ecological and environmental responsibility. Abya Yala, the Indigenous concept referring to all of the Americas, can be translated as “the continent of life.” The concept refers to unity and belonging to the land of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, from a non-European perspective. Indigenous knowledge and epistemology teach all of us about our social responsibility to the land and the environment.
In Abya Yala the land is called Mother Earth. In the University of Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia, under the leadership of the Tule community, they established a bachelor’s degree program in the Pedagogy of the Mother Earth in 2006. Their sustaining concept is that education’s main strategy is to defend Mother Earth. The purpose of education is then social responsibility towards the land and the environment.
Many Indigenous territories across the Americas are being destroyed by the extraction of oil and other minerals as well as forests and other living things. This is the case with the Keystone XL pipeline that comes from Canada and crosses sacred lands in South Dakota and Montana, destroying the environment and the water supply. Innumerable territories have been affected and their water supply has been contaminated by oil and mineral extraction as well as the clear-cutting of forests such as in the Amazon basin.
Influenced by Indigenous knowledge and understanding, both Ecuador and Colombia in their constitutions have upheld the Indigenous cultures’ understanding that entitled the earth the right to protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration. This is just one example to show how Indigenous knowledge impels Indigenous communities to become leaders for the sustainability and renovation of their communities.
All of us in academia have much to learn about Indigenous knowledge and the social responsibility it calls upon us to exercise towards our environment.
Thank you very much. I am looking forward to our discussion.