Modernising processes have little time or respect for indigenous knowledge practices or ‘ways of knowing’. This is the case even though indigenous practices have enabled people to cope with issues such as healthy eating, illness challenges, as well as extreme weather events, for many years. Such practices offer decision making options, relating to village-based risk avoidance, that enable more sustainable living. This is particularly apt when considering that humanity requires more sustainable development trajectories that embrace complexity, while, at the same time, moving away from top-down technocratic approaches to a more participatory governance, research and political agendas. This, in short, is all about ‘just transitions’ as we seek to move towards sustainable living without compromising people. Within this milieu, scientific knowledge is still limited in securing a deeper understanding on how such change can be achieved. This begs the question that if modern science should embrace indigenous knowledge as a legitimate form of knowledge generation, could it bring about a deeper understanding of sustainable practices and a move towards participatory governance, research and political mechanisms?

Hand-washing and health – An Example from Africa

To put this question into context, elderly Nguni people, for example, describe how, in the past, when a stranger arrived at a village, a complex hand-washing ritual was followed before greetings were exchanged. Such a ritual has relevance to the current COVID-19 crisis where the spread of a virus can be inhibited by careful hand-washing. Interestingly, the tradition held that it was unwise to dry ones hands on fabric after washing. This is because the fabric could further harbour germs. Hands were simply allowed to drip-dry which meant that any germs would simply pass into the soil where natural microbial processes would neutralise any possible pathogens.

Unfortunately, indigenous knowledge practices and indeed natural and cultural heritage have at times been denigrated. In response to this the Southern African Journal of Environmental Education produced a dedicated edition, Volume 35, on this topic (Pesanayi et al., 2019). Pesanayi et al. (2019) describe how education in colonial southern Africa has dominated and marginalised indigenous heritage, cultures and practices. This occurs through assumptions of western modernisation, and, by default, modern scientific practices.

Milpa/forest garden cycle – An Example from Belize

Milpa/forest garden cycle has been a characteristic practice of cultivating the land by the Maya people of Central America for thousands of years. This technique involved clearing the jungle with controlled fires to create cultivable land. The ashy and fertile soil is then ready to plant maize, beans, squash, from a basketful of 100 other polyculture crops. After a few years of use, these areas strategically regenerated, creating forest gardens maintained to grow perennial plants and trees to supply all the needs of everyday life. Ironically, the modern perception of this method – shifting slash-and-burn agriculture – does not recognize the cycle and the importance of the annual and perennial components. The push to transition to industrial monoculture agriculture exhausts lands and has grown to cause serious environmental issues. Changing trends in land use and land cover threaten upland and wetland forest ecosystems.

When forests are cleared permanently and the land is used with petrochemical inputs to stave off exhaustion, noticeable changes in the weather patterns occur. The rejection of traditional agricultural methods leads to a depauperate agricultural and biological landscape.

MODERATOR: Jim Taylor - Former President, The Environmental Education Association of Southern Africa (EEASA).

PANEL COMMENTORS

Ella Erzsébet Békési, Director, Cultural Heritage & Tourism Professional of the Heritage Education Network Belize (HENB).

Dawson Munjeri, Professor, Culture and Heritage Studies at the University of Great Zimbabwe.

PROGRAM & SPEAKERS

1. Lessons of the Past: Nature and Maya traditions at Pachamama - Belize
by Rob O’Donoghue - Professor Emeritus at the Environmental Learning Research Centre (ELRC), Rhodes University

The presentation will explore indigenous knowledge practices as a foundation for emancipatory learning transactions at the margins of colonial modernity. Examples of heritage practices are contemplated as transformative learning actions from below, together, emergent through the re-discovery and recovery of indigenous knowledge practices for learning-led innovation towards more sustainable lifestyles and livelihoods, Indigenous agro-ecological and socio-economic practices in southern Africa have enabled people to historically cope with and adapt to issues such as healthy eating and other livelihood practices despite a colonial history of exclusion and a continuing socio-cultural and economic marginalisation in modern settings. An adaptive resilience is evident amongst many indigenous peoples who have been culturally and socio-economically consigned to the margins in the modern nation states in southern Africa and elsewhere.

Within this abjection, many subjugated communities, have commonly been confronted with education as a modernising development process. Here modern education is designed to empower participants so that they can extract themselves from what are commonly seen as historically embedded conditions of underdevelopment confronted by many intractable challenges to future sustainability. Another reading of these sociocultural conditions is that colonial modernity has produced complex conditions of risk to future sustainability and that indigenous peoples have an intergenerational cultural capital for learning-led innovation in relation to many sustainability concerns, for example:

• Handwashing in the face of cholera and COVID-19 (Gaze izandla) – SDG

• Composting organic waste for carbon sequestration (Izala & ukuthatha ihlathi lomthi.)

• Leaf harvesting of green vegetables for nutritional health (imifino & umfuno)

• Home fermented milk and grains for dietary health (Amasi & maRewu)

• Clarifying spring water to collect sweet water (uthuthu & Amanzi mNandi)

A culturally situated and emancipatory learning approach to future sustainability contemplates ESD as an action learning arena for regenerative just transitioning struggle in these challenging times of a COVID-19 pandemic and climate change that are currently playing out on a global scale.

This perspective has emerged within a participatory turn in education that has been slow to emerge as open, co-engaged learning actions that is no longer constrained by a dialectical epistemic gulf between Indigenous and Western. What has charaterised many current approaches to ESD is a retention of an ‘outside mediating hand of modernity’ that has always known best for The Other as ‘target group’ for an educational intervention. A parallel ‘knowledge practices’ oeuvre of critical realism has resolved much of the latent ambiguity here to enable a re-visioning of education (ESD) as a realist dialectic of co-engaged learning for emancipatory transitioning.

Education re-framed as co-engaged innovative work around indigenous knowledge practices as learning from below, together, is explored to clarify education as realist epistemic processes of dialectical emancipation. ESD is thus being explored as emergent and learner-led around indigenous knowledge practices in relation to healthy lifestyle and sustainable livelihood practices through a Hand-Print CARE approach to learning actions from below, together.

The above examples illustrate that a cultural historical approach embedded in a critical realist episteme can, for example, enables us to re-imagine ESD as co-engaged dialectical learning at the intersection of indigenous knowledge practices and the disciplinary sciences in school settings of ESD. Illustrative examples of indigenous knowledge practices in southern African eco-cultural settings are used to explore how education can be reframed as emancipatory epistemic processes that are staged and engaged by participants within the sustainability challenges that they face and around those that we all share in this modern era of transformative learning towards a just recovery from the current pandemic.

2. Lessons of the Past: Nature and Maya traditions at Pachamama - Belize
by Felicita Cantun - president of Kanan Miatsil, Guardians of Culture Association

3. The Living Museum of El Pilar: Archaeology Under the Canopy
by Anabel Ford - Maya archaeologist
and Cynthia Ellis Topsey - community advocate promoting sustainable development

4. My life depends on chocolate and chocolate depends on mother earth and mother earth depends on love
by Julio Saqui - Indigenous Mopan Maya, Owner of Che’il Mayan Chocolate of Maya Center Village, Belize

My name is Julio Saqui, an Indigenous Mopan Maya, Owner of Che’il Mayan Chocolate of Maya Center Village, Belize. I grew up with Dad, a farmer and one of the crops he plants that excites me, is cacao fruits. He uses it for his Rituals, ceremonies and drinks as well. I told him I want to make it into edible chocolate bars, which he gets to taste, before he passes away. Today, I find peace and wellness in chocolate, as I continue the art of chocolate making into Dark & Milk chocolate bars and other Che’il chocolate products.

5. Livelihood Enhancements in the Maya Golden Landscape
by Marvin Vasquez - Operation Director at Ya’axché