“Genealogy of the broken”

Indigenous and endogenous educator positionalities and land relationships

Samira N. Chatila, Elizabeth Sumida Huaman, Tsering Yangki, Porter Swentzell, Belinda H.Y. Chiu

Introduction: Of place

Some things on this earth are unspeakable:

Genealogy of the broken—

A shy wind threading leaves after a massacre,

Or the smell of coffee and no one there—

Some humans say trees are not sentient beings,

But they do not understand poetry—

Nor can they hear the singing of trees when they are fed by

Wind, or water music—

Or hear their cries of anguish when they are broken and bereft—…

(from “Speaking Tree” by Joy Harjo)

In her poem “Speaking Tree” (2015), Mvskoke Creek writer Joy Harjo skillfully interweaves the beauty, pain, and longing of humans and more-than-humans—in this case, trees. We, human descendants and trees, share immeasurable loss as part of our genealogy as dwellers of this earth. As five place-mindful educators, we ask, Who witnesses, experiences, and survives the loss that Harjo describes, how does loss change us, and what is our responsibility in this dynamic?

We are inspired by Harjo’s artistic recognition of earth and human brokenness that we increasingly confront, made more evident by the rise of SARS-COV2 and pandemic that was occurring around the time of our authorship of this chapter and its development. Since then, we also acknowledge the perpetuation of violence shielded by misinformation against the world’s most vulnerable and with multiple intersections—racial, environmental, sexual, religious—that we see as made possible by disconnection between humans and planet. Furthermore, we are moved by possibilities of (re)connection toward land and human healing through educational opportunities that highlight Indigenous and endogenous positionalities. Our chapter offers critical responses to colonial and modern constructions of global development projects and their impacts on human and natural relationships. Universities are implicated in these activities, namely by providing research that fuels overzealous economic development characterizing the Anthropocene. However, our goal is not to re-interrogate neoliberalism through higher education but to uplift the place-based thinking of Indigenous and endogenous educators.^[1] Through two interconnected lenses, we first consider human relationships to and simultaneously, separation from, land and nature through environmental threats that include climate change, extractive industry, and mass consumption. Second, we describe ideas of places, people, and learning through a discussion of endogenous and Indigenous knowledges. Our aim is to bridge holistic environmental understandings held by educators and researchers who work in and outside of universities and formal institutions of learning.

This chapter engages dialogue among five educators and practitioners from Peru, Lebanon, Tibet, and the U.S. whose areas of research include Indigenous out-of-school community-based settings, state schooling and refugee educational programs, adult learning, and urban planning and development. Several of us work in higher education—Chatila, Sumida Huaman, and Swentzell—while Yangki and Chiu work with individuals and communities in professional development adjacent to universities. Using comparative and synergistic insights, we have engaged together for almost a year and a half (April 2021 – September 2022) to deepen the emerging sense of education and human rights as pluriversal (Escobar, 2018) and more-than-human (de la Cadena, 2015) enactments in diverse spaces and places where flows of many kinds of capital are linked with educational impetus and design. Our data comprise of four focus group discussions led by a series of semi-structured questions that we discussed amongst ourselves and with university students. We recorded our conversations to use our self-narrated lived experiences to efficiently engage in the simultaneous process of data generation and collection through power-sharing, shared learning, and emotive self-disclosure (Chang et al., 2013). We used our personal stories in dialogic and iterative ways to interpret how our individual and combined selves, stories, losses, and experiences are connected to larger constellations of socio-cultural and socio-historical contexts, and in retrospect, how those contexts give shape and meaning to our perspectives. The juxtaposition of our seemingly paradoxical approach – self and collective analysis – allows for a collective exploration of our researcher subjectivities, and a deeper understanding of our individual and combined roles as subjects and objects of and for place. To this end, we argue that Indigeneity and endogeneity are central elements of positionalities that require educators, students, and community members to address the whole ecology of life through as many approaches as possible—e.g., storytelling, storylistening, and storymaking (Archibald, 2008), and that demonstrate the meaningful contributions of earth and her beings while teaching for solutions that address global shifts.

In this chapter, we co-construct theoretical and philosophical perspectives that are linked with practice and positionality. In each section, we draw from narratives that inform our emergent understandings of more-than-human relationships and Indigenous and endogenous educational philosophy, design, and practice. We seek to model positionality through our narratives and to highlight Indigenous and endogenous standpoint—i.e., what brings us, as evolving em- and dis-placed peoples to our educational work and the issues that we stand for that are anchored in our worldviews and epistemologies.

Problems: Human relationships to land

We consider human relationships and separations from land and nature that are exemplified by the environmental shifts and threats that all species today confront, including climate change and land degradations exacerbated by extractive industry and global human mass consumption modeled by the so-called Global North and imitated by the Global South. Enactments of human distancing from land and nature often justified through ideas of “need”—as in, people need fossil fuels for automobiles, artificial climate controls, and so very many disposable plastics—are linked with coloniality. Those “needs” are created and fueled by global capitalism that requires people to desire eternally, meaning that they are constantly encouraged to desire more and more, and to never be satisfied with what they have. Thus, their sense of self becomes defined by their consumption patterns, rather than by other aspects of their identity, such as their relationships, values, and beliefs. This perpetual desire for (and consequently consumption of) more goods and services is what drives the global capitalist economy forward. These perpetual desires are reinforced by exclusive dichotomies where humans and earth others are absolutely separated from each other—in other words, duality between nature and culture, meaning that culture is everything that nature is not, and vice versa. To counter human and market-driven processes of dominating, marginalizing, devaluing and negativizing, Apffel-Marglin (2020) suggests a series of engagements to dismantle master narratives about nature and the ways in which Indigenous peoples specifically have been associated with nature or the idea that Indigenous peoples cannot be of high culture, intellect, and technology because they are “of nature” and thus polar opposites of the modern progress of man. Borrowing from Indigenous Andean concepts, Appfel-Margli considers “reciprocal co-animation,” the mutual understanding of the spirit within each other that moves us toward life and writes,

On the part of humans such reciprocal actions with earth others are always spoken of as imbued with respect. Humans showing respect toward earth others constitutes an ethical consideration; without respect there is no possibility of decolonizing the master’s story of nature and/or society, and of co-creating commons with earth others and each other. (2020, pp. 84-85)

As educators who work in different settings, we are also descendants of Indigenous and endogenous peoples confronting historic and recent threats and direct removals from homelands for various reasons, including invasion and war. We also recognize transnational Indigeneity, which we define as an identity and state of being that result from Indigenous persistence despite displacement, migration, and diaspora. These conditions force us to think about embodied relationships to land and ongoing struggles to address broken/breaking human connections that also involve more-than-human relatives on those lands. Educational practices—whether in or out-of-school and at all levels—must acknowledge embodied and real relationships with land, impacts of losses of land, and the lives of more-than-humans. We ask how to re-center ourselves and by returning to marginalized voices as we expand our own and many knowledge systems. As educators, we are interested in the healing, protection, and restoration of our ecologies and of our internal ecological worlds.

Place relationships

In our conversations over the last years, we have asked each other about what it means to be of, in, from, with, and for our own and other places. Using narratives in conversation with each other, we describe our relationships with knowledges of place that we characterize as: a) relationships with land and nature at home (Porter’s and Elizabeth’s stories), b) sentience, interdependence, and interconnectedness (Tsering’s story), and c) reclaiming local and endogenous knowledges (Samira’s story). Each narrative seeks to model educator engagements with place, awareness of separations, and what fuels our work in countering the violence of coloniality. Our experiences are co-crafted ways of speaking about our places with each other over time.

Relationships with land and nature (Porter and Elizabeth’s stories)

Porter: In other writing (Sumida Huaman & Swentzell, 2021), I have described the sharp contrasts between my childhood and upbringing in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, with my schooling. For example, I was raised in a home with no electricity and home-schooled by my mother until I rebelled as a teenager in search of structure through military schooling (my choice).

My younger sister and I spent our days rising with the sun on the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the east and the setting of the sun on the Jemez Mountains in the west. When night fell, especially during the long winter evenings, we huddled around a kerosene lamp, a cluster of candles or the flashing lights of the fireplace, and talked. We would take turns reading aloud from books we borrowed from the library. Our lives were largely dictated by the shifting seasons and the sun in the very local ways they manifested themselves at Santa Clara Pueblo.

When I reached the 10th grade, I rebelled. I wanted to go back to school, and because I sought order, I wanted to attend military boarding school. Despite my mother’s objections, I was accepted into a military institute in Roswell and went to live far away from my community toward the southern part of the state of New Mexico. One of my most captivating early memories of this experience was that on my first day, when the bugle sounded reveille at 0600 hours, and all of us new cadets had to hurry out of the barracks into formation, I remember that amid the chaos, the sun was rising on the streetlights. This felt otherworldly to me: It had never occurred to me that the sun could rise on streetlights and buildings. I felt in my stomach that something horribly wrong had happened. In my experience at home in Santa Clara, I had only ever seen the sun rise on mountains. Where we had our home in the community, I only knew the sun to set on the mountains as well. 

And so, one of the things that really brings into focus for me the relationship with place is how your life is dictated by the natural light of the sun and not false or electronic lighting. Then you become really accustomed to compare how the sun moves along the horizon. In many ways, the institute that I attended itself embodied the militaristic traditions of western universalism: the idea that there is a “right” way to do things that can be exported, by force if necessary, to all corners of the world. Local ways of knowing are seen as impediments, obstacles, enemies, or maybe at best allies toward western universalisms. The very location and operation of my education reflected these tensions.

This shift between ways of learning and engaging with place was striking to me. Today, I am a traditional arts educator where I define and practice traditional arts as the practical and aesthetic constructions of Indigenous communities that use tools and materials from our surrounding environment. Over the years, my gratitude has only increased for learning about the best consistency for mud mortar for housing and other community building structures, where to find good things to eat in the hills behind my house, for the sun rising and setting over our mountains. These reflect ways of knowing that are described by Tewa peoples, and those ways of knowing are also part of the spirit of the shared inheritance of humanity—wherever different people have found themselves over thousands of years.

Elizabeth: I really love listening to Porter because he talks about what it means to live—not just in or at, but of and with place – and to recognize the ways in which your biological and spiritual beings and biorhythms are in sync with things around you, and to consider what it means to watch the sun rise over the mountains know that the day is beginning.

This is a photo that I took almost 15 years ago. If you are traveling from the city of Huancayo to my community, the bus drops you off at this place called Cinco Esquinas or five corners. From here, you can like trudge up the hill and it’s a bit of a walk to get to my grandmother’s house. I took this image as I was walking on that road because for ever since I can remember, like as a child, this mountain is symbolic of what it means to be in relation with the world as a Wanka and Quechua person. And for so many reasons. Looking around you, you have this sense of understanding and gratitude that the beings around you such as these Apus, the great and beautiful deity beings in nature—that you are here because of them, that they were here long before you, that they knew your great-grandparents and those before them, and vice versa. I don’t have to travel back in time because they are still here, and we are a part of each other already and always. Through them, through the soil, trees, water, and wind around me, I can know my ancestors. As well, there is a humbling experience that comes with really recognizing those around you—in other discussions with Porter, he has talked about us as humans being here at the magnificence of the things around us, and I really feel that by looking at this mountain.

This mountain is called Huallallo Carhuancho by our people, part of the Waytapallana mountain range, and in Quechua, Waytapallana means the picking or gathering of flowers. And the reason why Waytapallana is named so is because, like everything in the Quechua world—and I feel in a lot of Indigenous places—is like a story into another story intertwined with our human story. This mountain place is a deity who has his own family members, the other smaller mountains within the same mountain range. Huallallo is also a glacier, and there are a number of lakes in that region that are also beings, deities, who serve important roles in the ecosystem of that range and that also provide sources of sacred water.

Everything here is connected. According to the Andean Indigenous agricultural calendar, beginning in July and August we hold a one-year ceremonial engagement that is organized by who we call the “mother and father” of the community, and their responsibilities to both earth and human communities. In August, there is the turning over of the earth for planting season. As an agricultural people, in order to get earth ready for planting, community members go to the mountain to pick the flowers that will be part of making the offerings to Ayllpamama, Land Mother. And also, when community members experience illness or sickness in some way, varieties of flowers that are picked there can be used for healing. Bodily illnesses from the Quechua cultural point of view come from imbalance and never divorce the physical element from the mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of a person’s being. Because the western-style healthcare system in Peru is executed poorly (i.e., inequitably), Quechua communities continue to practice Quechua medicine. We have our own health practitioners and specialists within an ancestral knowledge system. Sometimes, the kinds of imbalances that result in illness come from our lack of recognition or lack of respect or forgetfulness of our natural surroundings, and they can also be healed by the very things that take care of us that we have not acknowledged.

This mountain is central to our life source, as a healing life source, as a caretaker, somebody who watches over us. Below the mountain, you can see this whole range of farm fields and the living presence of community members’ enactments with the Andean agricultural calendar so that they can continue living as our people have for generations doing this kind of work. However, historically and in the current moment where so-called progress and modernity tend to obscure the things that people do in order to ensure that the world has food to eat, Andean Quechua and other Indigenous farmers around the world are viewed as uneducated laborers, people for whom the farm field is the default after not “succeeding” in education (to which access is historically problematic) or being able to achieve a white-collar position (which is linked with class privilege). As a person who honors my grandmother and my aunts who lived and worked in the farm fields– women whose first, and in most cases only language was Quechua, women who knew how to love, provide, and heal – I appreciate their knowledge as vastly intellectual with compassion. What they knew and shared makes me wonder at the inadequacies of formal schooling. The presence of complex Indigenous knowledges interplays within our Andean ecosystem as powerful markers of adherence to our Andean calendar and deep understanding of cycles of time, of generational experimentations, land-based and land-respectful curiosity and research, teachings and learnings, and adaptations and innovations.

Sentience, interdependence, and interconnectedness (Tsering’s story)

Tsering: My name is Tsering Yangki. The land I’m standing on today is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Odawa, Haudenosaunee, and is also now home to many diverse First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples. I also acknowledge that Toronto is covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit.

I am going on 17 plus years of professional experience in management and finance, currently for a large real estate asset management and development company focused on impact and sustainability. I was educated in finance and economics, and I was born a Tibetan refugee with lived experience and seeing the impact of climate change in my country of origin. Little known, but we do refer to Tibet as the world’s third pole, rooted in the Nalanda tradition that was introduced in the 8th century. And really, the Nalanda tradition is really rooted in and underscored by reason, logic, and pluralism, and these are the words I think you would hear about pluralism, about discourse, about different concepts and theories.

I grew up in Doeguling, a Tibetan refugee settlement in Southern India. Reflecting about our times now, I realize that it must have been materially tough for my parents, but to be honest all I remember was joy. The bounty we received from my mother—we called her Amala in Tibetan—her vegetable garden, and a sense of responsibility as my mother made me tutor at the age of 10 or 11 for our neighbors in the local villages, or a kinship as I took care of stray cats in the community. That was my joy. And very early on, I was grounded in three concepts: First, sentient beings—our prayers as a young child were always not just for ourselves or family or other human beings, but for every being, that was the first concept of sentient beings that I learned. The second concept is interdependence as a fundamental law of nature—we are all equally important and valuable people and planet. Our very existence, survivability and prosperity requiring cooperation based on the recognition of the interconnectedness, therefore, there is a need to increase our experience of kinship, especially during these times of social (in)justice and climate change. The third is impermanence. We are blessed with this precious life. My mother, Am-a, would say (and still reminds me to this day when I call her every weekend), “You have this precious human life. What are you choosing to do today? What are you doing today at this very moment?” With this sense of responsibility, gratitude, reciprocity, understanding of the preciousness and fragility of the very nature of a human life, we are instilled with a sense of great humility, but also courage to realize we each have the power to transform ourselves, starting with our minds, our common present and future.

I’m still learning and trying to intentionally apply these basic concepts each day with every thought, action, and words. It seems simple, but it takes intentionality of making sure that with every action and word, we are able to realize and act upon these concepts. In this photo that I’ve shared, you would see the wind house, its prayer flags, the beauty of it, but it’s really about recognizing the wind as a powerful story. We still have these stories, and I think of my father and the Dalai Lama during their time of exile, and having to leave their land and to till the soil of a foreign land where it might be zero to 40 degrees Celsius. They held resolve to make it a home for them and for my generation. Now, I’m a resident in Canada, and my work has been to integrate affordable housing, sustainability, and Indigenous knowledges. It is quite complex, but I do have to reflect with gratitude to our elders, even though they lost their land, they created ways to allow for the evolution of my culture. Thus, there’s also responsibility—as I speak about land and changes today, I have to recognize whether I am on land or of land, and the land is in crisis. My world of being of land really intersects with being born as a refugee, working in the industry, honoring many Indigenous groups, and meeting the challenge of how we recognize massive problems like climate change.

Reclaiming local and endogenous knowledges (Samira’s story)

Samira: I was born and raised in Ras Beirut, Lebanon, where my parents and their families were also born and raised. Even though Ras Beirut’s history is only partially documented in formal archives, and its boundaries are contested and politically produced, there exists an intimate and durable sense of history in the minds and collective memories of long-rooted Ras Beirut residents—whose belonging, like the neighborhood’s boundaries, is asserted locally but often contested in public discourse. To many visitors and newer residents, including Lebanese people from outside Beirut, Ras Beirut is an urban, educational hub with a vibrant and expensive city life that is often perceived as disconnected from nature. To many long-rooted Ras Beirut families, Ras Beirut is remembered as a village of fishermen, farmers, and craftsmen, including many families with land ties. These memories are not uniform: class, livelihood, and waves of migration shaped who held land, who worked it, and who faced exclusion. It is not the typical tale of a farmer who is working on their master’s land; Ras Beiruti families farmed lands they owned or held through family tenure.

The nomenclature of Ras Beirut draws from its topography, where “Ras” in Arabic directly translates to “head,” owing to the way the land bulges into the Mediterranean Sea. The name “Beirut” has been given multiple etymologies in the historical record; in some accounts it is linked to Aramaic/Semitic roots associated with vegetation and landscape. An iconic area of the Ras Beirut neighborhood is Dalieh el Raouche, where “Dalieh,” in local Arabic usage, evokes climbing plants or vines that cast shade beneath them. In the picture below, you see Sakhret el Raouche (also known as the Raouche Rock or the Pigeon Rocks), a historical rock in the zone of Dalieh el Raouche whose formation is attributed to long-term coastal and geological processes. This rock stands 60 meters high offshore and is 25 meters wide. It is widely recognized as an icon of Beirut—and, for many, of Lebanon; it is thought to be the epitome of Beirut’s nature. However, there is more to Beirut’s socio-natural history that can be explored through the surroundings of this gigantic rock.

The Dalieh is among the few remaining coastal headlands with a distinctive geomorphology and complex shoreline ecosystem that supports terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity; it has fossil-bearing rocks (including black flint), caves, sand dunes, marine terraces, coastal cliffs, ponds, bays, and a natural harbor. It has also been a prominent landmark with sociohistorical reverence and cultural memory for generations, where working-class families, including Beirutis, go there for entertainment, to make a living as fishermen, or to celebrate religious events.

In this conversation with Porter, Elizabeth, Tsering, and Belinda, it’s fascinating how I always felt a land connection between me as a Beiruti and the Beirut region, despite the rapid urbanization that swept Beirut, shrinking and fragmenting many of its green and accessible open areas. Residents of Beirut who originally come from the mountains, valleys, or rural areas of Lebanon understand Beirut as a city disconnected from nature. My friends who stayed in university dormitories used to look forward to spending their weekends in their respective villages, where fresh air, seasonal fruits and vegetables, and fresh dairy products were available.

One Thursday afternoon, a university friend of mine asked me, as she was packing her bag to go to her village in the mountains for the weekend, “How can you survive without a village?” I offered to give her a tour of Hamra and neighboring areas, which would take approximately 90 minutes on foot. She excitedly agreed and asked if we could bring our international friend, Yin, since he loved local tours. I agreed and took them on a tour I later understood they had never had. I showed them a public school for girls that used to be a prison for women during the Ottoman Empire. I showed them a modern building that was built on top of an ancient family house that was built on top of a previous cemetery for French soldiers during French Mandate Lebanon. My family members kissed the walls of this house before it was demolished by order of government. I showed them my great-grandmother’s house with a vegetation garden they had never seen before despite having passed by that house and the road leading to it almost every day for three years. I showed them the potato fields my grandmother and her family used to work on. I showed them roads that were previously covered with cactus hedges rendering Hamra difficult to inhabit. I shared stories about the names of different streets and areas, some of which my great grandfathers named. It was not their traditional tour of Hamra, as the stories I have shared with them were not passed on to me through formal schooling but either through family members, many of whom have passed away, or through history narratives and memoirs that local Beirutis have written and shared copies of within our community.

Those memories were in relation to our collective Beiruti experiences and relations to the land and the evolving relations with nature, people, and institutions over time. In the sociohistorical imagination of long-rooted Beirutis from Ras Beirut, Ras Beirut is a village with an imposed city life that has become naturalized through the priorities of foreign actors and more powerful local institutions and the exclusion of long-rooted communities and their livelihoods. Whether it is through the rampant privatization of public spaces, forced selling of land and property, rapid urbanization, political siloing, mockery of the Beiruti accent, inaccessible education, and the modernization of the employment landscape (that rendered many local occupations historically practiced by long-rooted Beirutis increasingly unpracticable), the Beiruti had to put their fishing tackles aside, change or close their businesses, and find ways to fit within the modern institutionalized lifestyle that adds to the exclusion of the people of the city. The forms of exclusion were multiple and varied, but among the strongest of those exclusions included the simultaneous process of denying Beirut’s nature-centeredness, overemphasizing its newly acquired urban identity, and singling out the Beiruti as a social outcast.

The kind of knowledge that we share in our communities is in the form of memories from storytellers. What is powerful about stories is that they are kind of spatial trajectories that travel across time and transform place into space and space into place. This is distinct from history, in the sense that memory is attached to sites but history is attached to events. Storytellers carry the blessing and burden of collective memories; these memories are blessings because of the wealth of knowledge they offer but are burdensome because they also act as active pointers to our continuous exclusion. The stories in our collective memories and memoirs reside within our minds and pages, since this kind of knowledge is not taught in schools and universities established in the neighborhood, often without incorporating local histories and livelihoods.

My late grandmother, who loved me a lot, used to caution me against school ever since I was a child. She would tell me, in Arabic: “I do not want you to go to school. I want you to have a future, but you cannot go to school and have a future!” So, pursuing formal education was not an aspiration because it was considered a limitation. As farmers and landowners, Ras Beirutis had what I call a “diploma dilemma.” The dilemma of the diploma is a series of what-if ’s: What if you apply to an educational program and get accepted? We will have to sell – and lose – land to cover tuition fees. What if you were good at education? You will come back as the “educated person” with crazy ideas! What if you get employed? No salary will help you collect enough money to purchase land. What if you want to stay in Beirut? Education would have distracted you by then from knowledge – agricultural knowledge – that mattered. The diploma dilemma is rather outdated, since today, most agricultural land in Beirut is lost. However, what it pushes me to think of is the following: what did formal schooling – including higher education – do to attend to the demands of the planet as a being of nature, and living conditions of the communities in the middle of which it established itself?

Discussion: Indigeneity and endogeneity

We offer that all educational research and practice benefits from re-centering values that uphold earth wellness. First, re-centering re-lies upon inclusion and rectifying voices that have something to say about earth that have been historically excluded and subjected to knowledge hierarchies. Second, re-centering challenges us to identify individual and collective motivations, worldviews, and to reclaim and renew earth stewardship commitments. Third, we put into practice—trying, failing, succeeding—the values that guide reclaiming and renewing earth stewardship. For example, if we are committed to long-term work for all societies—human and more-than-human—on this planet, we have to care about the earth’s climate because we are agents within the ecosystem. Our narratives provoke discussion of Indigeneity—being an Indigenous person with certain claims and ancestries to place—and endogeneity, which we see as liminal Indigeneity and being in place but not of it/emerging from it as non-autochthonous members of community, or as newcomers who are holding on to values and teachings that/are of place even as we are no longer in those original places. We describe relationships with land and nature; what it means to teach individuals who value sentience, interdependence, and interconnectedness; and the drive to reclaim Indigenous and endogenous knowledges to understand one’s relationship to place as evolving and responsive to confluent beliefs.

In and outside of universities, we can learn across observations of such complex phenomena of change and where we see education as a series of institutional and nonformal philosophies and activities, as desirable or otherwise. For example, Samira shared that in the case of many elderly Ras Beirutis, formal schooling was an obstacle to their learning and employability and a major contributor to their loss of land. The implications of these realities are clear. Today, Beirut has less than a square meter of green space per capita, rendering it one of the least green areas in the world. Of course, there are stories of Beirutis who became successful (economically advantaged) because of education. However, the irreversible loss of nature is to be mourned not just by Beirutis, but by everyone wherever they are located, since nature does not abide by human-made boundaries.

What might observations like these mean for educators thinking about places, the educator self, learners, and diverse values? What does it mean for faculty or facilitators of professional development to work toward being in place wherever we are, to learn the varied histories and local perceptions of those places, and to teach students and participants to ask ethical questions as they embark on these processes for themselves? These ideas address knowledge competences that are emotionally, spiritually, and physically experienced, and we ask what it would mean for our learning spaces to explore them in all subject areas and iteratively throughout our time with students.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we link place insights through positionalities in relation to calls for more creative educational practices through land –relations and stories and memories as transversal in- and out-of-school knowledge sources. We offer that place engagements are central elements of mutual learning enriched through collaborative autoethnographies.

Space and time are vital elements in individual educator trans-formation and in what we bring to each learning setting, and these are evident in the mobility of knowledges. In Tsering’s case, there are two historical moments that illustrate this intersection. First, in the 8th century, the ancient Indian Nalanda tradition of logic, reasoning, analysis, contemplation, and innovation was brought from India to Tibet by Nalanda scholar Shantarakshita. Following the destruction of the Nalanda University in about the 12th century, scholars and teachers fled to Tibet where knowledge was preserved and continued to flourish. In 1959, when Tibet was occupied, India provided refuge and Karnataka State in Southern India where Doeguling was formed and established and provided home to many Tibetans. This ancient knowledge of Nalanda, ancient wisdom of compassion and mind training returned home, although at the loss of Tibet status, and resides in Dublin, Karnataka state. The current project, Re-imagining Doeguling Tibetan Settlement (RDTS) in many ways exemplifies how Tibetans in exile were able to reclaim and reestablish this stewardship, and the RDTS is motivated to foster the growth of this ancient tradition and knowledge, the center of learning, and it is founded on the worldview of essentiality of compassion and interdependence and of course, it is aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to become an economically, socially and environmentally sustainable place for generations.

We offer this vision because it recalibrates our individual and collective development for a healthy planet through healthy places. Stories like Tsering and Samira’s also build our understanding of ideas of Indigeneity in relation to loss and disconnection, endogeneity as newer and emergent place-connections, and transnational Indigeneity. In the case of Tsering’s RDTS or Indigenous communities like Porter’s Santa Clara Pueblo, or places like Samira’s Ras Beirut, we re-center educational practices as facilitating questions regarding what people contribute to the planet, and we are inspired by the Nalanda tradition that teaches that people and sentient beings have knowledge, wisdom, and responsibility.

References

1. Apffel-Marglin, F. (2020). Co-Creating Commons with Earth Others: Decolonizing the Mastery of Nature. Mester, 49(1).
2. Archibald, J. A. (2008). Indigenous storywork: Educating the heart, mind, body, and spirit. UBC press.
3. Chang, H., Ngunjiri, F. W.; & Hernandez, K.-A. (2013). Collaborative autoethnography. Walnut Creek.
4. de la Cadena, M. (2015). Earth beings: Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. Duke University Press.
5. Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse. In Designs for the Pluriverse. Duke University Press.
6. Harjo, J. (2015). Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems. WW Norton & Company.
7. Sumida Huaman, E. S., & Swentzell, P. (2021). Indigenous Education and Sustainable Development: Rethinking Environment Through Indigenous Knowledges and Generative Environmental Pedagogies. Journal of American Indian Education, 60(1), 7-28.

Notes

1. While Indigenous educators signify educators originally from a place, endogenous educators are those educators who are of a place – meaning they have inhabited a place for some time (short or longer term) and are concerned with the state of education despite not being Indigenous to that place. ↑