ONLINE CURRENTS VOL3 - Flipbook - Page 28
“The moment you step into the classroom you hand them the power,” Uc Be says, leaning
back on his chair with a moment of pause. “ Indigenous communities should not be traveling
to these conferences of the supposed parties.
By doing so they validate an existing power structure that has never accepted us, in which
we are made to play a subservient role that willfully uses our presence in order to validate
their arguments and decisions. Participation is acceptance of a paradigm that I cannot and
will not accept: that my people are lesser; that we are unable to make our own choices; that
our knowledge systems are inferior. What system is destroying the world, I ask you? Ours? Is it
small-scale Mayan agronomic systems that are bringing us to the precipice of global
destruction?”
Truth be told, there is a learned incongruity in hearing such clarity from an informally dressed
man in a small room in a small town. We do not expect learning to be here. We have been
taught that learning is not housed in these places, that for it to be learning it must be housed
and protected in a concrete edifice - that to access that knowledge we must travel over
concrete to arrive, to present credentials in order to be given access, that we must ask for
permission if we are to be allowed entry.
Whereas here, Uc Be’s front room is never locked, it faces onto the street, has four chairs in a
circle, none with any seniority over the other, and the only diploma evident is perched above
the single toilet in the middle of the house.
All of which begs the question of what we consider knowledge to be, which generally of
course is what we are told knowledge is.
End Times
It is unsurprising therefore, that for Uc Be, classrooms have been and still are a politically
charged environments of propaganda and strategic subjectivity. By having an imposed
society define what is categorized and validated as knowledge, there is necessarily a
simultaneous rejection and repudiation of other belief systems, which in turn defines you, and
your position within those colonial structures. For him, education has been nothing less than
weaponized for the slow but insistent cultural erasure of indigenous peoples.
Perhaps one of the most glaring examples of education as a method for erasure of
indigenous culture is Canada’s residential schools. With a current estimation of 10,000
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