Interculturenatural self-determined education: socio-political power for the native peoples in Cauca, Colombia

Abstract

Self-determined education is part of the native peoples of Cauca, Colombia, as it implies a socio-political commitment to recover their languages and cultures, to promote the recognition and appreciation of cultural and linguistic diversity, and to position their existence rooted in Mother Earth. Self-determined Jxikaisawe´sx Fizewa (interculturenatural) education is strengthened through the Intercultural Bilingual Education Program (PEBI), in which the ten peoples that currently make up the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) participate. From there, multiple processes of resistance articulated around political principles such as unity, territory, culture and autonomy are intertwined in their platform of social struggle for lands and communities constituted as intercultural and decolonial entanglements to free themselves from the evangelizing, racist and civilizing education that sustains modernity/coloniality. Self-determined education begins in the womb of the maternal lagoon and spirals throughout life until it reaches another space. Therefore, there is no line that divides education by stages, but it extends to university education at the Universidad Autónoma Indígena Intercultural, where the culture's own themes are professionalized and life projects are strengthened, in which multiple harmonious practices are interwoven, inspired by spirituality and Mother Earth in every space and time. This work is the result of the analysis of these educational, political and social frameworks. Methodologically, it was based on Úus kipx tandxi'na (spiral research), which is the way of thinking about life of the Nasa people, who understand time as a spiral linked to different dimensions of existence. We walked and talked around the tulpa (bonfire) and other community spaces with elders, educational facilitators, and the community of the Council's ten villages, harmonizing the word with our own yú beka (distilled sugarcane liquor) to bring out the wisdom of the ancestors. Finally, the program continues and strengthens its own education as a project of political and social resistance that restores ancestral knowledge and intertwines the education of the Council's native peoples.