Hey,the text of "decolonization is not a metaphor" that Nasrin posted is great. It says so many important things about how colonization practices are still happening in the everyday. It made me think a lot about how decolonizing knowledge shouln´t be a metaphor neither. I have experienced so many time in my life those kind of practices. Many times I felt the colonizing forms, the exoticization of my adoptive countries, the tremendous injustices perpetrated in the established relationship of who is considered to have a more important knowledge, or of what kind of knowledge is valued more than another. As Tuck and Wayne propose, it is imperative to “pay attention to how settler colonialism has shaped schooling and educational research in the United States and other settler colonial nation-states”, and that to do so, there are two important work to be done: the first is about locating those dynamics of settler colonialism that have marked the “ organization, governance, curricula, and assessment of compulsory learning” , the second is concerned with “how settler perspectives and worldviews get to count as knowledge and research and how these perspectives (...) are activated in order to rationalize and maintain unfair social structures.” The problem of the university has come up so many times during the course... In the few time I have spent here in Montreal, and for the first time being part of this kind of formal education, I have met so many people discussing that problem in different contexts...that sometimes I wonder that if we all would stop for a moment our personal paths, researchers and so on, and spend more time articulating together ways to disempower at least the core features of coloniality that are preventing knowledge to actually happen in the university, and to try out others, maybe some urgent problems could be addressed more fully. Maybe the idea itselfof accessibility to the university it perpetuates a system of values in where having access to the university entails a better social status, and it reinforces the idea on where knowledge is situated, making knowledge move among a pre-established system of values that entails in themselves colonial thinking. Maybe a real decolonization of knowledge will rather happen when a multiplicity of strategies and curricula will simultaneously be able to form, and when both knowing about literature and knowing how to cultivate a land, and knowing how to make a delicious coffee, will carry tremendous importance, care, time and value.
More I listen, more I perceive the immenseness of what eludes me. It is becoming more and more disorienting, but maybe that is exactly something to be learned, to live in a constant state of disorientation. I wonder what would be the difference to think orientation in the sonic world rather than in the visual, linear, sequential world. I think about how are we improvising together when we are not playing jazz.
Thanks for all the sounds of this course, and to add some other voices, here some ideas from the “Good Living” premises of some ingenuous communities, in where lately I find so much wisdom, that kind of knowledge that comes with experience, with living, and therefore value so much the elders, and that is never personal, and never human centered.
“Although in each country Good Living adopts particular concepts, we can take the thirteen principles of the Ecuadorian movement as a guideline proposal, each reader's work being a critical reading of them:
1 Knowing how to eat: It is not equivalent to filling the stomach; it is important to choose healthy foods and to fast each new moon; everything lives and needs sustenance, that is why through the offerings we also nourish Mother Earth, the mountains, the rivers. Mother Earth gives us the food we need, that is why we should eat the foods of the season, time, and place.
2 Know how to drink: Before drinking, the Pachamama (the Earth) is given to drink.
3 Know how to dance: To enter into a cosmotellur connection and relation, all activity must be carried out with a spiritual dimension.
4 Know how to sleep: You have to sleep two days, that is, sleep before midnight, to have both energies; the one of the night and the one of the morning of the following day. In the southern hemisphere you have to sleep with your head to the north, your feet to the south, in the northern hemisphere with your head to the south and your feet to the north.
5 Knowing how to work: Work is not suffering, it is joy, we must carry out the activity with passion, intensely.
6 Know how to meditate: Enter a process of introspection. Balance is restored through one's silence and connected with the silence of the environment.
7 Knowing how to think: It is a reflection, not only from the rational but from the feeling. Without losing your reason let's walk the path of the heart.
8 Knowing how to love and be loved: Respect for everything that exists generates a harmonious relationship. The complementary.
9 Knowing how to listen: It's not just listening with your ears; is to perceive, to feel, to listen with our whole body; if everything lives, everything speaks also.
10 Speak well: Before speaking you have to feel and think well, to speak well means to speak to build, to encourage, to contribute. Remember that everything we speak is written in the hearts of those who hear it. Sometimes, it is difficult to erase the effect of some words; That is why we have to speak well.
11 Dreaming: We start from the principle that everything starts from the dream, therefore the dream is the beginning of reality. Through the dream we perceive life. Dreaming is projecting life.
12 Knowing how to walk: There is no fatigue for those who know how to walk. We must be aware that one never walks alone; we walk with the wind, we walk with the Mother Earth, we walk with the Father Sun, we walk with the Mother Moon, we walk with the ancestors and with many other beings.
13 Knowing how to give and knowing how to receive: Recognize that life is the conjunction of many beings and many forces. In life everything flows: we receive and give; the interaction of the two forces generates life. We must know how to give with blessing, knowing how to give thanks for everything we receive. To be grateful is to know how to receive; receive the brightness of Father Sun, the strength of Mother Earth, flow like Mother Water and all that life gives us”.
1 Knowing how to eat: It is not equivalent to filling the stomach; it is important to choose healthy foods and to fast each new moon; everything lives and needs sustenance, that is why through the offerings we also nourish Mother Earth, the mountains, the rivers. Mother Earth gives us the food we need, that is why we should eat the foods of the season, time, and place.
2 Know how to drink: Before drinking, the Pachamama (the Earth) is given to drink.
3 Know how to dance: To enter into a cosmotellur connection and relation, all activity must be carried out with a spiritual dimension.
4 Know how to sleep: You have to sleep two days, that is, sleep before midnight, to have both energies; the one of the night and the one of the morning of the following day. In the southern hemisphere you have to sleep with your head to the north, your feet to the south, in the northern hemisphere with your head to the south and your feet to the north.
5 Knowing how to work: Work is not suffering, it is joy, we must carry out the activity with passion, intensely.
6 Know how to meditate: Enter a process of introspection. Balance is restored through one's silence and connected with the silence of the environment.
7 Knowing how to think: It is a reflection, not only from the rational but from the feeling. Without losing your reason let's walk the path of the heart.
8 Knowing how to love and be loved: Respect for everything that exists generates a harmonious relationship. The complementary.
9 Knowing how to listen: It's not just listening with your ears; is to perceive, to feel, to listen with our whole body; if everything lives, everything speaks also.
10 Speak well: Before speaking you have to feel and think well, to speak well means to speak to build, to encourage, to contribute. Remember that everything we speak is written in the hearts of those who hear it. Sometimes, it is difficult to erase the effect of some words; That is why we have to speak well.
11 Dreaming: We start from the principle that everything starts from the dream, therefore the dream is the beginning of reality. Through the dream we perceive life. Dreaming is projecting life.
12 Knowing how to walk: There is no fatigue for those who know how to walk. We must be aware that one never walks alone; we walk with the wind, we walk with the Mother Earth, we walk with the Father Sun, we walk with the Mother Moon, we walk with the ancestors and with many other beings.
13 Knowing how to give and knowing how to receive: Recognize that life is the conjunction of many beings and many forces. In life everything flows: we receive and give; the interaction of the two forces generates life. We must know how to give with blessing, knowing how to give thanks for everything we receive. To be grateful is to know how to receive; receive the brightness of Father Sun, the strength of Mother Earth, flow like Mother Water and all that life gives us”.
(Manual para maestros que lloran por la noche)
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