Rikch’arisun,sayarisun,k’ancharisun: Indigenous knowledge systems and research for planetary beauty

Travelers

I write from Mni Sota Makoce, translated from the Dakota (Indigenous people of Minnesota, United States) language as the land where the waters reflect the sky, where Dakota and Ojibwe (Indigenous people of Minnesota) stewarded their places for millennia, where their descendants continue to hold and model what it means to be a good relative, a philosophy that is being taught to me by my friend, Iyekiyapiwin Darlene St. Clair, a Dakota scholar and tribal member of C̣aƞṡayapi, where the trees are marked red, or the Lower Sioux Indian Community. I think about how an Indigenous person like me, from another place, figuratively moves from being a traveler who has come from a long distance, to being a settler living on land where I hold no family or community history, to a guest welcomed into the homes of Dakota and Ojibwe peoples, their schools, and tribal buildings, to a non-blood relative who shares kinship through commitment to collective work. To me, these identities reflect the migrations and often arduous journeys that humans will make to arrive somewhere that appears desirable. Perhaps we have been invited, perhaps we have dreamt of these places, perhaps it has been prophesied—as in the case of the Ojibwe who migrated thousands of years ago from the eastern part of North America to this area because they were told to find the place where food grows upon the water, meaning the homelands of manoomin, or wild rice that they nurture and harvest through ceremony and their physical labor.

The traveler is central to my family history. My own Japanese father traveled through Latin America, falling in love with languages, communities, and my Wanka and Quechua mother. There are other travelers—my great-grandfather, Felipe Carhuamaca, a Wanka man from the community of Huamanmarca, the place of the hawks, walked across the steep central Andean mountain ranges of the region of Junín, Peru, until on one of his excursions he was killed transporting sheep through a canyon. Among the children he left behind was my grandmother, Antonieta Jesusa, born in 1910 and who would eventually marry my grandfather, Antonio Huaman, a Chanka (Quechua-speaking Indigenous peoples of Peru) and Quechua man. Antonio had known travel since he was a boy. As an early teenager, he left his work in the mines of Huancavelica and walked to Junín, bringing with him his mother, his nephew, and his little sister who was permanently deaf from a mining explosion. They arrived in Junín as somewhat unwelcomed guests and settled in the community of Chongos Bajo. It was here that Antonio built a life with my grandmother, and although she was Wanka, from one of the oldest families in the region, their children, including my mother, would often be called ñucca and halla by their peers, derogatory terms in reference to the idea of primitive and remote Indigenous highlanders and specifically, their non-Wanka father. Ñucca is an insult that refers to someone who does not speak the dominant language of Spanish and is viewed, even by other Indigenous community members, as less civilized. At times, they were also called chimpash, which is a term that refers to someone who is from an other side and is used toward people from the same community but who are part of different ritual or ceremonial groups within that same community, for example.

I am not sure how my grandfather made sense of his foreignness, but that he and his half-Wanka children would have been viewed skeptically despite sharing a common language family is not surprising due to the affinities that Indigenous peoples hold to their lands and the many beings that live there with them. The geographical landscape of Peru can be understood through its vast eco-regions—at least eight types of landscapes with certain characteristics, as documented by Peruvian geographer and philosopher Javier Pulgar Vidal in the late 1930s. These regions are the chala, yunga, quechua, suni, puna, janca, rupa-rupa, and the omagua and each of these terms holds their own local derivations. For example, yunga is also called chaupiyunga, yunca, ongoy, and coca by its peoples (Pulgar Vidal, 1946/2014). More specifically, as Pulgar Vidal explains, chala are the lands that adjoin the ocean on the western side of the Andean decline; yunga are the lands of the warm climate of the valleys and ravines that climb the Andes immediately after the chala, and those valleys and ravines of the same climate that extend into the eastern Andean decline; quechua refers to the temperate lands that extend to both declines; suni refers to the cold lands; puna refers to the very cold plateaus and cliffs; janca are the snowy peaks and white —glacial— regions of the country; rupa-rupa refers to the parts of the Andean hills and valleys covered with forested vegetation, located in the eastern decline of the Andes; and omagua is the immense jungle plain through which the Amazon and its tributaries run, whose waters flow to the Atlantic Ocean (Pulgar Vidal, 1946/2014). For convenience, most people will say that Peru is divided by three major regions—the coast, the highlands, and the jungles. While this is true, Pulgar Vidal’s work reveals complexities and depth to land that historically acknowledge the character of these places and how people relate to them. Concurrently, as we consider the characteristics of these areas, Indigenous peoples who live and work in these places must also grapple with how the regions have changed over time and are being altered by human activity, and as a result, what it means for many species to interact in harmony and discord.

Of mountains and rivers

In my travels across the Americas and beyond, I have been privileged to work with other Indigenous peoples who generously teach me how they see themselves in relation to their people and places. From my friend, Lo:t^t Honyust, an Onyota’a:ka (People of the Standing Stone, the Oneida people with communities in Wisconsin, United States, and Ontario, Canada) teacher at a school called Tsi’niyukwalihó•t^ (learning place), I learned almost two decades ago that his community’s desire is for their children to know their identity by their spirit names—the name given to a person in their Indigenous language, their clan, tribal nation, and what their homeland is called. Along with each of these components of a person’s identity are deeper knowledges and lessons, including prophesies, teachings, and ceremonies. From my friend and writing collaborator, Dr. Peter Mataira whose iwi are Ngāti Porou and Ngāti Kahungunu, I learned that a Māori introduction is incomplete without acknowledging your mountain and your river, enduring markers that link a Māori person to their genealogy (personal communication, November 14, 2021). These types of acknowledgements of how Indigenous peoples identify themselves are meaningful to me because learning what constitutes a proper introduction in other communities helps me to think about the questions and answers that Quechua students and researchers like me are asking about ourselves, including what we still hold and how to relate to a dramatically shifting world around us. Today, a typical introduction with a runa or nuna, a Quechua person, will depend on if you meet in community or elsewhere and on what kind of sensibility and trust they see in you. If you are lucky, you will learn the names of their community and those of their immediate and extended family. This is valuable information because you will know from whom they are actually descended and to whom they are connected presently based on their genealogy; you will be able to visualize their land and with that, what the community is known for and how the people live there.

My mountain is Waytapallana, the place where the flowers are gathered, in the Quechua Wanka language. Waytapallana is the highest mountain in a range named after it, among 16 other mountains. Waytapallana’s peak is a majestic 5,768 m or over 18,900 ft and the entirety of the range includes approximately 25 lakes of various sizes and colors, including turquoise blue in the immediate vicinity of the Waytapallana peak (Quispe Palomino, 2010). To the Wanka, Waytapallana is also a deity, one of our Apus, a seminal energy-life force, and he and his family are the surrounding mountains to whom ceremonies are dedicated. Waytapallana is also one of Peru’s tropical glaciers and, over the last two decades, has retreated over by over 50% due to climate change. From my grandmother’s second floor balcony, which is reached by a wooden ladder, there is a clear view of Waytapallana—my mother awakened daily to the gaze of the mountain, my grandmother and aunts gathered their flowers for ceremonies and healings there, and from them, I learned that we Wanka are loved in relation to the beauty of this being.

My river is Wankamayo, the river of the standing stone, known in English as the Mantaro River, who in our stories was created through the chaos and death of two serpents whose fighting broke the shores of a vast lake where they lived, creating the river and the entire Mantaro Valley. If the story is true, and I believe that it is, this would make sense because Wankamayo flows from Chinchayqutra, also spelled Chinchayqocha—both in Quechua—the great northern lake, known as Lake Junín. Lake Junín connects to both Wankamayo and the Upper Amazon basin and is the largest lake located entirely in Peru. The whole area was designated a national wildlife reserve in the 1970s—Reserva Nacional de Junín (Junín National Reserve)—and today, it is a dumping ground for acid mine drainage resulting from one of the oldest and most exploited mining operations in the country, the Cerro de Pasco mining district, having produced silver, copper, lead, and zinc since the Spanish colonial invasion of the 1500s (Rodbell et al., 2014). In 1999, the Peruvian government declared the reserve in a state of emergency, resulting in legally based attempts to curb further environmental damage from mining (Quispe Palomino, 2010). The reserve is home to endangered species heavily impacted by the mining contamination, including the Junín flightless grebe, the Junín rail, and a species of Andean frog (Rodbell et al., 2014; Shoobridge, 2006).

Due to the building of the Upamayo Dam for hydroelectric power in the 1930s, Wankamayo was spared from some of the major contamination that Chinchayqocha faces but was contaminated through the large metallurgical complex of La Oroya, also used for mining since the 1500s but escalating in production in the early 20th century, later including the infamous Doe Run copper smelting operation. Despite its proximity to the mining operations, our river is a water source for agriculture, fish farming, livestock, and human use—along the roads and homes it is not uncommon to see people still bathing in the brownish colored water and animals drinking from it, even though locals understand it to be poisoned. In 2003, Wankamayo was declared in a state of emergency by the President of the Republic of Peru under Law No. 28082 (Quispe Palomino, 2010). As a result of its contamination, there have in recent years been government and scientific reports outlining the dangers of heavy metals and their impacts on children’s cognitive and other forms of development and the dangers of carcinogens due to Lead and Arsenic (Custodio et al., 2021).

I outline these scientific points as a Wanka and Quechua runawarmi, human woman, and an educational researcher with an ontological investment in what these places signify and what they are becoming. In other words, the way that I understand my existence is bound up with our mountain, our river, our lake, and her dying birds and frogs—our human and more-than-human family members. Thus, the way that we introduce ourselves and the ways that others introduce themselves to us are data that address places, to whom we are related and accountable, and what matters to us. Our introductions are also reminders to ourselves and to the ones with whom we speak that we are not alone: We rely on many beings and they rely on us—maybe not for sustenance, maybe to see and admire them and to commit to not hurting them. I think sometimes about the coldness of higher education and the cruelty of extraction. I think about what it would mean to introduce ourselves with philosophies that urge us to name our relatives and our places, to declare our accountabilities. Would the Cerro de Pascos and La Oroyas of the world have happened? How can honoring our relations help us to rethink the mechanisms of ideas of progress now?

Despite how important declarations of accountability and recognition of relationality can be, learning how to do this or even being given the knowledge of our own identities, including about our more-than-human relatives, cannot be assumed. Maybe we as Quechua people once introduced ourselves in relation to all of our Apus instead of only doing this in ceremonies. Maybe our introductions took days or months instead of seconds. The Kanaka Maoli scholar Manulani Meyer (2011), well-regarded among Indigenous peoples for her ability to discuss Native Hawaiian epistemology, explains that epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge and that despite European academic claims to the term, it can mean infinitely “anything we wish it to mean” (p. 13, Meyer’s emphasis added). She helps us to imagine a way of thinking about knowledge that is untethered by colonial history and domination, that is not qualified based on what the colonial determines. She tells us that epistemology asks us to consider the difference between knowledge, knowing, and understanding; how we know that we know; what is intelligence; and what holds meaning for us. She also says that the fact that these ways of understanding are not completely clear to us is the result of colonial distraction and its mind control. And yet, she writes, “We are transforming and becoming clear through our conflicts, not despite them. A world-wide collapse of our oceans, fresh water, cultures, and land environments should inspire us to be courageous about the priorities of our times” (Meyer, n.d., p. 2, emphasis in original work).

Coloniality and us

First described by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (1992), coloniality answers the question of why despite political decolonization or independence of former colonies from their empires, there is still felt oppression. Even though colonization is no longer the only dominant method of imperial expansion, what is it that we, the formerly colonized, still live in and carry within us? What else, in addition to massive colonial wealth, was produced by the extractive and exploitative relationship between European and American empires and colonies? Quijano (2000, p. 533–534) argues that the codification of difference between the conquerors and the conquered, in other words, the idea of race supported by European science and rationality, was produced, as was a new model of global power focused on control of land and labor for capitalism, which desires exponential growth in perpetuity. He suggested four domains of control that constitute coloniality, and the model has since evolved, notably by Madina Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo (2009), among others (Maldonado-Torres, 2007), who write about the colonial matrix of power (CMP). The CMP helps us to visualize how control of land, labor, and economy is bound up with capitalism; how control of authority and its resources is bound up with the state; how control of normativity, including gender, sexuality, family, and religion, is bound up with the bourgeois family; and how the control of knowledge and intersubjectivity, including how we think about education, is bound up with Eurocentrism (Mignolo, 2002; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Quijano, 2000, 2007; Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2009).

Importantly, Quijano and others argued that coloniality is not static—the matrix shape-shifts and learns from itself because its agents have things that they want to do. Thus, scholars refer to the other side of the coloniality coin as modernity. What is most insidious about modernity is that it implants in people a desire for more, which requires the condition of always striving to have. This is about the big and small decisions that we make—the clothes that we wear, the food that we eat, everything that surrounds our daily lives and how those are linked with certain desires that have become perceived as needs, and how each thing comes from somewhere and is made up of elements that were imagined, labored, and produced in specific ways. Under coloniality or modernity, we are compelled to consider our own complicity, Indigenous or not, with the agendas that message us.

Rikch’arisun in the Quechua Collao, southern Quechua variety, means we awaken—and further, that we do not stay asleep or indifferent in the face of the problems that suffocate us. If we are to think about confronting coloniality, we must awaken to awareness of our own intelligences, our infinite spirit, heart, embodied, and emplaced knowledges, including what we know, how we know, and why we seek or value particular kinds of ways of knowing (Meyer, 2011). We also awaken to our intuition as we investigate the coloniality–modernity dynamic that limits the many ways of being and ways of knowing for its own purposes, and that demands that we think less of ourselves and more of what we have, build, and buy.

At the same time, to awaken can be disorienting because we are moving away from thinking of the world as a fixed entity, a given that we have been handed, where nothing needs changing or is changeable. Therefore, awakening also means reclaiming our status as considerers of the world and not as spectators of a world mythicized by imperialists. This distinction was powerfully observed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (2005). But just what is this world that we are waking up into, and what is our place in it? Is it a world where we are not called by our spirit names, where we may not know or be known to our clans and tribal nations, a world of broken things that our children can no longer map?

A way to stand and defend: Indigenous research

Indigenous research methodologies and research designs reflect infinite possibilities of how we think about and do research. Every research project and researcher subscribes to a particular worldview that informs the design of their project and they are responsible for describing this when explaining what it is that they are doing, why, and how. Some research worldviews are interested in how people make sense of their own experiences. Others are focused on change and others yet are interested in power dynamics and gendered inequities. Yet, despite several decades of Indigenous scholars writing about their research worldviews (Johansson-Fua, 2014; Mertens et al., 2016; Oliveira & Wright, 2016; Rigney, 1999) research scholars do not necessarily include, teach, or support Indigenous research methodologies as part of the array of research worldviews available to our students. There are likely a lot of reasons for this—maybe Indigeneity is viewed as esoteric or people are afraid of misrepresentation or appropriation. Whatever the reasons may be, in my own experience as a university and out-of-school educator, we can and ought to recognize the existence of research paradigms that are of and serve Indigenous peoples, including their distinct places, needs, languages, and cultural practices.

Despite distinctions across ways of thinking about and doing research with Indigenous peoples, there are characteristics held in common when describing Indigenous research methodologies (Atalay, 2012), including that they are mindful of Indigenous self-determination—meaning what people hope for their lives and the strategies that they use to achieve this and over time—which is inseparable from Indigenous knowledge systems because we need all of the important things that people are and do to take care of each aspect of our communities. Indigenous communities need scientists, lawyers, teachers, engineers, language speakers, doctors and healers, poets and artists, mathematicians, writers, and so on. Much of my work in educational research is about investigating how to support the growth of our own people and what hurts and blocks them. Second—and this was laid out for us so well by Shawn Wilson (2001) over 20 years ago—is that Indigenous research is the confluence where Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, axiologies, and methodologies meet—that is, our existence and purpose, what we know and how we know, what we value, and how we think about and shape the search for knowledge and how we recognize it when we see it, hear it, or feel it. In Quechua, these senses are not separated—for example, there is a term in Quechua Collao for a linkage between mind and heart, illanay, which is the feeling in thought (R. Vizcarra, personal communication, November 22, 2021). Third, Indigenous research holds the hope of Indigenous and place-informed pluriversal inquiry, meaning that the diversity of what we seek to know and how we ask—that is, the many methods of research design—is made vital by the many different worlds that we recognize and the many beings that are of service to those worlds. This proposal is linked with my stance that Indigenous research methodologies are more than research paradigms and are vital evidence of life-sustaining worldviews that produce research designs that engage processes of healing and helpfulness and that reflect Indigenous pluriversal realities—the philosophical and the daily.

The Cree scholar Cora Weber-Pillwax in 1999 also offered us principles of Indigenous research that laid the foundation for these meaningful pluriversal connections—within our worlds and across them. She offered us points to be mindful of and that distinguish our research from westernized methodologies and methods—in other words, she writes that Indigenous research asks for recognition and enactment of the belief of interconnectedness of all living things, research as lived Indigenous experience, groundedness of theories in Indigenous epistemology, and sacredness and responsibility of maintaining personal and community integrity (Weber-Pillwax, 1999). But Weber-Pillwax also did what wise people will do, which is to hold open the door rather than to shutter it with directives. She shared with us her excitement for where we would take Indigenous research in the future—which is now:

Each research project will be a research project layered over a research experience layered over a personal experience layered over a research project. Living through and integrating the thinking, visioning, talking, intuiting, and/or writing of these layers (for some people and some sections using two languages) is the form of rigor demanded by the present forms of indigenous scholarship. (Weber-Pillwax, 1999, p. 39)

Community-mindedness has incredible reach and researchers from every distinct language place will have something personal and collectively derived to add to how we understand research in relation to ourselves and our worlds.

This kind of work is happening among Indigenous researchers and dedicated friends today and there are awesome examples across many fields and communities and ways of knowing. I have had the privilege of working with and learning from some of them—the theories and methods of Indigenous storywork by Jo-ann Archibald (2008), the research with Sámi and Indigenous language revitalization and multilingualism being done by Patricia Fjellgren and Leena Huss (2019), to the questions about what it means to do multispecies ethnography that takes into account the earth and her creatures in the Andes and that centers loss and grief by María Elena García (2019), and the Ojibwe community members here in Minnesota who push university science students to think about how to interview a lake in an environmental study (Sumida Huaman et al., in press). These are examples of Indigenous researcher collaborations that are always becoming, as Tewa (Indigenous people of the Southwestern United States) artists Nora Naranjo Morse and her daughter Eliza Naranjo Morse eloquently describe our relationship with ourselves, each other, and the universe through their artwork.

Research that exercises Indigenous self-determination in relation to Indigenous knowledge systems and that explicitly demonstrates ontological, axiological, epistemological, and methodological connections shows us the many tools that emerge from our pluriversal realities and that we bring, sharpen, and develop in deep fellowship with the worlds of Indigenous communities, researcher colleagues, and the work itself. The work of researchers and allies shows us that everything in research is connected and that if you ignore one part of an Indigenous knowledge system or fail to consider varying understandings of temporality, your story of what is happening is incomplete. Indigenous research also shows us that we need each other—we need our ancestors and our families, whatever those look like. At a pragmatic level, this means that we need interdisciplinary and interepistemic teams who will work together in kindness and who understand that it will take every person on this planet contributing their gifts with their whole hearts to change the course of the future. As Indigenous peoples, we also need a sense of resolve that withstands heartaches. Through a language understanding of relationship with one’s place, Māori scholar, Hirini Moko Mead, conveyed this resolve most eloquently—reminding us that place and self are bound together, even where people and policies fail:

A bundle of attributes come with the fact of being born of Māori parents or even of one Māori parent. One of these attributes is the right to a place for the feet to stand, that is, tūrangawaewae. It is a place where one belongs by right of birth. Tūrangawaewae represents one spot, one locality on planet earth where an individual can say, “I belong here. I can stand here without challenge. My ancestors stood here before me. My children will stand tall here.” (Mead, 2003, p. 43)