 All right, well, my name is Daniel Bryan while I'm from the States. I've lived in Ecuador for 22 years and I'm a co-founder of small NGO non-profit in Ecuador that works in many different areas, but most especially in intercultural education, international education, and community-based education, which I'll talk about here in just a second. And so I'm here to share a presentation that was kind of built, was built as intersection, the intersection of decoloniality, critical interculturality and indigenous political protests in Ecuador, but I'm also going to kind of give this a different name. It's the same presentation, but just to kind of like bring that together. Unlearning and epistemic justice. So we'll talk about that word epistemic for those who might find it complicated and this is in and I hyper-focus this on indigenous activism and the arts in Ecuador and I mentioned hip-hop as you were coming in because we will look at that through hip-hop. So we are a small NGO as I mentioned and we're really about re-imagining education. We see places like like universities like here and we love them, but we think this can't be like the be-all-end-all of education. This is a part of a bigger movement hopefully for education and so we don't see universities as like this kind of ivory tower. We see them just part of a pleuroversity. And so we want to re-imagine education as a collective creation to foster liberation and to unlearn systemic and embodied injustices. So all of us are part of systems that carry with them social injustice, oppression, in some way either as a presser and or oppressed, but usually as both we embody those and so we try to work both at the community level in Ecuador. We work with indigenous and marginalized both urban and rural communities in Ecuador, especially in Ecuador and Amazon and with international students that come down with us. We work to kind of re-imagine what education can be in this world and how can we confront that injustice. Oh and here rehearsing change is the name of our semester-long study abroad program. We actually do a lot of study abroad, but it's a very different way of doing it. So it's actually seen study abroad as an act of resistance, resisting those injustices. And so we actually have a program, a semester-long program in which students from universities like here come down to Ecuador and for every student there is also a local, there's then a local community counterpart that participates in the same program and together we work together and I'm not talking about a local university student, but a local community member because we're community-based and we do that reimagining together. So it's not just students, it's not just community members, but it's very reflective of our world. Our world, if we want to make changes, we have to see them from both local and global levels. You're gonna see a lot of images. This is the images of our work. This is, for example, work that we're doing in an indigenous community in Ecuador, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a Kichwa community called Sawatam. And a lot of the images you're gonna see today come from Nina Xiong, which is the Heart of Fire Hip-Hop Association. Aizu means extended family, so it's, they see the hip-hop community as an extended family also with the earth and with all the elements. And it's an Ecuadorian NGO that merges hip-hop, popular pedagogy, and ancestral traditions in a way to, as a way to transform conflicts that we have due to globalization, capitalism, colonialism, and so here you see them working in that same community Sawatam, one of the elements of hip-hop is muralism, so you see that there, and then you also see them here actually in protest theater working collectively with us. This was right after one of the most recent indigenous uprisings in 2019 where they were using hip-hop as a way of protest. So what are we gonna be doing today? We're gonna see if we can connect with the relationship between arts and indigenous activism and see if you all can connect it into your own stories, right? See if whatever, if there's something in your story that can weave into the stories that you're gonna be hearing about today and that you're gonna be watching, but also at the same time the idea is that you're questioning yourselves, right? We're gonna talk about stuff like knowledge, like what is knowledge? Where does it come from? So see if you can question yourself in our world. See if you can also activate an understanding of how like storytelling and the arts affect knowing, how does it shape ways of knowing, and then let's dream, okay? So let's dream together a little bit about how maybe today we can change a little bit our world. We're going to start with a land acknowledgment. How many people have done land acknowledgments before? I know we just did one a few minutes ago, but yeah, have any of you all done a land acknowledgment? Have you heard of land acknowledgments? Yeah, so land acknowledgment is usually a statement in which we recognize that we are on stolen land from ancestral peoples, indigenous nations, and would you like to also read it again today? Yeah, so if you want to get that out. So we can read the one. If you haven't done one, it's good to hear the official Roger Williams land acknowledgment, which we will read, but at the same time I'm gonna ask you to watch a video and see a song that was basically meant as a kind of land acknowledgement. It's a video and song written by an indigenous woman in Ecuador who's singing the song and the video was created as a way of seeing indigenous protest as also a kind of land acknowledgment. Sometimes we see it as like other troublemakers or they're working against the system, so I want us to think of it also as a land acknowledgment. So first we'll have Paula read out the official land acknowledgement, which recognizes the people's ancestral peoples of this territory, and then we'll watch the video. Did you get to it? So I'm gonna also bring up the the video here because I can do mine first here if that's better. Actually, but while you're looking for it, why don't I give a little up? We found it, then we'll just go straight into the land acknowledgement. If you could use your mic though, so since this is being recorded. And actually what I will ask you to do often land acknowledgments are criticized for just being words and alleviating our guilt. So what I'm gonna ask you to do is sit in a way so that your feet are firmly on the ground and ask you to close your eyes when you're listening to land acknowledgement and see when you hear these words if you can also feel the ground below the carpet is surely cement below the cement is eventually the earth, right? And so we're gonna try to connect with that. While we're hearing this land acknowledgement. So I invite you to close your eyes if you feel comfortable or just rest your gaze down below. We acknowledge then Narragansett and Pocanokit nations as the original inhabitants and endurance stewards of the lands and waters upon which Roger Williams University is located. We recognize that our presence on this land implicates us in the legacy of our namesake who strove in ways to respect the sovereignty and humanity of indigenous peoples, but in others actively contributed to their genocide. In becoming the university the world needs now, let us commit to reconciling and partnering with the Narragansett and Pocanokit and all indigenous peoples whose lands and waters we benefit from today. Thank you. Now you're gonna open your eyes and you're gonna watch a video called Semegita. Semegita means little seed and so as we watch this video, I want you to enjoy the video and it's got subtitles in English, so you'll have to read those, but I ask you to once again keep your feet firmly planted on the ground and now we're going to connect with the same earth that is connected to the indigenous peoples of Ecuador with whom I work and we're going to try to identify a feeling in our body. Okay, try to feel through as you're watching this video and that remains part of this land acknowledgement because there is a there is discussion that until we feel the land acknowledgement in our bodies it means nothing, but yet we haven't yet made that connection that the land acknowledgement doesn't just recognize in words the presence of ancestral peoples in the past, but their presence here. Now, they literally are us because they were buried, their bodies turned into earth, which turns into food, which nurses our body, nourishes our body and keeps us alive. So whether they are your ancestors or not, they still give you life in that way and many others. Okay, so we're gonna keep our feet planted firmly on the ground. We're gonna see if we can feel in our bodies. We're gonna watch this video called Semegita. If anybody has trouble with images of social protesting, there is images here. There is no extreme violence in these images, but there are, well, there is a couple of images towards the end that do have a little bit of violence. So if you prefer kind of like hitting, okay? If somebody would prefer, you can just rest your gaze and listen to the music and the sounds and the intention, even if you don't speak Spanish, you can hear the intentionality of the voice. Okay? So this shows not just images of Ecuador, but also other parts of the world because in 2019 Ecuador had an indigenous uprising that basically resulted in other countries rising up. It's not the first time. It happened in the 90s, starting in the 90s. So, but we show this right now as a way of showing that indigenous uprising and showing also the linkages to nature and to art, where we would maybe usually think of those as, oh, so you have politics over here, right? Social issues, and then you have nature over here, and then you have art. Well, that's a different thing all together. But in an indigenous cosmology, that's all together. You can't separate that. The separation of disciplines is something that's like western or from the global north. It's very Euro-centric. So here you actually see a couple of land acknowledgments that that we're doing. In Ecuador, one in the Amazon and one in the Andes. And then we also do land acknowledgments like the one you see here, which is basically trying to be reciprocal with the earth and with our ancestors by, this is called a Chicana, where we're laying out different foods that are symbols of our appreciation and of who we are, so that we are in a sense also trying to give back symbolically. And this is a land acknowledgment actually from an international student who wanted to create something that she would be able to carry with her throughout her time when she came back from Ecuador and living here in the United States. And so she did this and others as well. I thought it would be helpful to talk about some complicated terms to understand what really the protest is about. So has anybody ever heard of like, we need to decolonize the curriculum, or we need to decolonize politics, or decolonize the academy, or decolonize the university? Has anyone heard like decolonize before? Yeah, it's a big movement right now, right? And but it gets confusing. What does that mean? So a land acknowledgement refers more to colonialism. So colonialism is what we usually we think about when we hear the word colonial, right? And that is the occupation and administration of lands and subjugation of the original people. It's at least how we would define it. Okay, but when we talk about decolonize, we're usually not talking about that. We're not talking about okay, everybody we have to leave the campus because these are not our lands. Okay. What we're usually talking about is more coloniality, right? And so coloniality is how decolonization lives within our systems. And so when you see protests out on the streets, that's usually more toward coloniality, like when you see Black Lives Matter's protests. That's about coloniality. And then modernity coloniality really looks at how coloniality is just called normal. That's just life. That's just life. It's got to get used to it, just the way it is, right? And that's kind of coloniality being masked, and if it's just considered as normal, then it's harder to fight because it's just the way it's actually taken as truth. It's the way the world is. And so all those protests that you saw were protests against that. Protests really against coloniality in this last film, but especially modernity that we got to break down this whole idea of what really is going on in the world. And so it's often they're often talking about like in the it's like these are the people that sustain us. The indigenous and are the ones who protect our natural territories, meaning like nature. They're the ones who protect oxygen and water, right? They're also the ones who, at least in Ecuador, produce the majority of our food. So that's really interesting to think about. So, but I really want to help us think about what do we mean by indigenous epistemologies and epistemic justice? Because that gets a little confusing, especially epistemologies. So to do so, I'm gonna ask you to think about climate change. But before that, let me just say epistemologies. If you want to just think in your own mind ways of knowing, you got it. We learn, we all have different ways of knowing. We're necessarily disciplines like, oh, there's a way of knowing in natural sciences and a way of knowing in social sciences. Those still usually follow a dominant kind of Western academic-based way of knowing. You can know through your body, right? You can know through hearing a story. You can know through a relationship. You can know through a feeling, right? And you can know through a scientific method, for example. Those are different ways of knowing. But when you hear climate change, just give me some words. What do you think of? There's no wrong answers. I'm not looking for anything specific, yeah? Threat. Destruction. What's that again? Carbon. The arctic, mm-hmm. Inaction, okay. Yeah, these are these are great words. And if I were to say, how do we teach climate change? Like to like hopefully fix it. How do we teach it? I mean, what do we usually tell people or do? Okay, participate politically. But how do they even know what it is? How do we teach them about it and that it's dangerous or it's important? We show people. What do we show them? Okay, so show them images, effects of it. Mm-hmm. Anyone else? Statistics. Yeah, good. So I actually had a conversation with an indigenous activist and scholar named Luis Enrique Cachihuango and he was, we were talking about climate change and he was saying, well how do you all teach climate change? And I'm like, let me show you and we go online and we found something that looked kind of like this. This is a Western epistemological approach to climate change. It doesn't matter if you can read that, just see the graph going up, kind of like statistics, right? We know in this case going up is bad, right? Temperatures rising, water levels rising. We're gonna hit a breaking point and then destruction end of times as we know it. And so when I told him that, he just looked at me and asked, how's that working out for you all? And I was, well, not too well. And he says, well, let me show you how we teach climate change from a relational or indigenous epistemology. And he brings up this image and he says, we are the woman whose hair flows as part of the water, meaning we are also the water. And we see the mountains and the sky, the clouds as Apus deities, gods as alive. And we hear a song coming from them and from us. Climate change isn't rising temperatures. It isn't rising water levels. Climate change is the fading of the image and the disappearance of the song. And until you know that, you don't know climate change. And I was like, oh my God, you know. And I was like, it just hit me so hard and then it struck me, that's a way of knowing, right? That is actually something we can all like relate to because it's a story. And we're humans and we need stories to live. Think about trying to live your life without story. You can't do it, right? I mean, you couldn't live a single day of your life. You couldn't live moments of your life without story because you're telling yourself stories in your head. And so as soon as he kind of connected with that relational ancestral storytelling way of knowing, it really started to impact us. And so we have worked with indigenous knowledge holders and scholars to try to see that kind of knowledge both through the academic lens and through the grounded local lens as well and try to bridge those together. And one ways in which we do that is through art that you can see here, right? So somebody's really trying to connect with an ancestral way of knowing as it relates to their community, their body. And we also use this and it was the phrase critical interculturality was brought together for this piece as well. We look at this as a way of trying to understand not just when we think about interculturality or we don't usually use that word, we use multiculturalism. We think about different cultures sharing the same space or working together maybe. But critical interculturality is bringing cultures together, learning from one another with the idea of changing the system, right? Multiculturalism is more about like, oh, this is just something we use to prove that we're doing something well. Or to show like, oh, we have looked different cultures in a given space where multicultural check that off. Let's get out of here. A place like Roger Williams, they want to increase their numbers of diversity because that shows you're a multicultural institution. But does it show you're trying to change the system that caused the problem in the first place? Probably not, right? And that's not just Roger. Every university in the Western world, right? So I'm not picking on you all by any stretch of the imagination. And so we actually try to see like life through different lenses. So if you think of a tree, like look outside at one of those trees or the tree that's drawn here, we can see that if we use a relational epistemology, we can see it as pacha. Pacha means like the everything, time, space. Like what often people would also call like the universe, or we would say the pluriverse. But you can also see it as alpa. Alpa is like the earth that you can touch, the tree that you can touch and say that's mother nature. It's yakta. Yakta means it's a territory, meaning has a relationship with a human story. When we do a land acknowledgement, we're on a yakta, right? All of you have in some way a yakta. You might be like, I don't know what my territory is. It might be more like imagined. It might be more symbolic. It might be even virtual or something like that. But we have to see that tree is being on a territory that has a story. And aizu is this extended family that I mentioned earlier with Nina Shungu. So aizu is all living beings sharing time, space. So I'm going to take us now into how a little bit how it's kind of like a case study here. And it's looking at the relationship between interculturality because we're going to explore indigenous activists in Ecuador and the relationship with non-indigenous artists, specifically the hip-hop movement in Ecuador. So inso we are exploring interculturality. I should have mentioned interculturality is actually a term that was started in Latin America. And it was a way of kind of moving away from like an ism, like multiculturalism or interculturalism, which isn't really a word, but interculturality was meant to be kind of more of a movement that started in Latin America. So what we're going to do is we're going to look at the relationship between art, indigenous activism, and see if we can also see like this idea of different ways of knowing, being expressed by the indigenous Cosmo vision that we just talked about. So we talked about, remember, Pacha, the everything, Alpa, the Mother Earth. We talked about Yachta, the territory in Aju, the extended family of all living beings sharing time and space. So we're going to see if we can see that a little bit in images that we're looking at, but also videos that we're going to show. And we're going to try to do that also through this critical intercultural lens. Here on these images you see images from 2019 over there and over here. We had our, of the last like 10 years, our biggest uprisings were in 2019, where about 50,000 indigenous marched on the city of Quito to protest austerity measures that most affected rural and indigenous peoples. And then in the one here in the middle, that's 2022. That was just this past June where they were doing the same thing. The previous one, I mean, they're all about also like subsidies. So we have subsidies here in the States as well, but they're different in Ecuador. We subsidize the consumer and many nations in this world. And so like we reduce the cost of something, whereas here we often subsidize the producer. So like, and that kind of results in like big agro industry because we subsidize like big agricultural industry, or we subsidize energy companies, but we don't subsidize like at the gas tank. We subsidize at the supermarket, which is what we do in Ecuador. And so when both years, 2019, 2022, when subsidies were being eliminated or reduced, that most affects indigenous peoples, especially because they're producing agriculture. And we were changing kind of into a more stateside perspective, and we were actually increasing subsidies for agro industry. And so that really called the indigenous how to strike. And then the top middle and the bottom left is our images of hip hoppers, rappers who are joining in the protest in their way. So I'm going to show you a couple of videos. The first video, these are just a couple of minutes or a few minutes each. The first video does have one pretty strong image and it's a minute in. So if anybody would prefer not to watch, I will say one minute when we're a minute in so that you can see the rest of it without having to see that really, really strong image. But what we're showing here are groups of rappers, four different groups of rappers came together to protest in 2019. And it's called Rikichari, which is like wake up in Kichwa. And it's trying to get the hip hop movement to wake up and join your indigenous brothers and sisters on the streets. And so it's four different groups, three of which are indigenous and they actually rap, all of them are going to rap in Spanish and in Kichwa, one of the indigenous languages of Ecuador. And two of them have worked closely with Nina Shungu. One is basically part of Nina Shungu, the hip hop collective we've worked with. So remember, for those who don't speak Spanish, you're not going to be able to understand, it's more about hearing the hip hop and seeing the imagery on the screen. So they're going to look at also a historical perspective of uprisings in Ecuador from the 90s all the way through until 2019. So you're going to see images from different time periods. So once again, I will say one minute when we get past the moment. And so now I'm going to share this one last video. And this is just to show you how things progressed over the last three years. And so a lot of rappers, then when 2022 came, they were like, we have to stand, but we have to stand through our medium, through our art. And so Samai, who's a close friend and who actually has done rehearsing change several times our program and actually learned to rap, not from us, but in the spaces with local knowledge holders, he went to a protest where he just freestyled. He freestyled part of this piece you're about to see. And people loved it and said, you ought to turn that into a whole song. And so it was part of a protest of rappers. But also the whole time that they're rapping, they're also leading the humanitarian movement. They're actually at the Casa de la Cultura, so the main kind of cultural center in Ecuador. And they're running all the donations that come in and they're turning them into meals. And then they're organizing the cooking stations over here. So it's really led by not just the hip-hop movement, also other cultural activists, but they played a really big role. But they were also the entertainment, which is really interesting. So when the indigenous folks came back after a hard day of protesting to the safe sites, which were at a couple universities, the hip-hoppers are there and they're actually rapping in the evenings, they're working with the kids, they're teaching how to do it, so it's a really fascinating movement. So we're going to watch Samai and Khatari, which is Rise Up. But watch how he relates. You're not going to be able to understand if you don't speak Spanish or quichua because he does a lot of quichua. But watch how he relates to the earth, the elements, and thinking about seeds as we talked about, thinking about what does protest now mean in this hip-hop movement. Okay, so with a... So with that, I think it's interesting to see how Samai is... He's really starting... His grandparents spoke quichua, but he never identified as indigenous. He was born in the city, grew up in the city. His father abandoned them and it was from that side that was indigenous and so he's like, I'm not. But now it's like this reconnection. And his rap is a way of not just reclaiming that indigenous identity but also kind of reclaiming himself and a connection with nature. And seeing rap is also the seed. We talked about Semezit at the beginning, but rap is also the seed. And that's why you saw that. And a lot of what he's talking about, too, is comments on how the media treated this, which was basically saying that this strike must have been financed by narco-terrorists from Colombia and elsewhere. But what he's saying is, no, we're not terrorists, we're just people with ponchos on and our feet are in dirty feet, basically. And that's who's financing this. And people like Pachesana who raised thousands of dollars from our ex-students and all that and brought in just us. We made 3,000 meals during the last strike. And so those were the people who had all these untold stories. And so it's the rappers who actually came in and talked about these stories. So I guess as we kind of sum this up from, like, now it's kind of come into the academy again and think about what does all this mean also here? So realize that relational ways of knowing are kind of like a web. All this stuff, you might not be able to wrap your head around it, but it's kind of like you're making, you're starting to weave, right? And it's the weaving itself that's a way of knowing. It's also sharing space together and not so much time. Like, we're always, like, doing this thing and we got to get something done by a deadline. It's a line, right? But here we think more about space. It's verb-rich knowing. Western languages tend to be noun-rich languages, whereas indigenous languages tend to be very verb-rich languages. So it's a way of kind of thinking about this. It also sees as everything alive. You saw that, like, in the videos, like the connection with the everything. And stories, how stories are part of knowledge creation. They're not just a way to communicate knowledge. They are the making of knowledge. I asked you to think about education as a collective act because we see that between rappers and the indigenous folks, how they collectively learn together and work together. Think about, instead of university, think about pluriversity, pluriversality instead of a singularity or a universality. Think about also that what they do is, and they argue also, we don't need police, we don't need judges because nobody is police and everybody is police. In our world we tend to externalize a police or a judge wherein indigenous and relational ways of being knowing you don't need that because we are all that. But also it's not that simple and you have to have an embrace, you have to embrace a mixed worldview and know that I am from here, but I also share, I can also share in some way in these other ways of knowing. So I wanted to finish with that and maybe just kind of leave you a little bit of an assignment what it's like to think about your story and your story as related to what we talked about, Pacha, the everything. What is your story related to Alpa, Alpa the mother earth, Yacht the territory and Aiju, how are you related to all these living beings with whom you share in community? And when I say living beings I don't just mean like what we would say from a science perspective is living but the mountains as living, the ocean as alive, your ancestors or ancestors from this place that we would say are dead now but are part of the earth. So think of kind of that where, what, how, with whom and see yourself as a protagonist in that story as you walk out. Really make this an assignment for yourself and I think you'll find some rich discoveries over the next days. So I'm going to open some, just a little bit of time for questions and then, but before we go I will close out with just something that takes about 30 seconds. So anyone have questions or comments? You don't have to just have questions. You could just make a comment about what you saw or heard or it could also be challenging something that you heard or saw today. Do you want to, are we supposed to pass this around? Sorry, it's being recorded. You are now going to be documented. So I definitely kind of relate to some of this because even though I was actually born in Guatemala City, my grandparents are indigenous. So I'm there, me and one of my professors on campus are estimating that they speak Kiche and recently I've been kind of like diving into my indigenous roots. So that's something that this has really kind of sparked more of an interest for me in. So there's definitely that. And I kind of see myself as more indigenous than Spanish, I guess. I'm not really sure if that's the correct term. But I'm definitely getting into the root, my indigenous roots and this is something that's really kind of inspiring too. Great to hear. Thank you for sharing. I think also if you want to explore it more, there's a lot of people that are exploring that. There's a lot of people who have been told, you're not indigenous, but then they realize that they're grandparents or in some cases they're great grandparents, like our co-founder. It took her until she was in her 30s to actually learn that she's also indigenous from that lineage, but it was always hidden from her. So she's done a lot of reading and exploring. And of course she works now with indigenous communities as well. How can I get involved? Like if I want to help, like as a student now, can I do? Okay. But first of all, and I'm going to challenge this a little bit what you said so that we can work on this a little bit, that in terms of like, we often think like how can I help, right? And I think the first part was like, how can I get involved? How can I participate? How can I be part of? How can I share? And this is kind of training, because that's also training these different ways of knowing, right? Because, I'm not saying you were saying this, but a lot of people who go to help, help from that other perspective, help from that westernized perspective. And usually when we go there, we realize, we're not helping. If anybody's being helped, we're being, you know, we're being helped. So that's not to pick on you, it's just to like, share that little bit of insight there. So there's lots of ways. One is, I would argue, becoming first and foremost like a local activist in some way. It's also, how can you get involved? Learn about where you are, right? And learn about the folks that call this place their ancestral home. Learn about stories that are of, that are very similar or that have, that are part of like protests or part of like our very complicated world like migration stories, like in Providence, there's so many immigrants from other parts of the world, especially in Latin America. And why it's often because we have to, we only respect a certain way of knowing in our world and being, and we need to, we need to find a way of connecting in with that. That's an oversimplified, it's a complex oversimplification, if I can say that phrase. But it's basically people who need, you know, income, immigrate. But in many cases, because we work with a lot of communities where people have immigrated out, you know, we'll do this work and they realize, you know, my husband or some person immigrated and it wasn't really because of the money. It was because pressured, you know, because we see the meaning through the money, right? And we wanted to like achieve certain things here in our community that we really don't even care about. We thought we cared about them, right? Because a lot of cases, the folks who come at least from Ecuador, they have to pay so much money to be able to come. People, you know, a lot of times our folks will be like the folks who stayed. We'll say, well, why did they pay $16,000, $18,000 to be able to come here? So that could be a way. But then if you wanted to be like involved directly with us, it could be through programming that we offer. I know we're starting to talk about them here, the possibility of doing programming. But there's also a pretty great consciousness here on campus, at least with the folks that I've talked about in terms of internationalization and doing study abroad that is sensible, that is fair, that is meant to be reciprocal. So I would say if, you know, doing a study abroad of that sort would also be a good way of getting involved in participating. Thank you. So this isn't my question, but I'm just so struck literally last night. On my bed stand, I picked up, there are two books there, and one of them is called Epistemic Injustice by Miranda Fricker, right? Yeah, yeah, well. And I was, I didn't know that that was going to be the topic, and you gave so much substance, right, to that book. It's a really cool, interesting book. But my question was more around, you know, the protests and kind of where they're going and what the kind of energy around the organizing and around the synergies that you were talking between artists and indigenous peoples. And the, whether there's kind of what the seeds are, you know, in terms that have been planted. So right now they're in dialogue tables, the indigenous and the government. They end this month. So we're hoping for a favorable outcome. There's already been certain things. Like they demanded that anytime the government and oil companies want to extract oil, they have a new system for, or they're creating, they're going to create a new system for informed consent. So it used to be, as we talked in the previous class, you could just go and manipulate the one president of the community, pay that person $100,000. They leave the community, that person signs the consent, and it's as if the community has consented to oil extraction in their community. Or it can actually be faked informed consent. They'll invite you all to a meeting and say, we're giving out food in today's meeting so if everybody could sign right here your name and your identification number, and now you can get the free food, and then they take that form, put it right behind the document that says informed consent, and that is no longer considered informed consent or won't be. So there are some steps that we already know are favorable, and we're not as hopeful with some of the other ones about basically economic assistance, especially for farmers, the indigenous farmers, especially we're not so favorable about bringing better education and health to rural communities and especially indigenous communities where they usually don't have access to those. So we're going to see where that goes. With relationship to the artists, they have a project actually, we're one of the supporters of this project in which they are trying to have constant organization now because the problem was in this last strike, the indigenous arrived, and it took days to get things organized, and then it was still tough to organize. And so the artists and the cultural organizers and the hip-hop community are actually now meeting regularly as a way of maintaining their organizational movement to support indigenous activism, whether it's for a protest that comes to Quito or supporting them in their communities. One thing that's come out is Nina Shungu, for example, is starting the process of an online degree. It's like a community college degree, and it's focused on organizing basically. It's called cultural organizing, but it's going to be cultural and community organizing, and it can be done online. And since, due to the pandemic, one of the good things was a lot of indigenous communities got internet, whether it's satellite or whatever in the... or they can travel a little bit to get to one of those places with internet. And so in this case, they're actually going to be able to have an opportunity to access this kind of education and in doing so get a degree which helps them be recognized then by the outside world, which is good for their own negotiations and also with the education itself, because part of this is going to be, how does this other world work, the non-indigenous, the Western world? And so when they, by learning that, hopefully they'll also have better negotiating capabilities. And it's great to see, but it's called gestión cultural, cultural organizing basically, or administration, yeah. And so that's kind of what it's called, but they're kind of manipulating it and using it also for activism. Or the government wouldn't approve the, because the government approves all degrees, so you have to be careful about that. So this is recorded, but we're not going to share that with the Ecuadorian government. So kind of at the start of the presentation, you talked about decolonizing the curriculum at universities. What are some of the best ways that universities can go about doing that so it's as effective as possible for the students? Well, I mean, that's great. I mean, first of all, I mean, there's so many things that you can do. And it really, but you have to like look at little steps. I think the first thing is to bring all the different actors into a room and talk about this, talk about what are the colonial structures that exist? I mean, these are the first steps, right? How do these affect regular life? So if it's talk about that, you know, colonialism to coloniality and how are we representing that? And so that people can hear. So we actually talk about a process called gritos, grietas, and siembras. So gritos like screams, crying out. So everybody needs to like cry out what they feel, what they see about like kind of coloniality within their structures. Then the big thing is, and this is going to be different in every institution, is grietas, which are cracks. So then you recognize if people can't recognize that there is a system that's based on colonialism and coloniality, you're in trouble. But usually almost every academic, even like college presidents, can at least recognize that, you know? That kind of came out weird. Even college presidents. I mean, it's not to say that they're bad. I said it exactly right. But usually college presidents, their main focus is bringing in money to support that system. But most of them, I just talked with one last week, can at least admit that absolutely this has been upheld by processes of colonialism and coloniality. So if you can get everybody to agree upon that, then you start to look at like, what are the cracks in that system? So you do an exercise of where those cracks are, meaning the opportunities as you see those cracks. Cracks, because our intention usually as administrators, especially a college president, college president is going to walk around with a spatula and spackle. You guys know what spackle is, right? And they just like go up and cover up the cracks. That one's good. Cover it up, cover it up, cover it up, cover it up, cover it up. But we also know that the system is falling apart. So the idea is, wait a minute, don't cover up the cracks. Let them fester for a while and let's see which ones are really opportunities. In many ways there are. We didn't have diversity inclusion in the past, but it was a crack in the system. We have to provide greater diversity in our college campuses. We have to think about what inclusion means. I would actually argue that the way we usually look at inclusion is epistemic violence because we're usually saying that inclusion is, we're going to take diverse students and include them into this existing system. That doesn't work for them. For me, we should be including ourselves in a different point of view. We should be moving ourselves to the margins. That's a way of combating epistemic violence. We think about community engagement in that respect. We often think also, we're going to take all the knowledge we create here in the university and share it with the community so that the communities can also develop and be better and be educated when it really should be recognized that the community is the knowledge producer and the university is just part of the community. You would actually start to look at those cracks, name them however they are for a particular university and that naming takes a while. Then you have to be very intentional about the next thing which often we're not very intentional about it and that you have to plant a seed. Sienbras is planting, so you plant a seed of change into that crack. Very intentionally, usually working across the big players in university which are students, faculty, administration and then those people we never see like a board of trustees. They're often not called into this but then they can often trump anything that's decided. I would argue you have to find a way to bring all those people into the same conversation and it can be done in many different ways. It can be done for example in study abroad and bringing in more global south programming. It can be done in equity diversity inclusion and saying wait a minute what does inclusion mean and let's develop our own way of seeing inclusion. It can be done in community engagement and instead of us saying we're going to go and serve the community why can't we actually go and do like a class with a community? Why can't we actually invite them to be in and actually give them college credit? This happens now in a lot of places but how do we actually break down some of those walls that aren't really even there, we just believe that they're there. So those are just a few examples. We're past time, right? Are we? For many things, right? Well I just know that some people are usually like you know, I got to get moving, I got another. Please take one out to the board and they're reading something. Yeah, I would take this to the board. Well actually I had this I had this conversation with the college president I won't mention which college and I said you're like the Spackler in Chief he's like yes I'm the Spackler in Chief and he was proud of it and I said why? And he's like because it's that's going to hold things up I said is it holding things up or is it covering things up? And he was like oh. Right? And I said you know that's just like Columbus he covered America, he didn't discover America. Right? I don't want to compare college president to Columbus that's not fair but it's like symbolically there are shared analogies there, right? So I would say you know don't like fight the covering up let discomfort enter into your institution and see if you can work it out as a college president or provost or whoever you know, deans don't always try to like solve a conflict. You know, how do you see that conflict as an opportunity for greater transformation? I mean and I'm we have it too, you know we had a situation in our organization where we actually practiced for two years a practice called unlearning because we realized even in our organization really progressive, like really grass rootsy we still and we were working a lot with indigenous populations and marginalized communities we hadn't fully unlearned a lot of our gender bias among our team and so we took a long time for teachers to work through that because that's how long it takes you can't just say okay I'm going to do a weekend workshop and now I've unlearned that let's move on to the next thing so it's got to be also an investment of time and making yourself vulnerable to what needs to be unlearned and that's painful, yeah but it's the good kind of pain it's like that kind of like therapy you know where you're working through it but then it's also like you feel like emotionally more grounded after having explored that pain but if the university here doesn't want to feel pain or whatever university if they're just kind of trying to avoid that the whole time it's going to be tough okay so what I'm going to do is close out with, I mentioned my friend Luis and the Rique Cachihuango who told me the story of like learning about climate change he's also written something that's called the the supreme law of Pachamama what's actually called La Le Suprema de Pachamama which he wrote first in Kichwa and then in then in Spanish and I've translated it here into English so I'm going to read this out and we'll close with this we are nothing more and nothing less than the earth because we are earth we are nothing more and nothing less than the air because we are air we are nothing more and nothing less than the fire because we are fire we are nothing more and nothing less than the water because we are water we are nothing more and nothing less than the Pachamama because we are Pachamama we are nothing more and nothing less than mother life their life because we are life. The everything in me and me in everything. We are new kanjik, the living us. So you are me and I am you. This is the supreme law of pachamama. Thank you all for the invitation and I'm free for the next little while if anybody wants to come up and ask questions or talk about your personal connections to this work. Thanks again.