Identity and Indigenous Education in Peruvian Amazonia

Abstract

Throughout Peruvian Amazonia, state-backed educational institutions and pedagogical strategies have seldom emphasized the retention of indigenous knowledge. This in turn has historically undermined the cultural survival of the region’s culturally diverse indigenous peoples. Indeed, the story of formal “modern” indigenous education in the Peruvian Amazon is intimately related to state-driven introductions of Occidental concepts of “progressive” development, eventually anchored to incorporation into global markets. While it is clear that prospects for indigenous peoples’ cultural survival may be analyzed in general sweeping terms, it is also evident that a close analysis of each local or regional case reveals significant differences in approaches to contextualizing inter-cultural education and indigenous identity politics. Taking my cue from Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, which provides a basis for understanding and critiquing neo-liberal commoditization of education, I explore some of these contradictions as they find expression “on the ground” among indigenous peoples from Alto Amazonas, (Loreto, Peru). The chapter concludes by asserting that the intercultural educational environment in Peru must be formulated to include systems of Indigenous Knowledge that synergize both the school and the community’s well-being.

We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.

—Epictetus

I acknowledge the generous financial support I have received over the years from a number of organizations including: Oxford University; Harvard University; the University of Kansas’ General Research Funding; the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland; the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; and the US’ federal assistance through a series of Fulbright Awards and Grants. In addition, the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marocs (Lima, Peru) and the Uiversidad Nacional de San Martín (Tarapoto, Peru) have provided crucial institutional support, while countless mestizo and indigenous peoples and their communities’ have graciously shared their perspectives. Above all, I express my love and deepest gratitude to my wife, Luz Angelica Gomez Mendoza de Dean. I dedicate this essay to all of my countless indigenous teachers who have taught me the value of “straying from the path.”

Throughout the Americas, “Western” educational institutions and pedagogies have seldom focused on the retention of indigenous knowledge, which in turn undermines the cultural survival of indigenous peoples.¹ Ever since the “New World’s” first “Columbian Exchange” (Crosby 2003; Maybury-Lewis et al. 2009; Nunn and Qian 2010), indigenous communities have been caught, “in an increasingly globalized world” one which now obliges them, “to adjust institutions, learning, tactics, and adopt much of the available world’s knowledge in order to survive and live in the world of the future” (Champagne 2004). In the face of global, regional, and local alterations associated with the predominance of neoliberalisms, the frictions of identity politics, ethno-nationalisms and transnational social networks are now all becoming mutually implicated in the formation of organizations that presumably represent indigenous peoples (Dean 2003, 2012; Killick 2008; Greene 2009; Rénique 2009; Viatoria 2010; Davidov 2013). Yet, top-down leadership models, NGO or state-backed cultural patrimony projects, museums, and the political articulation of strategic essentialisms often do little to represent contemporary life-ways in Amazonia (Nugent 1993; Turner 2002; Jaramillo 2006; Whitten and Whitten 2006; Adams 2009; Dean et~al. 2011).

For the outsider, “customary” indigenous knowledge and identity tends to be freeze-framed—embodied in material artifacts and cultural icons represented in a timeless simulacrum of putatively authentic former life ways. Notwithstanding the dominant folkloric/touristic imaginaries conjoined to the recursive formation of “authentic” Amazonian indigeneities, an incredible array of material acquisitions from foods to digital gadgets, not to mention the satisfaction of consumptive desires dove-tailing with increased access to popular mass-media, have all enriched the “essential knowledge bases” of indigenous peoples’ collective identities, but not without unintended consequences. Local ontological constructs (i.e., “community,” “territorially,” “freedom,” “identity,” and “personhood”) are increasingly embedded in supra-local interactions and processes that beg questions of “cultural authenticity” (Jackson 1995, Brown 1998; Jaramillo 2006; Nugent 2009).

Nevertheless, contemporary performative modes of enacting indigeneity have been helpful in mobilizing and contesting strategic essentialisms in an effort to advance the rights of indigenous peoples across the world—including education, access to their ancestral lands, and control over the management of their natural resources. Over the past generation, debates over the performance, and meanings of indigeneities have been common themes surfacing in the socio-political lives of contemporary indigenous peoples in lowland South America (Graham 1995; Dean 2012). For instance, Gabriela Valdivia’s study of the distinctive performativity of indigeneity among three native political organizations (FEINCE, OISE, and FOISE) in the Ecuadoran Amazon is useful for assessing the legal case against Chevron Texaco (2007; see also Sawyer 2004). Illuminating how indigenous ethnic federations have endeavored to garner supra-local support for their “claims,” Valdivia (2007) demonstrates how identity politics and transnational social networks are themselves mutually implicated in the formation of organizations that ostensibly represent indigenous peoples.

Likewise, Johnny Alarcón Puentes (2007) embraces a political anthropological approach to account for the transformations of power noted among the Wayúu and their fractious relations with the Venezuelan state, and broader national society. José Antonio Lucero’s (2006) comparative study of two indigenous political federations in Bolivia (CONAMAQ) and Ecuador (FEINE) is an important reminder that indigeneity itself is a product of both localized “grass roots” mobilization, as well as a result of “opportunity structures” located beyond the community that collude to privilege some voices while muting or silencing others (see also cf. Madrid 2012).

The complex relations between land rights, indigenous activism and schools have been assessed by ethnographers, such as Evan Killick. In an effort to determine the impact of land titling among Ashéninka communities in Peruvian Amazonia, Killick (2008) compared accounts of communities that were obliged to fight for their rights to their land with those Ashéninka communities that obtained official land titling through established legal means. Emphasizing the later communities, Killick cogently illustrates that it is the Ashéninka’s very desire for schooling that often inspires their communal motivations to obtain official state recognition for their rights to communal land ownership. Killick concludes by suggesting that “communal identities and action can be a result of the recognition of land rights rather than an impetus for land rights claims” (2008, p. 22). This raises the question of the impact that residing in defined settlements has had for the fluid identities of indigenous peoples in the broader context of inter-ethnic relations predicated on a spectrum of identities inextricably linked to ethnic mixing and the politics of mestizaje (Madrid 2012).

While it is clear that prospects for indigenous peoples’ cultural survival may be analyzed in general sweeping terms, as I have down above, it is also evident that a close analysis of each local or regional case reveals significant differences in approaches to contextualizing inter-cultural education and indigenous identity politics. In Western Amazonia, for instance, all too often indigenous peoples have been forcibly expelled from their ancestral lands to make way for ill-conceived development schemes, colonization programs, political violence, military occupation, and the circulation of petroleum, timber, palm-oil, and coca-leaf based narcotic derivatives.

Upper Amazonian frontiers have been driven by extractive export-oriented economies, as well as by what Stefano Varese (2002) aptly called civilizing projects. These refer to global styles of great temporal duration that have been tempered by the violence of colonial and postcolonial encounters to extinguish indigenous alterities. For its part, the “Bolivarian state” in Peruvian Amazonia historically failed to acknowledge indigenous peoples’ rights to cultural, political or economic autonomy. Implicit in the Peruvian state’s contemporary neoliberal, and at times populist civilizing project is a political philosophy whose imperative is the creation of a national citizenry—a “national community” (Rosaldo 1989)—out of a heterogeneous mix of culturally, linguistically and historically diverse peoples. By promoting the cultural homogeneity of a unified Peruvian citizenry through pedagogies of imaginary belonging, and orthodoxies of the Orwellian “unconsciousness”—schoolteachers, military officers, merchants, missionaries, bureaucrats, and local elites and their interlocutors have long reinforced the naturalizing impulse of the state’s relentless attempt to forge the singular nation-state. Exalted by the will of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Civilista elite and their allies to create a complaint national citizenry, popular education in Amazonia² has historically been fashioned to satisfy Lima’s demands for the efficient domestication and national incorporation of the vast tropical forested region into the rest of the country (García Jordán ed. 1995). This was particularly so during the “Aristocratic Republic” (1889–1920)³ while the state, and its very agents and interlocutors—including teachers, doctors, religious figures, (Catholic and evangelical), colonists (colonos), armed forces, engineers and extractive entrepreneurs all carried forward the message to Amazonia’s sparsely populated residents of the imperative of cultural assimilation into the Peruvian nation-state. Not all indigenous peoples, however, were keen on embracing the identity of Peruvian national citizenship, especially among spatially isolated groups like the Urarina, who have long been brutalized by state intervention (Dean 2002, 2004a, 2013a).⁴

Almost a century after the demise of the Civilista Party, the Urarina have been in the midst of deeply consequential changes over the past few decades that puts their future at increased risk (Witzig and Ascencios 1999; cf. Dean et~al. 2000). As I have noted elsewhere (2013a), during the 1990s and mid 2000s the Urarina’s structure of patron-clientilism had become stressed by the growth of competitive mercantilism (petty-patrónes, small scale extractive entrepreneurs), the development of class distinctions, the spread of literacy, the slow but perceptible growth in urbanward migration, and an oil thirsty globalized economy that has since wrecked environmental havoc (Defensoría del Pueblo 2001; La Región 2013). In the recent past, Urarina political power was authorized primarily through personal prestige, rather than through appeals to formal jural authority or literacy (Dean 1999a, 2013a). However, the Urarina are now in more frequent contact with extractive entrepreneurs, not to mention Peru’s vibrant (albeit fractious) ethnic federation movement, NGOs, and state officials, which in turn has begun to change the enactment of leadership since literacy, rather than orality, has come to certify public expressions of indigenous authority. Hence, all the more need to explore the dynamics of education, identity and mobility in indigenous Amazonia.

Mobility, and Education: Technologies of Social Disruptions in Amazonia?

Many peoples living in Peruvian Amazonia have had their livelihoods jeopardized due to on-going socio-economic challenges, ecocide and decades of political violence. Like highland Andean communities, indigenous societies, such as the Urarina’s neighbors, the Kukama-Kukamiria (Cocama-Cocamilla) and Quechua-speaking populations (Kichwa Lamista [Llakwash Runa]), and mestizos (ribereños, chacareros, gente humilde) of the Huallaga Valley have been dramatically impacted by nearly two generations of civil war that has left tens of thousands dead and countless disappeared. This has been accompanied by significant transformation in their patterns of human migration, internal displacement, and a neoliberal economy that has favored the privatization of natural resources, including petroleum exploration, and vast palm-oil production plantations and facilities (Brokamp et al. 2011; Quintero et~al. 2012).

Unabated extractive economies underwritten by global interconnections and the commoditization of communal resources (Tapayuri Murayari 2012, p. vii; Dean 2002, 2013a), coupled with the booming illicit trade in the region’s valuable Amazonian hardwoods and the processing and trafficking in cocaine (pasta básica de cocaína) (Kernaghan 2009; Dean 2011, 2013b) have all taken their human toll. In the Huallaga Valley, dispossessed of their hunting, fishing resources and farming lands—and hence their economic livelihoods—many have been forced to migrate to the cities and towns in search of employment, educational opportunities and social mobility. As a result, indigenous peoples in geographically isolated regions, such those in the province of Alto Amazonas (Peru) are coming to terms with novel “ways-of-being” in the world, spurred in great part by massive migratory flows now refiguring quotidian life with immense rapidity.

In a decidedly anti-enlightenment turn, I now pursue a line of scholarship contesting the notion that humans are universally driven to fashion increasingly more efficient technologies (Hornborg et~al. 2007; Hornborg 2013). As I argue here, the technological developments facilitating human mobilities in Peruvian Amazonia⁵—be it in terms of the expansion of educational facilities, or the recent completion of a transandean all-weather road (IIRSA Norte)—have been associated with what Alf Hornborg (2013) describes as a “zero-sum game” involving uneven global resource flows (see Wolf 1982; Schneider and Rapp 1995). This has resulted in wealthier parts of the world prospering at the expense of humans and environments in poorer regions of the globe, especially lowland South America (Cooper and Hunefeldt 2013).

Following David Harvey’s concern with urban concentrations of poverty (1973), the case of indigenous migrants to Yurimaguas underscores the contentious relationship between social justice, space and freedom. Typically having the least amount of formal (state-based) schooling and most restricted access to basic social welfare services, displaced indigenous peoples often find themselves vulnerably “emplaced” in frontier settlements like Yurimaguas.⁶ Those indigenous peoples who have been driven from their Amazonian or Andean natal communities, are now obliged to carve out a living in the make-shift “shanty-towns” that loop much of the globe’s “city” centers—as is the case for the barriadas circling Yurimaguas, a rapidly urbanizing center located in the midst of the rainforest, along the Upper Amazon’s mighty Huallaga River (Justice et~al. 2012). Deprived of their territorial, economic, and political autonomy—customary beliefs and values—which once unified indigenous peoples and their communities, begin to waver; as has been documented in a rich body of literature in Peruvian Amazonia, including M. Godard-Kuckinski’s seven decade old classic, La vida en la Amazonía peruana: Observaciones de un médico (1944; see Dean 2004b).

Invariably this results in the loss of a community’s cultural identity, particularly as their sense of pride in linguistic proficiency, long-established ritualized practices, beliefs, communal solidarity, and respect for the elders gives way to the Herculean pressures to conform to the dominant provincial and national societies, their distinctive moral economies, and the “modernizing” and seductively alluring impulses of global, popular culture. Indeed, the story of formal “modern” indigenous education is intimately tied to the historical introduction of Occidental concepts of “progressive” development anchored to global markets (Escobar 1995; Saavedra and Escobar 2007).⁷

Characterized by an urban, monolingual-based model of pedagogy, the bureaucratic nature of formal schooling in Peruvian Amazonia tends to deeply authoritarian in practice and hierarchical in its organization. Furthermore, the mandatory imposition of Spanish⁸ as the dominant national language through officially sponsored literacy programs—has estranged some indigenous peoples from their traditional means of socialization, modes of cultural expression, ingenuity and human creativity. Post-industrial, models of pedagogy (emphasizing individual rather than collective achievement), and the commoditization of education are antithetical to traditional indigenous notions of sharing of information (Dean 2004c). Not only have we seen indigenous students learning skills and discursive formations (Foucault 1972) that have not been appropriate for their particular socioeconomic and historical situation, but they have all too often been taught to be embarrassed of their own cultural and linguistic heritages. Not surprisingly, “typical” students in pluri-cultural Peruvian Amazonia are instructed about the “noble” Andean Inca, the “glorious” Spanish Empire, and Republican hagiography, but are taught very little about Amazonian indigenous historicities, mythopoetics or narrative epics and songs undergirding their own societies’ distinctive cultural identities (Dean 1999b).

According to Anthony Stocks (1983), the Kukama-Kukamiria, a Tupi-Guaranían speaking peoples associated with the lower reaches of the Huallaga watershed have retained a degree of cultural autonomy (albeit as “invisible natives” or “nativos invisibles”) in spite of the ferocious onslaught of European colonialism precisely because of their ability to retain their subsistence economy, as well as their unique forms of social organization. Socioeconomic marginalization, coupled with the state’s relative weakness in the Huallaga may in part explain the endurance of distinctive cultural identities, cosmovisions and ways of life among indigenous groups such as the Kukama-Kukamiria (also known as the Cocama-cocamilla), yet clearly no native Amazonian society has remained unchanged, despite a booming ethnological industry devoted to plumbing ahistorically framed indigenous ontologies (Dean 2013c).

While one can take issue with the characterization of the Kukama-Kukamiria’s social organization as a “closed corporate community,” Stocks is nevertheless right to emphasize their socio-economic marginalization vis-à-vis regional and national forms of citizenship (Lazar 2013). Such a line of analysis is useful because it underscores the incomplete, “integration of regional society,” which Stocks argues has historically been based on extractive economies, rather than more heavily capitalized forms of production, hence the limited growth of national citizenship, let alone cosmopolitanisms among the Kukama-Kukamiria (Stocks 1983; see also Bunker 1985; Cheah and Robbins 1998; Hornborg 2013; Vasquez 2014).

While many local Kukama-Kukamiria peoples in Alto Amazonas are aware of the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, the country’s second largest protected area (more than 20,000 km²), few know much about the history of this zone or its local indigenous inhabitants, despite the recent boom in the tourist industry the natural reserve has generated. In over more than two decades of conversations I have had with local indigenous and mestizo peoples of the area, few were cognizant of the historical significance of Manuel Pacaya Samiria, a prominent leader (apu) of the Kukama-Kukamiria peoples, who established Nauta after leading the successful 1830 uprising at the Jesuit mission of Lagunas, located at the embouchure of the Huallaga River. Have the Kukama-Kukamiria become not only “invisible native peoples,” but also a society whose historical memory and collective identities are being torn asunder through sustained contact with “booming” frontier towns like Yurimaguas?

Indigenous Identity and Education in Peruvian Amazonia

Though stylish in many academic quarters, the term identity is often used quite loosely. Even so, the concept of identity is of great utility because it allows humans to perceive the existence of a relation among entities that otherwise would be seen as distinct, as David Hume pointed out in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739; see Levi and Dean 2003). The politics of identity is a fundamental aspect surrounding issues of educational “modernity.” How can individuals, families, groups, and larger social networks reconcile the strain between hierarchy and equality as fellow citizens in what Benedict Anderson (1983) has famously dubbed “imagined communities”? Political citizenship is vacuous without the recognition of agentive empowerment and social citizenship, which involves all community members with adequate socio-economic and cultural capital to fully participate in national social and political life. As my colleagues and I have emphasized elsewhere (Dean and Levi 2003), there is a compelling political necessity for states to recognize not only forms of legal, but medical and educational pluralism, which can effectively accommodate for the heterogeneity of cultural identities (differences not only between groups, networks, and categories, but within them as well). The suppression of such identities has its deadly consequences as is readily apparent from the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa to the lowland rainforests of Peruvian Amazonia (Dean 1999a, 2009).

Some scholars have examined the efficacy of Habermasian models of learning and communication in formulating decolonizing, “emancipatory model of education” for Native North American peoples (Knowles 2012). Contrasting “dominant” and Native American epistemological “perspectives,” Knowles argues that Habermasian approaches allow for the broadening of epistemologies including indigenous ontologies, thus in turn enhancing Amerindian peoples’ pedagogies (2012). Whereas Jürgen Habermas championed the ideal of transparent communication (1982), Jean-Francois Lyotard probed the variations intrinsic to language itself (1984). As such, Lyotard provides us with a sobering reminder that universal categories, established through the liberal principle of “consensus,” are by no means equivalent to respecting the right to be different.

For Habermas, practical knowledge is socially constructed and generally valorized by the “ideal of consensus” achieved by competent practitioners of those specialized fields of knowledge (Rescher 1993). But ethnography reveals the very notion of “ideal consensus” is problematic in relation to indigenous peoples’ knowledge systems. Who exactly will be the competent practitioners of “indigenous knowledge” capable to validate its practicality or incorporate it into suitable curricula reflecting contemporary concerns, especially those tied to the notion of cultural survival? What will be the metrics for determining successful academic achievement? In addition to the risks of exposure to non-customary forms of pedagogy, what are the dangers of allowing “traditionalist” practitioners’ points of view of colluding with hierarchical power structures in their validation of contested beliefs and actions, which are constitutive of customary indigenous knowledge—such as patriarchial, gerentocratic and maternal structures of authority, or the cultural sequestration of women to monolingualism, home and hearth?

Amazonian Educational Praxis and Postmodernity?

Taking my cue from Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, which provides a basis for understanding and critiquing neo-liberal commoditization of education, I explore some of these contradictions as they find expression “on the ground” among indigenous peoples from Alto Amazonas, (Loreto, Peru). Originally published in 1979 in French, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984) argues for an epochal break with the so-called “modern era.” He contends that by the end of the nineteenth century, Occidental cultures had essentially transformed, “the game rules for science, literature and the arts” (Lyotard 1984, p. 3). These transformations are interpreted within the broader context of the destabilization of Enlightenment grand-narratives that irrevocably altered the perceived foundations of truth, meaning, and freedom, which previously had been employed to justify both the conventions of scientific knowledge, as well as the underpinnings of modern institutions (including the likes of the “school”). Given the erosion of the Enlightenment idealist and humanist metanarratives, wherein can legitimacy actually dwell?

Pace Lyotard’s (1984, p. 3) assertion, “that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age,”⁹ I contend that the “postmodern condition” alluded to by Lyotard is applicable to the status of knowledge and its problem of its legitimization not only in post-Fordist societies, like the USA or Australia, but geographically “isolated” social formations at the margins of the world—like indigenous Peruvian Amazonia—which are linked to global markets and the metropolises via complex global commodity chains (currently associated with the circulation of cocaine, petroleum, and fine hard wood timber, see Dean 2013b). Moreover, in light of recent patterns of urbanization—the dynamic, cosmopolitan process of people¹⁰ coming together en masse to form villages, towns, and cities—“education” and the transmission of knowledge provides an excellent optic for evaluating the human consequences of contemporary transformations, namely recent spontaneous migration to the “new urban settlements” (or barriadas) enveloping Yurimaguas, one of Peruvian Amazonia’s principal cities.

Language is a critical aspect of indigenous peoples’ cultural identity (Aikhenvald 2013; Aikman 1999, 2013). When it is historically oppressed or neglected, as among the Munichis peoples of the nearby community (with the similar place name), its essential elements are lost forever, most often giving way to ethnocide among numerically small societies. When the last of the few surviving speakers of Munichis have passed away, will their once culturally robust community be remembered? Or will it remain merely etched on the toponymic memory, or digitized in tourist images and linguistic databases? While language is a key aspect of cultural identity, one must keep in mind essentialist notions of ethnic identities—which link language, culture, and biology—and in so doing obfuscate the actual distribution of ethnic groups and languages in Amazonia (Hornborg and Hill 2011; Aikhenvald 2013). Indeed, the contemporary nature of Amazonian ethnolinguistic diversity underscores the fluid, dialectic relationship among ethnic identity, language, genetics, geography and the astonishing disruptions associated with colonial and postcolonial encounters. Study of Amazonian ethnolinguistic distribution patterns has fortunately moved away from a fixation with migrating “peoples” simply hauling their cultural baggage across lowland South America to contemporary concerns with ethnogenetic processes within regional systems of exchange and the complex political economies associated with what I have glossed here as simply “social disruptions.”

Notwithstanding the philosophical status of Amazonia’s “modernity,” Lyotard’s ruminations on the legitimization of knowledge and education are particularly pertinent in rural and peri-urban Peruvian Amazonia. In his persuasive analysis of capitalism, Lyotard claims that the state has found its only realistic goal in the struggle for the exercise of power. Accordingly, science and education are authorized, in de facto terms, through the notion of performativity, e.g., via the logic of maximizing the system’s performance. Lyotard’s prophetic analysis resonates with the ascendancy of neo-liberalism across much of the planet. Like in the metropolises, higher education in Peru is no longer considered a universal welfare right, having been increasingly recast as a privatized sub-sector of the national economy.

Intersubjective Spaces: Towards a Radical “Decolonized” Pedagogy

Despite the misgivings of anti-universalist “postmodernists” such as Lyotard, Lucy Trapnell—a long-term Amazonianist indigenous educational specialist and advocate—is “right on spot” for insisting that the campaign for universal access to early childhood education must always be supplemented by critical analyses of the impact that intercultural bilingual educational experiences have had for the primary socialization of indigenous children (2011; cf. Mato 2011). Not without its imperfections, the existence of indigenous teacher training initiatives, such as the Iquitos based AIDESEP’s Bilingual Teachers training program (Programa de Formación de Maestros Bilingües de la Amazonía Peruana, see Dean 1999b; Burga 2011), provides one of Peruvian Amazonia’s most innovative intercultural pedagogical and curricular frameworks that strives to be mindful of the relationships among key components of apprenticeship, culture and traditional knowledge. In the case of AIDESEP’s program, this enables learners to provide their feedback for on-going curricular and pedagogical modifications. This facilitates students to actively value, enrich and engage in the educational processes that occur both in the classroom and in indigenous community settings (Trapnell 2011; Aikman 1999, 2013; see also Mato’s collection 2009).¹¹

Drawing from ethnographic field research in highland Quechua community schools, Sumida Huaman and Valdiviezo’s (2012) critical scrutiny of teachers and their pedagogical styles in the formal educational ambit exposes general contradictions when it comes to the contentious issues of the inclusion of “Indigenous Knowledge” (IK), languages, customary practices, cosmo-visions, and the meaningful participation of comuneros (community members). They found that despite genuine efforts from those who support cultural revalorization efforts, the basic components of indigenous peoples’ identities remain largely symbolic, as is noted among the Wanka Quechua highland community. Following Sumida Huaman and Valdiviezo’s (2012) insistence that urges us to move past the formal/non-formal dichotomy of the indigenous pedagogical experience, I too contend that the intercultural educational environment must be formulated to, “conscientiously include Indigenous knowledge in education processes from the school to the community,” and all the more so in Peru, where state-backed formal educational systems have by and large exclude recognition of indigenous cultures, languages or gender rights.

After more than a generation, there has been a welcome renaissance in ethnographic research in Amazonia that has yielded insight into the hotly debated nature and consequences of sex and the embodiment of gender roles.¹² This has paralleled increased occupational and social roles, which have now opened up for young rural indigenous women, dramatically transforming collective and personal identities (Ames 2012, see also Muratorio 1998; Dean 2003). On this front, Ames (2012) has explored the role of formal schooling in daily life, and the future aspirations of indigenous girls, young women, and their mothers in rural Peru. As she demonstrates, increased educational opportunities for indigenous girls, young women and their families are not only reflective of desires to surmount economic hardship, social oppression, and ethno-racial discrimination, they also provides a strategic institutional nexus to challenge gerontocratic and patriarchial gender relationships. Clearly such social charged encounters are not purely individual but imbricated, “with intergenerational agreements, family projects, and shared understandings” (Ames 2012, p. 267).

A growing body of scholarship has been taking seriously indigenous peoples’ presence in urban Amazonia. Despite the “risks of being heard” (Dean and Levi 2003) indigenous peoples in Amazonia have become more visible as they proactively collaborate in the fabrication of their own residential “emplacements.” A central aspect of this transformation is the capacity for indigenous peoples to act in novel contexts previously reserved for Peru’s dominant national society (Virtanen 2010). Young people occupy a variety of “native” and “non-native” habituses and develop their notions of indigeneity within complex social networks as part of their strategy for rupturing the stigmata associated with the baneful proscriptions of indigenous alterity. As Pirjo Virtanen (2010) notes in the case of Apurinã, Cashinahua and Manchineri youth in Rio Branco, a city in Western Brazil, the younger generations are severing their image of indigenous peoples untainted by urbanity, which promotes new types of interactions between indigenous peoples on the Federal reserve and those in the city.

Oscar Espinoza’s (2012) valuable study of the Shipibo peoples’ concerns about their future prospects for cultural survival speaks eloquently to the worries of many indigenous community members. Peru’s Shipibo-Konibo elders, for instance are anxious that the young are leaving their rural communities, lured to residing in the city, where it is felt they become influenced by new moral worlds, and hence to a willful “forgetting” of their indigeneity, and all that it constitutes in local, communal enactments of belonging, rights and obligations. To wit, Espinoza discusses how Shipibo moral and cultural values influence the way in which Shipibo youth respond to their new historical context of urban residency. As Espinoza correctly indicates, not all Shipibo youth behave in such ways or believe their elder’s concerns. Rejecting primordialist views of identity, Espinoza reminds us that there are “many different ways of being Shipibo” (p. 451). Yet, he insists that the primary issue is not necessarily the question of Shipibo identity, but rather the phenomenological sense of what contemporary Shipibo youth “face” in the recent socio-cultural and economic circumstances they live.

My own ethnographic research among Kukama-Kukamira peoples residing in the barriadas of Yurimaguas supports Virtanen and Espinoza’s recent findings. While there is a flourishing body of academic and policy studies devoted to understanding how young indigenous peoples residing in urban areas are redefining and refiguring their new cultural and social situations, scant research has been conducted on those who have not necessarily been the “primary” indigenous beneficiaries of urban-based education. Casual conversations and semi-formal interviews I have collected among dozens of illiterate Kukama-Kukamira emphasize the embodiment of the novel intergenerational strains now facing families. Over the years, many have increasingly discussed with me the socio-linguistically charged distinction between letrado (“literate”), profesional (“professional”), and ignorante (“ignorant”). The unlettered have had restricted access to social mobility, which has been a double-edged emotional sword for family and community members. In the context of a generation-long rural agrarian crisis (Rumrrill 1986; Mayer 2009), illiterate parents have encouraged their children to go to school—often citing this as a primary motivator for migration to the city in the first place. Sadly, many of the elder indigenous peoples now residing in the city express a deepening sense of being incapacitados (incapacitated/disabled) because of their inability to fully function in novel contexts, or to provide their kith and kin with adequate social support (Dean 2013c).

Future Prospects: Social Inclusion as a Perquisite for Indigenous Education?

In spite of the abysmal record of abuse and postcolonial domination exercised through the imposition of hegemonic modes of formal education, indigenous peoples and their allies have long contended and amply demonstrated that they have their own modalities of local knowledge, practical expertise, and culturally specific means of transmitting knowledge, albeit neglected (and in some cases violently suppressed) by the dominant agents of national society (Dean 2004d). Given the Peruvian governments’ historical disinclination to act on behalf of subalterns, indigenous peoples’ participation in education is an essential part of transforming abstract policy formulations into long-awaited results that make a real difference in peoples’ lives. In order to preserve community, sovereignty, and distinctive cultural identities, indigenous peoples and their advocates need to fashion more effective leadership, viable economic institutions, and expand new ways of formulating and implementing indigenous education throughout Amazonia, particularly as cities become a critical aspect of novel variations of indigeneity (Virtanen 2012).

Reflecting on a number of self-identifying indigenous intellectuals, as well as the status of a number of indigenous intercultural programs of higher learning, Mato has highlighted the pitfalls of embracing hegemonic “academic knowledge” to comprehend social processes marked by cultural differences, historical clashes, and structural inequities (2011, see Foucault 1972). When it comes to indigenous education in the face of “Western” pedagogies and curriculum, I return to Lyotard who suggested that we should rejuvenate the death of grand narratives with “little ones” (petits récits). For indigenous peoples of Amazonia, modes of local and “Indigenous Knowledge” that are held in common by specific groups, however “unscientific,” are worthy of valorization, especially as they facilitate the needs of the community—including its own (perhaps contradictory) inclusive visions of cultural survival, sovereignty, and the fundamental right to be different in a pluri-ethnic, multi-cultural nation state.