MAlVIKA GUPTA & FELIX PADEL
Land and mind
“We need the mountain and the mountain needs us.”
– A Dongria woman’s words about Niyamgiri and the movement to save it.[1]
Niyamgiri is a forested mountain range in Odisha, in eastern India, and Dongria Kond are the main community living there. The mining company Vedanta built an alumina refinery just below the range’s highest peak to mine its bauxite. Between 2006 and 2014, people from many walks of life came together to protect it effectively—for the moment. Odias learn from school textbooks that Odisha is one of India’s poorest states, but rich in minerals, implying that once these are properly mined, everyone in Odisha will be prosperous. The opposite of how mining companies work!
Lado Sikaka, a key Dongria leader, speaking at a public hearing about expanding the refinery, put it this way: “Vedanta tries to lure us with schools and roads… They say there’s billions to be made by mining the minerals up there. For us it’s not money! It’s our Life, our Maa-Baap, and we’ll fight to protect her!” He showed his axe as he said this, at a public hearing in 2009.[2] The bauxite capping the mountains in south Odisha holds monsoon water like clay, a source of perennial streams, reinforced by a Dongria taboo on cutting trees up on the summit. Once the bauxite capping the mountains is mined, the monsoon rain runs straight off, and as a water source, the mountain is dead. The base rock of these mountains is named Khondalite, after the Khonds.[3]
Many Adivasis[4] understand this mutual connection between themselves and the land they live on instinctively, as a core part of their identity and value system. This connects them with Indigenous Peoples in other countries. “Land as Our First Teacher” is a land-based learning system[5] recently set up in Canada to replace the notorious boarding schools that Indigenous children were forced into from the 1860s through the 1970s, as part of a policy of forced assimilation. Initiatives like this one in Canada, and others in New Zealand/Aotearoa, Ecuador, and elsewhere, bring back the Indigenous languages that were banned in those schools and the sacred rituals that were also banned, alongside teaching crafts, costumes, dances, and stories. This revival in other countries shines a spotlight on the traumatic loss and break-up of Adivasi communities, cultures, languages, and above all, rootedness in the land, which is occurring throughout India right now.
Native American activists’ identity as land or water defenders has many parallels with Adivasi movements. In Ecuador, ‘Rights of Nature’ have been enshrined in the Constitution since 2008, in coordination with the Cochabamba Declaration of Indigenous Peoples in Bolivia of the Rights of Mother Earth. Quichua highlanders call Earth ‘Pachamama’, and consider her and the mountains sacred. This is not romantic rhetoric, but a core value that manifests in countless movements against extractive industries throughout the American continents. In India too, even a company building a new steel plant performs a bhumi puja to appease Mother Earth. But often this is just a token appeasement. Adivasis are often far ahead of the mainstream in understanding the importance of honouring the Earth-sacredness that gives us Life.
Education is a key issue in how such values are passed on between generations – or not. Adivasi communities had their own system of learning countless skills for seeking food from the land by hunting, gathering, and farming, and for making things from natural materials, from combs and baskets to tools and houses. Many tribes had ‘youth dormitories’ where children found joyful independence from home, and elder girls and boys taught younger ones in an active social life full of humour, learning dances, myths, stories, riddles, games and a wide variety of work skills. The Muria Gond people of south Chhattisgarh, in central India, called this institution “ghotul”.[6] The Oraon people, or Kurukh, called it dhumkaria. As the need for literacy has grown, schools have been introduced which – despite policy recommendations from experts to attune schooling to Indigenous ways of learning – still tend to denigrate everything about Adivasi culture.
Too often, ‘tribal’ schools are places of ferocious discipline, where ‘civilised’ behaviour and ‘knowledge’ is taught by rote, with a missionary attitude of converting ‘backward’ children into obedient workers. Adivasi languages are often banned completely, and children found speaking them are severely punished or ridiculed. Hinduism and Sanskrit prayers are imposed over Indigenous or Christian rituals, just as older missionary schools imposed Christianity, in India as also throughout North America, in the discredited boarding schools central to the policy of forced assimilation. There are now at least 5000 tribal residential schools in India – far more than there ever were in Canada and USA. The world’s biggest boarding school is in Odisha’s capital, Bhubaneswar – KISS (Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences), where over 25,000 Adivasi children live on a single campus. Children of different genders are rigidly separated. Vedanta has sent dozens of Dongria children to KISS, many miles from their home, where they are invariably homesick, like most of the Adivasi children – especially the younger ones.[7]
Social scientists have written about the deep alienation Adivasi children experience in boarding schools.[8] Nothing of what children learn there corresponds to what their parents learnt a generation ago, living on the land, learning in community. The ‘knowledge’ they imbibe through books and screens is removed and abstracted from their land and experience, and abstracted further in the computer-dominated ‘smart classrooms’ promoted at KISS and in similar educational schemes we have witnessed at NMDC’s ‘Education City’ in Dantewad, in south Chhattisgarh,[9] and the Adani Foundation’s ‘Gyanodaya’ scheme in northeast Jharkhand.[10] Both these are areas where police, acting on behalf of project authorities, have used violent repression against villagers protesting against the loss of their land,[11] so the smart classrooms on offer buy ‘legitimacy’ and brainwash children to forget their parents’ resistance.
The structure and curriculum of these ‘tribal’ schools serve to isolate the individual from family and community ties, into a path where everything depends on individual achievement and competition. Competition is among the core values learnt in tribal schools: in exams, in sports, in the job market, and in politics, business, and law. By contrast, a core Adivasi value is sharing. In education this is obvious; there’s no marking or exams in the traditional system. Athletic activities sponsored by mining companies channel children’s physical energy that once went into dancing into sporting competitions defined by winners and losers. Nowadays, Adivasi children are orchestrated into dance performances for visiting dignitaries – often for the very mining companies that are displacing their communities and taking over their lands in the name of giving them ‘development’. Adivasi dance evolved as an expression of radical democracy in villages’ interaction with each other. This is the context of Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s short story ‘The Adivasi will not dance’, imagining a refusal to dance for mining officials, in a system where dance has been co-opted.[12]
Indigenous or ‘tribal’ peoples everywhere have faced distorted depiction by anthropologists and others, as part of their subjugation. In Australia, as in New Zealand, Canada, and USA, colonial, monolingual schooling has been challenged by several generations of Indigenous educationalists, such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith, in her seminal book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999, 2012); and Professor Lester-Irabinna Rigney, who has set up culturally responsive pedagogies throughout Australia, with ‘provocations’ emphasizing indigenist epistemologies and the ‘Aboriginal child as knowledge producer’.[13]
These uses of education as a weapon of colonialism, dispossession, domination, and forced assimilation give a global context to the significance of Gladson Dungdung’s writings. His first book published in English was entitled Whose Country is it Anyway? Unknown Stories of the Indigenous Peoples of India (2013) – a title which highlights the injustice of multi-level dispossession faced by Adivasi communities in Saranda Forest, in southern Jharkhand, and many other areas.
CONAIE, the confederation of Indigenous peoples of Ecuador, consider communities’ rights to their territory as the most important out of 21 indigenous rights enshrined in the country’s 2008 constitution, and assert that there’s “No real education without territory”. “Territory” here includes the land’s physical integrity as well as what is beyond the physical: a community’s spiritual connection with their land, impossible to comprehend from a materialist or extractivist perspective. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung shared his meeting with a Hopi chief in the USA, who described how ‘white people think with their heads’; in contrast to his own people thinking from their hearts.[14]
When President Correa initiated large-scale mining in Ecuador from 2011, against continuing CONAIE opposition to all forms of extractivism, he closed many of the bilingual intercultural (EIB) schools that had been started under CONAIE influence throughout the country, initiating large residential ‘millenium schools’. Since Correa left office in 2017, the EIB schools have returned. Here, as in New Zealand and other countries witnessing a resurgence of Indigenous values, self-determination over education is a key to this resurgence, decolonizing lands and minds.
How long will it be before India witnesses a similar resurgence, and Adivasi or tribal communities start to take back control of what and how their children’s education is defined? Already, we have witnessed numerous small-scale initiatives, such as Adharshila and Muskaan in Madhya Pradesh. But the rapid, ruthless extraction of resources from Adivasi lands, including mindless extraction of surface and ground water sources, is threatening the future well-being of everyone in India, while funding industrial schools that brainwash children’s minds. At some point, we need to wake up to the devastation caused by extractive projects around the world, and the real, long-term sustainability embodied in Adivasi values of sharing and limiting what we take from the land, and begin to reverse the learning.[15]
[1] In Matiro Poko Company Loko (Earth Worm Company Man) documentary about mining in Odisha, by Amarendra and Samarendra Das, 2005.
[2] Public Hearing at Belamba village near Lanjigarh, 28 April 2009, mentioned in Felix Padel & Samarendra Das, Out of This Earth, East India Adivasis, 2010, p.167 – a book that analyses the Niyamgiri case in detail (new edition Das & Padel 2020). Lado’s speech is recorded at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipHmVee_uXw.
[3] The spelling of this tribal name is variously written as Kond, Khond or Kondh, after the Odia name for them Kondho. Konds call themselves Kui (Kuwi, Kubi) and their language Kuinga/Kubinga. ‘Khondalite’ was named by British geologist T.L. Walker in 1902, who discovered the bauxite cappings of these mountains, ‘after those fine hillmen the Khonds’, who live in this area of the Eastern Ghats, and consider the mountains as sacred.
[4] ‘Original dwellers’ – a term used by a majority of India’s tribal population (officially ‘Scheduled Tribes’ – STs) since the 1930s, excepting groups in northeastern India.
[5] By Michelle Kennedy and Joey-Lynn Wabie, Youth Research and Evaluation eXchange, 2020. See https://youthrex.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/YouthREX-FS-Land-as-Our-First-Teacher.pdf.
[6] Verrier Elwin’s book The Muria and their Ghotul (Oxford University Press, London, 1947) is a classic account.
[7] Discussed in more detail in ‘The Travesties of India’s Tribal Boarding Schools’, in Sapiens, 16 November 2020, by Gupta and Padel, at https://www.sapiens.org/culture/kalinga-institute-of-social-sciences.
[8] See, for example, ‘The Education Question’ from the perspective of Adivasis: conditions, policies and studies, Report for UNICEF by P. Veerbhadranaika, Revathi Sampath Kumaran, Shivali Tukdeo and A.R. Vasavi 2012. Bengaluru: National Institute of Advanced Studies. Available at http://eprints.nias.res.in/333.
[9] See ‘Education City Chhattisgarh’, Ministry of Education, Government of India, https://repository.education.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/dantewada–education-city-chhattisgarh.pdf.
[10] For more information, see the Adani Foundation website at https://www.adanifoundation.org/en/about-us.
[11] See, for example, ‘Stir over project site: Steel plant plan opposed by villagers facing ouster,’ Down To Earth, 30 December 2001, https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/stir-over-project-site-17438, and ‘Extreme repression, corporate loot, cultural genocide “characterize” India’s tribal belt,’ Counterview, March 2019, https://www.counterview.net/2019/03/extreme-repression-corporate-loot.html.
[12] Shekhar’s short story ‘The Adivasi will not dance’ appears in his volume of short stories, The Adivasi will not dance: stories, Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2015.
[13] Lester-Irabinna Rigney,‘Aboriginal child as knowledge producer: Bringing into dialogue indigenist epistemologies and culturally responsive pedagogies for schooling’, in Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, edited by Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, Steve Larkin, Routledge 2021; and ‘Professor Lester-Irabinna Rigney and Professsor Robert Hattam, Towards an Australian Culturally Responsive Pedagogy’, Centre for Islamic Thought Education, University of South Australia, and 2021, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxwNDTDEWes.
[14] In Memories, Dreams, Reflections (published in German 1962, in English 1963). The Hopi conversation is recounted at https://www.agabajer.com/blog-posts/what-a-swiss-psychiatrist-learned-from-the-hopi-tribe-chief-and-how-its-relevant-to-business-today.
[15] Felix Padel and Malvika Gupta, ‘Reverse the learning: Continuous economic growth is an illusion. Adivasi economics may be the only hope for India’s future,” Down To Earth, May 4, 2017, https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/economy/reverse-the-learning-57776.