Precolonial Indigenous Education in the Western Hemisphere and Pacific

Abstract

Before widespread colonization began in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere and Pacific were agriculturalists and land and seaside managers who hunted and fished; they were brilliant scientists; they were artists and musicians; they were politicians; they were historians and geographers; they were adaptive economic players; and, importantly, they were exceptionally diverse. Much of the scholarship examining these achievements has been political and anthropological, not educational. How can this be? By following different forms of evidence down an array of disciplinary paths, scholars can consider epistemological questions orienting how peoples past and present have made sense of their worlds and their learning. And by examining the residual evidence of learning through the processes of place-making at the junctures of geography, oral tradition, and architecture, as well as agronomy and crop creation and various forms of knowledge construction, porous histories of indigenous education take shape.