Indigenous land-based education in Mexico: practices to perpetuate communal knowledge of territory

Abstract

The text analyzes school practices based on territory, Indigenous knowledge and communal life carried out by teachers, students and elders in Indigenous schools in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Based on ethnographic data from 2014 and 2022 in Indigenous middle schools at the North Sierra of Oaxaca is presented the centrality of territory, relationality, respect and reciprocity in school life; mainly through walks through the community, drawings and texts created by the students and interviews with elders. The intention is to discuss the possibilities of land-based education as a way of perpetuating communal knowledge of territory as a form of Indigenous peoples’ resistance.