Indigenizing and decolonizing higher

education on Nicaraguas Atlantic Coast

Julie Cupples
1
and Kevin Glynn
2
1
Institute of Geography, School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
2
School of English and Media Studies, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
Correspondence: Julie Cupples (email: julie.cupples@ed.ac.uk)
Some universities in postcolonial settler nations such as New Zealand and Canada have begun to
acknowledge their need for a more inclusive approach toward indigenous cosmologies and epis-
temologies, lest they continue to alienate indigenous students; nevertheless such change is not
proving easy for these universities. In the North Atlantic Region of Nicaragua, there is however a
community university which is successfully using higher education to empower indigenous and
Creole students and intellectuals against a backdrop of long histories of racism, discrimination,
poverty and marginalization. The pedagogic model in operation at the University of the Autono-
mous Regions of the Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast is based on the concept of interculturality and
aims to provide access to higher education for individual students but without losing sight of
education as a collective good. The concept of interculturality and its articulation in diverse sites is
of critical interest to postcolonial geography given its connections to the geopolitics of place and
space and its origins in black and indigenous social movements in Latin America.
Keywords: Nicaragua, higher education, modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, interculturality,
health, communication
Introduction
In recent decades, we have witnessed a decisive resurgence of black and indigenous
mobilizations across Latin America. While African-descended and indigenous peoples
have resisted colonialism, racism and exploitation for ve centuries, in recent years,
such mobilizations have become much more visible and politically effective. Indigenous
and Afro-Latino populations have protested and occupied, created their own institu-
tions, engaged transnationally with the United Nations, the World Bank and non-
governmental organizations (NGOs), and made their own media (see e.g. Postrero &
Zamosc, 2004; Yashar, 2005; Salazar & Crdova, 2008; Anderson, 2009; Andolina et al.,
2009). They are demanding land rights, political and cultural recognition, autonomy,
environmental protection and the right to their own languages, knowledges and cul-
tural practices. These decolonizing mobilizations are bringing about dramatic shifts in
the terrain on which development is conducted and asserting alternative ways of
knowing the world. The black and indigenous project in Latin America is epistemic as
well as political, given that colonialism was as much about asserting the superiority of
European ways of knowing and repressing indigenous systems of knowledge not useful
to colonial domination as it was about taking indigenous land and resources (Quijano,
2007). Colonized populations were deemed incapable of rational thought (Quijano,
1992) and consequently, black and indigenous knowledges have been excluded,
omitted, silenced, and/or ignored (Grosfoguel, 2011: n.p.).
Given the epistemic underpinnings of coloniality, contemporary struggles for
decolonization are waged partly in sites of education, involving not only a demand for
bilingual schools but also the creation of intercultural universities which aim to support
political and social struggles with culturally and epistemologically appropriate modes of
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Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 2014 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and
Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
teaching, learning and research (Mato, 2011). These initiatives are explicitly framed by
the actors involved as political responses to centuries of domination and exploitation,
and their key aims are to strengthen processes of decolonization, development and
autonomy. This article explores one such initiative which began in the 1990s on the
North Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. The Universidad de las Regiones Autnomas de la
Costa Caribe Nicaragense (URACCAN or University of the Autonomous Regions of the
Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast) is a community and grassroots university which is suc-
cessfully using higher education to empower indigenous and Creole students and
intellectuals against a backdrop of long histories of racism, discrimination, poverty and
marginalization. The pedagogic model in operation at URACCAN is based on the
concept of interculturality and aims to provide access to higher education for individual
students, but without losing sight of education as a collective good. It emerges at a time
when the universitys changing role in society is intensely contested globally, producing
a range of intellectual and political responses and mobilizations (see Readings, 1996;
Aronowitz, 2001; Neweld, 2008). Our work with and visits to URACCAN began in
2008, when we started working with Costeo mediamakers connected to the univer-
sitys community television channel, BilwiVision. This article emerges from long-term
scholarly involvement in Nicaragua by one of the authors, and forms part of a broader
research project involving questions of indigeneity and indigenous rights that is situated
at the intersection of human geography and media and cultural studies, and in which
both authors are involved. Our reections also emerge from our long-term employment
at a New Zealand university that was trying but largely failing to incorporate Ma ori
worldviews and to recruit and retain Ma ori faculty and students.
We argue that a focus on such initiatives could provide us with empirical and
theoretical resources for revitalizing and reorienting postcolonial geography in line with
some of the insights emerging from the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality (MCD)
paradigm. The MCD paradigm is of interest to geographers, as it is addressing a range of
geopolitical and epistemic questions surrounding space and place, the contested and
competing ways in which the world is regionalized and understood, and the knowledges
and cultural practices of marginalized populations.
This article is divided into four sections. First, we outline the complex relationship
between indigenous peoples and traditional universities. Second, we introduce the
MCD paradigm and the concept of interculturality central to URACCANs mission and
vision. We then describe the work being done by URACCAN, focusing in particular on
intercultural communication and intercultural health. We end with a set of reections
on how postcolonial geographers might better practise interculturality in support of
decolonizing processes.
Indigenous peoples in traditional universities
While traditional universities can be sites of radical thought, they are often alienating
environments for indigenous students and scholars. Universities in postcolonial settler
nations such as New Zealand and Canada have struggled to embrace indigenous cos-
mologies and epistemologies, and the results of efforts to improve indigenous students
admission and completion rates have been very uneven. Indeed, indigenous and Afro-
Latino scholars in Canada, New Zealand and parts of Latin America have emphasized
how many experience the academy as a colonial and monocultural institution (see e.g.
CW Smith, 1994; Pihama, 2001; Kuokkanen, 2007; LT Smith, 2010; Mato, 2011) that
functions on a basis of epistemic ignorance regarding indigenous cultures (Kuokkanen,
Indigenizing and decolonizing higher education 57
2007). For Canadian-based Sami scholar, Rauna Kuokkanen (2007: 49), indigenous
people who come to the university face many challenges and difculties, including
benevolent ignorance, misconceptions about their cultures, individual and institutional
discrimination, and systemic marginalization. Similarly, Ma ori intellectual, Linda
Tuhiwai Smith (1992: 3), asserts that Ma ori exist in institutions which are founded
largely on the collective denial of our existence as Ma ori and which not only actively
continue to assimilate us but more importantly perhaps actively compete with us and
the world views we represent. Smiths (1992; 2010) work (has shown how the attempt
to make space for theoretical and methodological approaches that are relevant for
indigenous communities converts the university into a site of struggle against racism,
marginalization and coloniality.
Kuokkanen (2007) notes that although most universities are concerned with the
question of diversity, they tend to treat indigenous students largely as a population that
needs special help while continuing to marginalize their worldviews or epistemes. This
epistemic ignorance in the academy is compounded by the ways in which indigenous
issues get framed by dominant societies. In many countries, mainstream society assumes
that indigenous peoples are not capable of academic achievement and are better suited
to factory or plantation work. Furthermore, the deepening of market-oriented logics of
exchange that accompanies the global expansion of neoliberal agendas means that most
universities increasingly subject knowledge production to assessments driven by expec-
tations of generating an economic return value (Kuokkanen, 2007). Such assessments
and expectations clash with the gift economies and wider notions of reciprocity that
form the basis of many indigenous societies and constitute not a form of exchange but
an alternative to exchange (Kuokkanen, 2007: 30).
While indigenous peoples are struggling to indigenize research, teaching and gov-
ernance in traditional universities, an alternative response is the creation of a different
kind of university in which indigenous ways of knowing form the basis of scholarly and
pedagogical practices. Intercultural universities that are rooted in and connected with
the political and social struggles of marginalized groups are ourishing throughout Latin
America. Two universities, URACCAN and Blueelds Indian and Caribbean University
(BICU), were created on Nicaraguas Atlantic Coast in the 1990s, and many more since
have been established across the continent, including the Universidad Autnoma
Indgena Intercultural (UAIIN) in Colombia, Centro Amaznico de Formao Indgena
(CAFI) in Brazil, Universidad Intercultural de las Nacionalidades y Pueblos Indgenas
Amawtay Wasi (UAW) in Ecuador and Universidad Intercultural de Chiapas in Mexico
(see Mato, 2011). These universities are open to non-indigenous students, as the
principle of interculturality means that white and mestizo populations must respect and
learn from indigenous and other marginalized ways of knowing. It is important to
recognize that practising interculturality is often hardest for dominant groups, as black
and indigenous populations are used to negotiating hegemonic cultures and knowledges
while holding onto their own, whereas white privilege allows the dominant to ignore
subordinated ways of knowing and being.
The decolonial option and postcolonial geography
It is helpful to draw on some of the insights emerging from the MCD research paradigm
(otherwise known as the decolonial option) in order to grasp how URACCAN might
provide a lens through which to rethink postcolonial geography. The decolonial option
emerges primarily out of Latin American cultural studies, but is raising key geographical
58 Julie Cupples and Kevin Glynn
questions concerning the geopolitics of place and space, cartographic ontologies, bodies
and subjectivities. While there is substantial theoretical overlap between postcolonial
studies and the MCD paradigm, the latter mobilizes a different historical perspective,
locating the start of modernity not with the European Enlightenment but with the
conquest of America in the fteenth century. MCD sees modernity and coloniality as
mutually constituted; it recognizes that the global capitalist world order in place today
would not have been possible without the colonization of America (see Escobar, 2007;
Mignolo, 2007 for detailed introductions to the paradigm).
The decolonial option draws on a corpus of Latin American indigenous, popular and
subaltern thought and a variety of historical and contemporary indigenous and Afro-
Latin social movements, such as the 1780 Tupac Amaru rebellion in Peru, the 1804
Haitian revolution, and the Zapatista movement in Chiapas. MCD holds that coloniality
created the conditions for border-thinking and interculturality (see Mignolo, 2000;
2007; Escobar, 2007; Quijano, 2007; Walsh, 2007). It aims to bring non-linear, situated
and non-Eurocentric modes of thought to the fore, and encourages activists and scholars
to think with social movements and from the perspective of the excluded other
(Escobar, 2007: 187).
Surprisingly, geographers have been slow to engage with the decolonial option, and
both indigenous peoples and Latin America remain inexplicably on the margins of
postcolonial geography, which is more focused on the legacies of the nineteenth century
and on British (and sometimes French) colonial expansion (Gilmartin & Berg, 2007, see
also Mignolo, 2000: 91; Mignolo & Tlostanova, 2008). For example, Blunt and
McEwans (2002) edited collection paid scant attention to Latin America and virtually
none to indigenous peoples, apart from one chapter on Australia (Gooder & Jacobs,
2002). Joanne Sharps (2008) more recent textbook makes a few references to Latin
America but none to the decolonial option. These tendencies mirror a broader failure
within postcolonial studies to include indigenous perspectives (Byrd & Rothberg, 2011).
Yet geography is perhaps uniquely placed to engage with and extend the MCD para-
digm, which could also enrich postcolonial, political, cultural and feminist geography in
important ways. Ramn Grosfoguel (2011), without referring to the discipline of geog-
raphy, notes that postcolonial scholars tend to be located in the humanities and privilege
cultural analysis, while social scientists more often identify with world-systems
approaches and prioritize economic relations. While he perhaps overstates this division,
it is historically real and has material consequences for knowledge production. While
substantial scholarship in human geography draws equally on the humanities and social
sciences, ongoing tensions between postcolonial geography and development geogra-
phy remain (see Sharp & Briggs, 2006; McEwan, 2009). (Postcolonial) geography and
MCD need to engage more closely with one another, not only because the MCD
paradigm is raising crucial questions about the geopolitics of knowledge, cartographies
and the body, but also because geography is engaged with approaches that have much
consonance with and pertinence for the decolonial turn, in particular the ongoing
interrogation of a culture versus economy dichotomy and the development of
nonreductive ways to think about political transformation (see Grosfoguel, 2007).
Geographers also have much to contribute to MCDs interrogation of the excess of
condence . . . regarding the ontology of continental divides (Mignolo, 2005: x), and of
processes that resulted in an Anglo-America in the North and a Latin America in the
South, whereby Chileans, Uruguayans and Nicaraguans lost the right to call themselves
Americans (Galeano, 1973). As Mignolo (2005) writes, the Latin in Latin America is
a lens through which post-independence elites looked towards Europe while denying
Indigenizing and decolonizing higher education 59
the validity of black and indigenous knowledges. Yet, for late Argentine scholar Rodolfo
Kusch, whose writings never referred to Latin America, to be in Amrica (as he called
the continent encompassing both North and South) is to co-exist with indigenous
people and people of African descent (Mignolo, 2010: xlvi).
While a debate on whether decolonial is a more productive and spatially attuned
concept than postcolonial is beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth noting that both
indigenous scholars and those associated with the MCD paradigm have emphasized
what they see as serious limitations with postcolonial theory (see Mignolo, 2000;
Pihama, 2001; Surez-Krabbe, 2009; Smith, 2010; Mahuika, 2011). At any rate, both
the modernity/coloniality nexus and Amrica as place and as idea are highly amenable
to geographic enquiry.
Nicaraguas Atlantic Coast and the emergence of URACCAN
The Atlantic Coast region of Nicaragua is a multiethnic and multilingual region that has
followed a distinct historical trajectory from the rest of the country. It is home to six
indigenous peoples and ethnic communities: the Miskito, Mayangna, Rama, Garfuna,
Creole and Mestizo, known collectively as Costeos. The region welcomed and inte-
grated freed and escaped slaves who found themselves on the shores of the Mosquito
Coast. It was never colonized by Spain, but many inhabitants developed mutually
benecial trading relationships with the British. At the end of the nineteenth century,
the region was annexed by Nicaragua and since then has been subject to substantial
discrimination and internal colonialism by the Pacic mestizo majority. Tensions
between the central government and the Atlantic Coast increased dramatically during
the Nicaraguan Revolution in the 1980s, when many Costeos took up arms against the
revolutionary government. Military and political struggles in the region and govern-
ment recognition of its own cultural insensitivity towards the Coast led in 1987 to the
passage of an autonomy law and the rewriting of the Nicaraguan Constitution to
recognize Nicaraguas status as a multiethnic nation. At this time, Nicaraguas Atlantic
Coast was divided into two autonomous regionsthe RAAN (North Atlantic Autono-
mous Region) and the RAAS (South Atlantic Autonomous Region). Despite signicant
marine, forest and mineral resource wealth, poverty levels are higher on the Atlantic
Coast than in the Pacic. There is very little formal employment and Costeos lack
access to decent health care, education, sanitation, drinking water, transport and tele-
communications (Cunningham Kain, 2006). While the legal framework ushered in with
autonomy is excellent, it is weakly implemented, and many Costeos are frustrated
with the slow and incomplete nature of the process (Castillo & McLean, 2007).
Autonomy requires stronger and more assertive institutions, and thus a cohort of
educated and politically committed professionals willing to stay and work in the region.
In some ways, URACCAN and BICU build on earlier initiatives to nurture intercul-
tural citizenship, bilingualism and indigenous rights through education. The Moravian
Church, which began its evangelizing missions on the Atlantic Coast in the mid-
nineteenth century but progressively became indigenized, invested heavily in educa-
tional initiatives that created Moravian primary and secondary schools in remote areas
and promoted Miskitu literacy through the translation of religious texts and newsletters
into Miskitu (Hawley, 1997). In Bilwaskarma, the Moravian Church established in 1935
a School of Nursing (which was relocated to Puerto Cabezas/Bilwi in 1981) and later a
Moravian Theological Centre (Cunningham Kain, 2004). As Hawley (1997) writes, the
Moravian church played an important role in mobilizing Miskito populations in defence
60 Julie Cupples and Kevin Glynn
of their rights. It continues to be involved in higher education. While the church has no
formal involvement with URACCAN, it provides accommodation for the Bilwi branch
campus of BICU (Dennis & Herlihy, 2003). There have been other initiatives to provide
higher education on the Coast. Beginning in the 1970s, the National Autonomous
University of Nicaragua (UNAN) repeatedly attempted to establish courses and distance
learning in the region, with limited success (Cunningham Kain, 2004). Until the cre-
ation of URACCAN and BICU, higher education provision for Costeos was patchy and
mostly inaccessible.
Education was one of the central issues of the autonomy process, and local political
actors insisted on institutions that apply endogenous forms of pedagogy, use indigenous
and Creole languages, and involve culturally appropriate teacher training and course
texts (Cunningham Kain, 2002). The development of autonomous intercultural univer-
sity education was deemed necessary to halt the brain drain of intellectuals from the
region, to provide educational opportunities in the RAAN and RAAS, particularly for
indigenous and Creole young people who nd it very difcult economically and cultur-
ally to study in the Pacic, to strengthen the professional and political human resource
capacity required for the consolidation of autonomy, to conduct research that would
respond to local realities and aspirations, to empower people and local communities to
determine their own development, and to overcome long histories of racism, discrimi-
nation, poverty and marginalization (for more detailed discussion, see Cunningham
Kain, 2002; 2004). In other words, such an approach aims not only to enhance
well-being in the region, but also to improve relations with the rest of the country and
challenge racist views of Costeos often held by Nicaraguan mestizo populations in the
Pacic. As Miskito intellectual and URACCAN founder, Avelino Cox, remarked to us,
Pacic Nicaraguans believe that we Costeos dont think, they believe that there are no
intellectuals here, that there are no researchers (pers. comm., Bilwi, 12 January 2008).
URACCAN was created in 1992 through a resolution of the National Council of
Universities (CNU),
1
and began to offer classes in 1995 in Bilwi and Siuna in the RAAN
and in Blueelds in the RAAS. Additional branch campuses were created in the next
decade in Nueva Guinea (RAAS) and in Rosita, Bonanza and Waslala (RAAN).
URACCAN has around 3000 students and about 200 teaching faculty. Tuition costs are
kept low and at least half of all students receive full or partial scholarships. While some
faculty have Masters and PhD degrees, the institution also employs traditional healers
and indigenous language specialists without formal qualications (Hooker Blandford,
2009). BICU, which was established in the RAAS just prior to URACCANs launch, is
based in Blueelds but has a branch campus in Bilwi and a strong intercultural and
community focus.
URACCANs vision statement expresses its aspirations to be a leading community
intercultural university that accompanies the indigenous peoples and mestizo and
Afro-descended communities of the region in development processes which promote
citizenship (URACCAN, n.d., our translation). While its teaching and research are
grounded in local needs and realities, URACCAN is a globally connected institution with
an impressive set of international partners, including a number of both mainstream and
intercultural universities, from which it gains nancial support and with which it shares
experiences. It is also connected to national government agencies, and focused on
transforming national policies in ways that help the Atlantic Coast and promote the
undoing of long histories of neglect and misunderstanding. URACCAN is connected to
local communities through diverse forms of engagement, including forms of exchange
and accompaniment (acompaamiento) with Councils of Elders, womens organizations,
Indigenizing and decolonizing higher education 61
traditional healers, local media makers and shing and agricultural cooperatives
(Hooker Blandford, 2009).
URACCAN organizes its teaching programmes, departments and institutes according
to Costeo aspirations and ways of knowing. Consequently, the usual boundaries
between scientic and cultural approaches are less evident. Indeed, the scientic,
technological and cultural are thoroughly entangled at URACCAN, and indigenous and
Creole knowledges are privileged. The university offers a range of degrees including
Intercultural Medicine, Intercultural Communication, Education Sciences with an
endorsement in Biology, and Sociology with an endorsement in Autonomy. It also offers
short courses aimed at training community leaders, some with a gender focus.
URACCAN has seven research institutes whose activities and publications support the
regions struggles for autonomy, cultural revitalization and intercultural communica-
tion.
2
It also publishes an in-house interdisciplinary journal, Ciencia e Interculturalidad
(Science and Interculturality), that is freely available on the university website. When we
shared research ndings on the RAANs community media operations with a large
group of mainly Miskito and Creole rst year students enrolled on the degree in
Intercultural Communication in January 2009, we found them to be outspoken,
engaged, articulate, and willing to share their ideas about globalization, development
and culture. URACCAN is a space in which they appear to feel that their (world)views
are validated and legitimated, and where it is safe to speak out. Space precludes a
detailed exploration of URACCANs teaching and research programmes, but the follow-
ing two sections elucidate how interculturality is materialized through work in the
realms of communication and health.
Intercultural communication
The RAAN has an historically well established tradition of grassroots media activism that
has worked in particular through participatory radio to advance community agendas
and strengthen links between citizens and political leadersor to hold the latter
accountable when such links are stretched thinly or broken. URACCAN has drawn on
and advanced this tradition through its curricular agendas around intercultural com-
munication and its establishment of the regions rst community television station,
BilwiVision. BilwiVision was an initiative of URACCANs Institute of Intercultural Com-
munication and produces programming in all the languages of the region. It also
participates in a trans-American popular education and arts alliance known as the Viva!
Project, which brings together indigenous and other community-based practitioners
stretching from Canada in the North to Panama in the South. BilwiVision thus lends the
voices of the region to the broader collection of processes whereby colonized peoples
are speaking back from the margins, reclaiming not only their land but also diverse ways
of knowing and communicating (Barndt, 2011a: 8).
Indicative of its recognition that communication is core to the democratization of
education, the creation of links with surrounding communities and the promotion of
decolonial agendas, URACCANhas established community radio stations in areas where
previously they did not exist and trained journalists within the communities on the use
and management of these stations, respecting their own culture, identity, language, and
cosmovision (Antonio & Armida Duarte, 2011: 126). The university has also abetted the
development of digital technologies and new communication strategies for the promo-
tion and diffusion of Costeo voices and perspectives through media outlets based in
Nicaraguas Pacic region (Antonio & Armida Duarte, 2011: 126). Indigenous commu-
nicator and intellectual, Avelino Cox, situates such praxis within the ambit of
62 Julie Cupples and Kevin Glynn
decolonization, noting that the peoples of the region are trying to make a small
indigenous globalization in the face of the large globalization as part of a coordinated
survival strategy (Glynn &Cupples, 2011: 119). Thus, the work of BilwiVision is oriented
partly toward both overcoming racist views held by many Pacic Nicaraguans and
strengthening links with indigenous peoples elsewhere throughout the Americas.
BilwiVision broadcasts a mix of local and imported productions. Locally generated
content responds to a variety of needs throughout the region and fulls a range of
purposes, including the advancement of regional democracy and cultural autonomy,
the transmissionand preservationof traditional healing practices and linguistic resources,
the promotion of cross-cultural interaction and understanding, the showcasing of indi-
vidual communities, and the dissemination of other forms of information and entertain-
ment. For example, the channel has been used for the circulation of videos produced by
student lmmakers based upon traditional Miskito narratives known as the kisi nani.
These stories entertain, inform and help to promote a sense of community identity and
engagement, as well as facilitating intercultural dialogue around traditional cosmologies
and understandings of place. For another example, the popular programme, La comunidad
en su casa (The community in your home) features video ethnographies of the day-to-
day lives of local communities, thus facilitating forms of translocal connectedness and
solidarity and helping populations to reect upon how to present themselves to others.
We believe that such developments should not be dismissed as the mere incorporation of
indigenous peoples and cultures into the communication technological networks and
systems of Western modernity. They are more appropriately understood in conjunction
with the wider resurgence of indigenous practices, knowledges and identities that has
lately played no small part in the ongoing transformation of the political cultures of the
Americas through the partial displacement of dualistic, Euro-modern ontologies and the
concomitant (if incomplete) emergence of glimpses, at least, of alternative modernities
grounded in forms of reciprocity and relationality (see Escobar, 2010).
Intercultural health
Health teaching and research at URACCAN have a strong intercultural focus. Health
professionals such as nurses who are trained at URACCAN learn traditional and western
biomedical approaches, so they are able to draw on both when treating patients. The
Institute of Traditional Medicine and Community Development (IMTRADEC) is system-
atizing traditional medical knowledges so they can be shared with not only traditional
healers but also doctors and other health professionals whose training has been rooted
in western biomedical models. The key aim of this approach, according to Wedel (2009),
is to put traditional and western medicine on an equal footing so they can collaborate
with and inform one another in the provision of health care on the Coast. Indeed, the
embodied experiences of everyday life on the Atlantic Coast emphasize the efcacy and
importance of local knowledges for dealing with local health care needs. Many of these
knowledges have spiritual or supernatural dimensions and are frequently rejected as
Miskito sorcery by outsiders and western-trained scientists. The Miskito, for example,
believe in supernatural creatures known as lasa, such as the wahwin, liwa, swinta and
duende, who can cause harm to individuals. Some lasa play important roles in local
environmental protection. For instance, the swinta protects the forest and the liwa, the
creatures of the sea, discouraging people from overhunting or shing (see Fagoth et al.,
1998; Dennis, 2004; Jamieson, 2009; Cupples, 2012).
One major health issue on the Atlantic Coast is an epidemic known as grisi siknis
(Miskitu for crazy sickness), a condition in which young women (and occasionally
Indigenizing and decolonizing higher education 63
men) submit to supernatural possession by lasa or devils, and act in wild, hysterical and
violent ways, running away or injuring themselves or others with machetes or other
weapons. It is understood locally as a spiritual or cultural illness for which western
biomedical knowledge has no response. Grisi siknis has no identiable digestive, respi-
ratory or other biophysical or clinical explanation. Attacks are often successfully cured
by traditional indigenous healers such as sukia using herbal medicine (for discussion, see
Dennis, 1981). Research by IMTRADEC into grisi siknis, disseminated in theses, aca-
demic articles and informational pamphlets, is providing important information for
health professionals on how to treat attacks and enhancing the legitimacy of traditional
healing in Nicaragua.
3
As Wedel (2009) notes, as a result of this research, traditional
medicine is now part of Nicaraguas National Health Plan (20042015), and national
health provision now includes the cosmovision of the communities (MINSA, 2004:
47f, cited in Wedel, 2009: 50). Traditional healers are sometimes brought into the
hospital in Bilwi to apply treatments to patients. While Costeos are often receptive to
local medicine, Pacic doctors who work on the Coast are also beginning to embrace
traditional medical knowledges, despite some ongoing discomfort and opposition. At
any rate, as Wedel (2009) writes, acceptance by health professionals of grisi siknis as a
spiritual and collective illness constitutes a substantial challenge to the idea of the body
as an individual biomedical entity that can be treated in isolation from the social world.
Interculturality is therefore being materialized in hospitals, health centres and commu-
nities aficted by illness. We can see what Enrique Dussel (1995: 76) might understand
as a liberating transmodernity at work, in which both modernity and its negated alterity
(the victims) co-realize themselves in a process of mutual creative fertilization.
Practising interculturality
Despite structural impediments to the expansion of professional opportunities on
Nicaraguas Atlantic Coast, many URACCAN graduates are employed in NGOs and
government agencies or are teaching, running their own businesses, or holding elected
positions as regional and municipal councillors or mayors (Hooker Blandford, 2009).
URACCAN and its students and faculty do however face a number of serious challenges,
including inadequate material resources and dismissive attitudes from Pacic elites.
There also continue to be many gender- and race-based forms of structural disadvantage
in place, including ongoing insecurity over land rights, which make it difcult for
Costeos to attend university. Mestizos and Miskitos continue to dominate faculty and
student cohorts, as do Spanish and Miskitu languages, leaving Creole, Mayangna, Rama
and Garfuna populations, languages and issues less well represented and researched
(Dennis & Herlihy, 2003). Degree completion rates are still too low and URACCAN
researchers are constantly monitoring the institutions achievements and impacts (see
for example Cunningham Kain, 2002; Hooker Blandford, 2009; Garca Solrzano &
Tom, 2012; Herrera Siles, 2012).
Successes and setbacks notwithstanding, the mere existence of URACCAN disrupts
a number of colonial and neocolonial assumptions about the region and its peoples. It
challenges the assumption that indigenous and black populations are not capable of
scholarly activity, or that indigenous knowledges ceased developing after contact with
Europeans (Smith, 2010: 58). URACCANs intellectual production demonstrates to the
rest of Nicaragua (and to the wider world beyond) that indigenous knowledges are
dynamic, contested and heterogeneous, and that like Eurocentric knowledges they
continue to develop, hybridize and function as sites of productive disagreement. Indeed,
64 Julie Cupples and Kevin Glynn
URACCAN demonstrates to the Pacic mestizo majority that there are many ways of
being Nicaraguan (Rivas, 2007). Postcolonial settings provide the rationale for the idea
of alternative modernities (Gupta, 1998, quoted in Watts, 2003: 445) and a route to
thinking about why local knowledges struggle to gain legitimacy or institutional
support. URACCANs value stems in part from its role in the effective institutionalization
and systematization of local knowledges.
Just as indigenous knowledges nd (limited) spaces of expression in conventional
universities, URACCAN like other intercultural universities, is not opposed to teaching
and engaging with western knowledges, or to enrolling white or mestizo students or
employing mestizo faculty. Indeed, URACCAN does not attempt to ignore the potential
development value of western/Enlightenment thought, but instead seeks to create a
space where both indigenous and non-indigenous faculty and students can encounter
and reect upon different ways of knowing and on the strengths and pitfalls of different
models of development. This approach is appropriate and necessary, given that Costeo
cosmopolitanism has historically involved both a critical interrogation and an embrace
of the capitalist world economy. There is a strong awareness on the Atlantic Coast of
how the extractive economy has produced both benets and costs for the humans and
nonhumans of the region. As pressures on environmental resources continue to mount,
and as conventional development continues largely to fail the region, spaces for the
forms of intellectual engagement URACCAN facilitates are essential. Interculturality
aims to promote equitable coexistence between different cultures and ethnicities on the
Coast, so that historical rivalries can be put aside and the relationship between com-
peting knowledges (including those of capitalist and extractive development) that may
intensify or mitigate such rivalries can be reordered.
By drawing on the ancestral, embodied, experiential and everyday knowledges of
Costeos, URACCAN appears to be successfully producing a highly interdisciplinary
curriculum, engaging in depth with communities and policy makers, creating research
that has tangible benets for stakeholders, and providing desperately needed education
for marginalized socio-economic groups. These achievements form the basis of com-
monly stated objectives and aspirations at many mainstream universities with long
histories in Europe, the US and Australasia. Despite such histories and greater nancial
resources, they often struggle to achieve the things being achieved by URACCAN in part
because of the hierarchical ways in which both university governance and knowledge
are increasingly organized. The neoliberal ethos enacted through vertical corporate
managerialism, audit and surveillance, commodication of knowledge and the priori-
tization of science (seen as both relevant and necessary) over humanities (increasingly
deemed a luxury we cannot afford) sits uneasily with indigenous ontologies which
tend to be based on horizontal and reciprocal solidarities, collective decision making and
relational rather than instrumentalist understandings of the connections between
humans and nonhumans. Not only does the neoliberal framework make the university
a less welcoming place for both indigenous and non-indigenous students and faculty,
it also has a potentially limiting impact on knowledge production. The subject-
object divide, for example, is ubiquitous in environmental science, producing such
outcomes as accounts of climate change which isolate carbon emissions from the
unequal social and environmental relations upon which neoliberal globalization
depends (Featherstone, 2013: 44; see also Cupples, 2012). If decolonization depends on
the relational production of more ethical interdependencies (Raghuram et al., 2009),
perhaps we cannot simultaneously indigenize and neoliberalize the academy. Indig-
enous and intercultural universities matter in part because they offer us multiple
Indigenizing and decolonizing higher education 65
decolonizing and liberatory possibilities for governance, knowledge production and
ways of being in the world. One of BilwiVisions Canadian partners in the Viva! project,
Barndt (2011b: 137) says the following of URACCANs work:
It is hard to imagine a similar undertaking at a university in the Global Northgetting local and
national ofcials, artists and university faculty members to exchange experiences and ideas
about how to promote community arts within the university and surrounding communities.
Yet in Nicaragua they came together for three days to do precisely thatto examine how their
curriculum could recover histories, revalue cultures, catalyze critical thinking about social
issues, and inspire people to create many forms of expression that strengthen cultural identity
and community development.
Kuokkanens (2007) concept of the indigenous gift economy is clearly at work across
URACCANs diverse activities. URACCAN was born out of a collective desire to confront
poverty and racism, and to strengthen the regions autonomy based on a belief that the
academic systematization of knowledges that are held, practised and continuously
developed in common by indigenous and ethnic communities is an effective way to
meet such aspirations (Cunningham Kain, 2004). At URACCAN, the postcolonial (or
decolonial) is not just another curricular choice (see Brydon, 2004: 6) but underpins
everything that is done across the disciplines. Individual achievement is important and
to be celebrated, but individual knowledge must be shared and given back to the
community. Unlike most academic research, which is inaccessible for marginalized
populations as it is published in for-prot journals and hidden behind paywalls, most of
URACCANs research is freely shared online and given away to anybody with an
internet connection. URACCAN can therefore shed critical light on the ways in which
we organize knowledge at our own institutions. While academics in neoliberalizing
universities in Europe and Australasia are debating intellectually stultifying concepts
such as impact and excellence, Latin Americas intercultural universities are engaging
beyond the academy and transforming national policy without need of a state-led
bureaucratic procedure that exhorts them to do so. URACCANs impact includes build-
ing intercultural citizenship among both students and wider communities, as well as
promoting the liberation of these constituencies from the need to have white or mestizo
society as an aspirational benchmark. The lack of material and nancial resources at
intercultural universities such as URACCAN and more broadly in the societies around
them has made it all the more necessary for them to develop innovative ways of
facilitating community involvement in their practices and processes.
It is of benet to us all to break away from Eurocentric ways of knowing. As Arturo
Escobar (2007: 44) writes, one does not need to be an indigenous or colonized subject
to occupy the locus of enunciation that the decolonial option puts forward. Instead,
the decolonial option becomes a mode of thinking and articulating multiple and
counterhegemonic alternatives to the logic of coloniality. As Quijano (1992) notes,
European rationality based on the subject-object dichotomy is now in crisis. Geogra-
phys ability to make a difference beyond the academyand to tackle what are often
considered to be the disciplines most pressing questions, which include how we might
cease destroying our planet and begin to provide decent life opportunities to a majority
of the worlds populationdepends on us occupying an alternative locus of enuncia-
tion. Neither saving the planet from destruction nor ending social and economic
inequalities will be possible without advancing decolonization. The examples of grisi
siknis and BilwiVision show what is possible when different kinds of knowledge become
admissible and thinkable. Critical human geographers are trying to think relationally, to
66 Julie Cupples and Kevin Glynn
take nonhumans seriously, and have for some time been trying to undermine the
dominance of positivism within the discipline and encouraging their colleagues to take
the subject matter of cultural geographiesbodies, discourses, nonhumans, the cultural
politics of place, everyday lifeseriously. Embracing the decolonial option might there-
fore advance our thinking and professional relationships in innovative ways.
Of course, it can be difcult to know when we are occupying a decolonial locus of
enunciation and thinking with the excluded otheralthough when decolonization
occurs, we will know it, as it never takes place unnoticed (Fanon, 1963, cited in Tuck
& Yang, 2012: 7). But as URACCAN faculty and students know, interculturality does not
have nor does it require a xed denition. Interculturality is a project that is always
under construction. It is advanced when we listen properly to people who are differently
located in the colonial matrix of power; when we speak respectfully across cultural and
intergenerational differences; when knowledge circulates multidirectionally from,
between and within academic publications, community forums and workshops, inter-
net, radio and television, and spaces of policymaking; when we dismantle the hierarchy
between the scientic and the supernatural; and when we treat oral, televisual, non-
human and written epistemologies in a non-hierarchical manner.
Being engaged in the process, participating, is the basis for the construction of
cultural citizenship (see Castillo & McLean, 2007 for a discussion of how such exchanges
unfold). Through URACCANs work, students, academics, visitors, community
members, professionals and policy makers are forced to engage in what Brydon and
Dvork (2012) refer to as crosstalk, a metaphor for the productive ways in which
globalization facilitates interaction between different imaginaries, pushing those
involved in the encounter beyond their comfort zones and encouraging them to reect
on the institutional spaces and modes of citizenship they inhabit. In such a process, new
forms of critical theory become both visible and thinkable. Constructing cultural citi-
zenship and engaging in crosstalk mean in part doing the following, as put forward by
Miskito intellectual, Avelino Cox Molina (2003: 1112, our translation), who writes:
To confront the vision of the indigenous world of the Autonomous Regions in which the
everyday and the supernatural, the communal and the individual, the correct and the sym-
bolic, the rational and the intuitive, the sacred, the profane and the spiritual are entangled in
an intricate and indivisible manner, I had to enter a process in which the limits between the
observer and the phenomenon observed become blurred and the barriers that separate the
world of reason from the world of magic are broken down.
This quote will sound very appealing to many critical scholars. It is important,
though, not to lose sight of the fact that the purpose of critical interculturality is to
promote decolonization. We must exercise great caution that it is not privileged, critical,
rst world scholars who are transformed and empowered, while indigenous peoples
continued to be denied their land rights, or black populations are disproportionately
incarcerated and blocked from getting ahead by ingrained institutional racism. As Tuck
and Yang (2012) remind us, decolonization is unsettling, as it involves indigenous
sovereignty and the return of stolen lands. It is important to debate coloniality in our
written work and teaching, and to admit into our institutions, knowledges and cultural
practices that will complicate the ways in which research is conducted and disseminated.
Postcolonial pedagogies that involve a coming to terms in the classroom with the
colonial past and present can, as Brydon (2004) writes, be an unsettling and deeply
uncomfortable process for those present. Such practices must not however stand in for
the more uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen land (Tuck & Yang, 2012: 19).
Indigenizing and decolonizing higher education 67
Fernando Coronil (2011: 2634) states that Latin America has become a diverse
fabric of collective utopian dreams in which it is now possible to engage different
cosmologies. Working in a New Zealand university and spending time at URACCAN
engaging with its intellectual production reveals that the era is over when development
expertise could be thought to ow unidirectionally from global North to South so that
Latin America might be put on what was assumed to be a singular and inevitable
development trajectory dened by Europe. For us as postcolonial geographers, it is time
to listen and learn so that diverse cosmologies can become part of the universities where
we study, teach and research, and part of the societies in which we live.
Acknowledgements
This research is funded in part by the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand, grant
number MAU1108.
Endnotes
1 The CNU is Nicaraguas university coordinating, accrediting and quality assurance body.
2 These are the Institute of Natural Resources, Environment and Sustainable Development
(IREMADES), Institute of Traditional Medicine and Community Development (IMTRADEC),
Centre of Socio-Environmental Information (CISA), Centre for Studies and Information of the
Multiethnic Woman (CEIMM), Institute of Intercultural Communication (ICI), Institute of
Linguistic Promotion and Research and Cultural Revitalization (IPILC) and the Institute of
Studies and Promotion of Autonomy (IEPA).
3 For examples of published research into grisi siknis conducted at URACCAN, see Comisin de
Salud de la RAAN, 1996; Rupilius, 1998; Carrasco et al., 2000; Wilson, 2001; Davis et al., 2005;
Espinoza & McDavis, 2006.
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