Indigenous knowledge, skills and action: Indigenous women’s learning in the Peruvian Amazon

Abstract

Drawing on long term ethnographic research in the SE Peruvian Amazon this article asks what kinds and forms of learning do indigenous women value, how are the knowledge and skills they value changing over time and what is the nature of their agency in the face of the discrimination and prejudice that permeate their lives. Harakmbut women’s lives have been transformed over the past 40 years in the wake of neoliberal globalisation, rapacious exploitative economic practices and unregulated illegal gold mining. Within this context, three types of learning emerge as important: learning about indigenous cosmology and way of life; experiential learning through engagement with an expanding capitalist society; and learning through training and capacity building for participation, voice and rights-based advocacy. The article argues that all three types of learning give meaning to Harakmbut women’s lives, their relationship to their history and their views of the world.

Keywords:

• Intergenerational
• knowledge
• gold-mining
• cosmology
• indigenous women
• agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Notes

1 Tambet is a pseudonym. I have changed some of the details of ‘Tambet’s life and situation to ensure her anonymity.

2 I write as a non-indigenous academic – I am not writing on behalf of Tambet or Harakmbut women – but offer my analysis from the privileged insights I have gained through sharing in the lives of these women (see for example the work of Smith (1999) on decolonising methodologies).

3 The miners who have settled in Madre de Dios are diverse ethnically, economically, in terms of their provenance, the kind and scale of the mining they carry out, their relationship to the environment, and their aims and their relationships with the Harakmbut. For more details see for example Aikman (1999c, 2012).

4 CONFINTEA, the UNESCO International Conference on Adult Education is held every 12 years. CONFINTEA V was held in 1997 and CONFINTEA VI was held in 2009 in Belem, Brazil (see Morrison and Vaioleti (2011) for more detail about the discussions of indigenous peoples at these conferences).

5 The growth of gold mining over this period is documented in Gray (1986).