Episode 2: Indigenous Future-Making
Dr. Filiberto Penados is a Maya educator, and activist scholar whose work focuses on indigenous education and future-making. He has held faculty positions at the University of Belize and Galen University and has been adjunct faculty at University of Toronto, University of Belize and University of Manitoba. He has a long history of involvement in indigenous movements in Belize and Central America. He has taught, written and presented on various topics including the decolonization of education and development. He is currently Founding Advisor at the Centre for Engaged Learning Abroad and President of the Julian Cho Society (a Maya organization in southern Belize). He joins us from Belize.
He speaks to us about:
decolonial education
development with identity
indigenous future-making
coloniality
decentering power
relationship to the land
global solidarity and international legal instruments
having humility - and much more!
Transcript
Intro: Often when people talk about poverty, it tends to pathologize the people who are being perceived as being poor. And the approaches often tend to be ahistorical and apolitical. And they don't tend to take into account the history that has brought people to that point or the broader structures that are creating this reality. I think in order to address these issues, we have to tackle the structural violence, the structures that produce that and also make repairs for that historical process. There's no doubt that is the case. I don't see anyway that we can really move forward without taking a historical and political kind of approach at addressing these issues.
Safa: Welcome back to The Rethinking Development Podcast. My name is Safa, and I'm your host. Thank you for tuning in to the first in a series of episodes where we will speak with academics, writers, artists and activists to contextualize international development and humanitarian aid within broader historical and global power dynamics and socio economic systems that have been shaped and reshaped over time. In our conversations, we aim to rethink ethical behavior and best practices through the lived experiences and personal reflections of different guests. Our guest today is Dr. Filiberto Penados. Dr. Penados is a Maya educator and activist scholar whose work focuses on indigenous education and future-making. He has held faculty positions at the University of Belize and Galen University, and has been adjunct faculty at the University of Toronto, University of Belize, and University of Manitoba. He has a long history of involvement in indigenous movements in Belize and Central America and has taught, written, and presented on various topics, including the decolonization of education and development. He's currently the founding advisor at the Center for Engaged Learning Abroad, and President of the Julian Cho society (a Maya organization in southern Belize). Dr. Penados, thank you so much for speaking with us today.
Filiberto: Thank you for the invitation.
Safa: To begin the conversation, could you perhaps tell us a bit about what initially motivated you and led you to study and engage in the process of decolonial education and development issues in Belize, but also internationally?
Filiberto : Yes. Well, I think a couple of things have led me to do the work that I am doing at the moment, or that I have been doing for the last 20 years or so. First of all, I think my own personal history: I'm Maya Yucatec. My ancestry is Maya Yucatec, from a small community in Belize, by the name of Succotz, which is just off the border with Guatemala. And I think there are a couple of things I saw growing up that, you know, made me question things. One of them is that, for example, I came to realize at one point that my heritage language is Yucatec Maya, but I cannot speak it. And I speak Spanish as sort of my first language, but can not really write it. And then I speak and write English, but I grew up, you know, feeling really uncomfortable about speaking English. And so kind of figuring out how did that come about, and realizing that, you know, in my family, our heritage language, our mother tongue was lost over 2,3 generations. Why is that? And I think once you begin to question that, you realize that has a lot to do with colonialism. I think also growing up, becoming othered at some point, realizing that people see you as different, as an Indian, as they still refer to people here. Those things certainly made an impact on me. And then I started my education, my higher education by training, initially training in math and physics and then moving to become a teacher and I had an experience teaching at an inner school in Belize City, and working with Afro descendant kids in a very tough kind of environment. And it made me question the whole education system, where you would have certain people have better quality education, the services not being there for certain people and wondering whether the education that the students we were teaching got was relevant to them. So those two things I think combined led me to question both education, think about colonialism. And then one final thing is that while being trained as an educator, I remember attending a conference, a national symposium in Belize discussing the future of education. And the question was education crisis: what is to be done? And from then I started thinking, what is the crisis in education and I realized that often the crisis was spoken about in terms of like poor grades in math and physics and English and so on, but never really questioning: is the purpose of education the right one? Or how do we educate in a post-colonial, yet colonial context like Belize? And so, all of that led me to think about how development, which education is often thought about as a framework within, wonder about what does it mean? What does development mean? And how does that frame education? How is that connected to colonialism? So all of that kind of brought me to this point to think about alternatives to development and alternatives to conventional ways of doing education.
Safa: Very interesting. You mentioned your own process of questioning the school system and in terms of thinking about education systems and curriculum and the way that maybe Eurocentric narratives and values and histories are reinforced. Can you share a bit about the work or the research you've done in terms of centering Mayan or indigenous learning and knowledge systems and the impact that has had?
Filiberto: Well, one of the most exciting things I think I have done was to establish an alternative school along with some colleagues in southern Belize, which is an area where we have high predominance of Maya people, particularly Kekchi and Mopan. And we set up a school. Largely, the motivation of setting up the school was in response to a number of the issues that I have already been identified, but obviously: limited opportunities for students to go beyond primary school, the fact that students grapple with questions of identity because of the curriculum that they receive. They don't see themselves reflected in that curriculum. The fact that, you know, people make use of Maya culture and things Maya to sort of sell tourism, in the culture industry of Belize. So they basically use Mayan cultural and natural resources for the benefit of others rather than Maya people themselves. So we thought: "Okay, what can we do?" And we realized that education was a key area in which we can intervene. So we set up a center called the Tumul K'in Center of Learning - Tumul K'in in the Mopan language means new day or new light, a new dawn for thinking about education. That project consisted of questioning what do we mean by education, what do we mean by knowledge, who gets to decide what knowledge is, what the purpose of education is, who knows and questions like that. And so within that center, we did a number of things. One, we challenged the content of the curriculum, and so we included indigenous content in the curriculum. From Mayan history, to Mayan language, Mayan philosophy, Mayan agriculture systems, as well as students learning, of course, conventional science and computer science, learning about other cultures as well from other cultural angles. So we did that. We also tried to use a different pedagogical approach than being inside of the classroom, but rather kind of being on the land and learning from the land. So students actually planting corn and then learning about what that means. So kind of a holistic approach to learning. And instead of questioning who knows, we kind of knocked down the walls of the school and opened it up to the community so that the community could be part of the school and the school could be part of the community, so that knowledge bearers from the community would be also teachers. The students would go to the community to work along with elders and knowledge bearers to learn from them. And then the question of who owns the school and who should determine what school should be like and we transformed the way that the school is managed to really have the communities determine what should be the content of that curriculum, to really be at the center of school governance. The impact that we saw on that was that, you know, in a very short period of time, like within six months of students coming to the school, you would see them opening up because they were feeling more confident about who they are and about their knowledge. We saw, for example, doors open for them to access knowledge with their grandparents and their parents. And so it increased their self-confidence and self-efficacy. Some of the students graduated from that school; I was there up to the first set of graduates, some of them went back to work in their communities, some went to study further and come back to this school to teach. It was one of the best experiences that I've had so far.
Safa: Wow, wonderful. It really sounds like a wonderful initiative and that process of questioning education and defining what it means and how it can look like in a specific community. I think in my mind that kind of relates to the phrase or the process of development with identity, which is something you've written about. Could you maybe speak to us a bit about what that refers to and the ways in which participatory methods and community-led methods have been central to some of the work that you've been involved with?
Filiberto: Right. So the concept of development with identity, which doesn't come from me, it's a concept that emerged in Central America, South America in the early 2000s. It really was a critique of development thinking. Generally, development assumes that we're moving from kind of traditional to modern, and it means forgetting who you are to become somebody else. And so it means that you must check your own knowledge, your own ways of knowing, being, and doing at the door of the development process. You have to first accept that that knowledge, that way of doing, being, and knowing is not valid in order for you to progress and to become 'developed'. And so indigenous peoples have always been critical of that - have always been clear that their own knowledge systems, their own ontologies, their own axiologies and epistemologies are really important and of value, that each society moves and evolves or changes according to those values, its ways of understanding the world, the ways of relating to the world and to each other, and that each society has a right to do that. So there shouldn't be any reason why that identity as it were, has to be checked at the gates of that. So in a sense, it was saying, look, in order for me to change, I should be the one determining the direction and the speed of that change. And so the idea of development with identity was that, it aimed to say, okay, every society has the right to determine the kind of development that they want. That's the idea of with identity. And that informed very much the project that we did with the school. It was to provide a space where students can see the knowledge that comes from their own society, from their own culture, to see those values as being very important, as being valid. But yet, you know what, opening kind of the windows to other ways of understanding the world, and learning from those as well - indigenous peoples have always been open to kind of other ways of understanding. And so that was kind of what it was about. And so, of course, participatory approaches are central to that. Ultimately, development with identity is a self-determined process of pursuing your well-being, your future. In fact, nowadays, I talk a lot more about indigenous future-making to avoid the term development, which connotes this trajectory of moving from traditional society to kind of high consumption, kind of modern society. Future-making kind of promotes more that indigenous peoples are agents, they are actors and they always are making their future, they are not people of the past only, they are people of the present - of course the past is important, and they are people who are making their future by drawing on their own heritage and any other knowledge and technologies that might be available to them.
Safa: And in that process of imagining futures or future-making, in some situations, there are opportunities to work with partners, whether that's partners from other local community organizations, sometimes with government partners, sometimes in some cases with private sector partners, but in situations or countries where there's a history of colonialism, particularly for example, like in Canada, a settler colonial country context where relationships with the government also, with some other actors have a history of being violent and of not necessarily being trustworthy. When it comes to working with other stakeholders or other actors, what have been kind of your experiences with cooperation, or collaboration and overcoming some of the power dynamics that exist and are shaped through history?
Filiberto: Right. The historical experience of indigenous peoples has been - with others, in terms of the colonial others, the Europeans travelling through the Americas, and then the State as kind of the inheritor or promoter of the same kind of logic, has been an negative one. So in other words, you know, in Latin America, there are a number of scholars who talk about coloniality rather than colonialism, to say that colonialism, while it is a historical period, it gave rise to a way of thinking, to a logic that persists today. And that kind of logic, that kind of power complex is what we refer to as coloniality. In other words, colonialism, or the logic of colonialism continues to exist today. In state actors, in funding agencies, sometimes - often, there's the assumption, as I said, that indigenous peoples and their culture are obstacles to moving forward, thinking about indigenous peoples as victims or people of the past that need to get on with the play, if they're going to move forward. So yes, I mean, the experience generally can be and has been a negative one. So indigenous communities are always very suspicious. But, you know, good partnerships can be created. That requires on the one hand I think, from an indigenuous side, to be pretty clear about these realities, about these dynamics, and be clear also about the future that we're trying to create. And to not be silent about calling out and pointing out these contradictions and these structural sort of violence that exists or slow violence that often exists as well. And it requires on the potential allies to view indigenous people as historical, contemporary, social and political actors and to recognize the agency of indigenous peoples. It is time to step aside to let the indigeneous people guide and lead the process and to support that. That is not always easy. Indigenous time, indigenous dynamics sometimes come into conflict with the understandings and ways of doing things which promote 'development'. But as I said, I mean, I think that there are good ways of doing this. One experience, one concrete experience that I had was working, for example, when I was at the Tumul K’in Centre of Learning, was to work with an agency called Ireland Aid or IrishAid. And it was, it was really fantastic. I mean, I couldn't believe the way that they were willing to support the initiative, and they visited us, and they heard about what it is that we were doing. They visited with us and they were impressed with what we were doing. They asked us, you know, what can we do, and we made a proposal to them, and they supported and they committed to work for a long period of time. So not just a one off thing, but to walk the path along time, which is, I think, is something very important. And then they they didn't focus on, you know, whether a workshop is implemented, whether this thing was done, but rather the big picture, what it is that you're really trying to achieve and how it is that you're moving. So they were very respectful of that, respectful of the agency of the Maya people who worked in this project. So I think it is possible, but one has to be, you know, very aware and constantly reflect on our own positionalities in order to, you know, engage ethically.
Safa: Yes, as you say, you have to be constantly aware and question your own positionality and be conscious of the role that everyone has to play. But one thing that came to mind as you were speaking is that in, you know, so-called development projects and such, often, a lot of efforts are made to address issues of poverty and addressing the crisis of poverty in communities. It's one of the main goals of a variety of development programs. Sometimes, when people speak about shifting the power, they refer to economic power. There are conversations around reparations and different ways that shifting economic power can happen. What have been your experiences or your research or just your thoughts in general about the way in which redistributing economic power or addressing the crisis of poverty has been happening? Or the ways in which it should be done in better ways, whether that's in Belize, or just generally in other contexts as well.
Filiberto: Right. I mean, often when people talk about poverty, they tend to pathologize the people who are being perceived as being poor. And the approaches often tend to be ahistorical and apolitical. And they don't take into account the history that has brought people to that point or the broader structures that are creating this reality. So, I think in order to address this issue, we have to tackle the structural violence, the structures that produce that and also make repairs for that historical process. There's no doubt that that is the case. I don't see any way that we can really move forward without taking a historical and political kind of approach at addressing these issues. You know, it is about making space ultimately - in the case of indigenous peoples, of making space for those indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, and it's not a simple process, obviously, because when people talk about decentering power or economic power, when you think about indigenous economies, indigenous economies tend to be built around reciprocity, which challenges the capitalist system. When indigenous people, for example, talk about land, they talk about land not as private property, which again, private property is that foundational concept in the capitalist system, which kind of frames everything. And so, if we're talking about decentering power, it means making spaces for different ways of thinking about the economy, different ways of relating to each other and relating to the land. The land is critical, you know, to indigenous peoples, but not land as real estate, but land as the teacher, land as the source of life. So I think it is great that there's these conversations, but as I said, many times, they kind of only go so far. And when really people start to take power, exercise their power, people who have been the promoters of this idea become scared. It reminds me of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator, who wrote quite a bit about empowerment and emancipation. He said, often, the problem with allies or with liberators, or people from the ruling class is that they want people to take power, but whenever they do, they become scared. So they want to set parameters which would limit the actions of indigenous peoples or oppressed people. So, I think that it's great that there is that conversation, that we're doing something about that, but I think more needs to be needs to be done, because as I said, we cannot address the issues of poverty and inequality without taking a historical and political approach.
Safa: Absolutely. And that really resonates with me. And sometimes on the podcast, we speak about how different development initiatives are really at the surface level or they just address symptoms, but they don't address root causes. So that analysis is really resonating with those ideas and those thoughts. In terms of also thinking about the role that different organizations and funding agencies, as you said, have in communities. For example, in some communities, local, technical knowledge or ways of approaching a social issue or program are really utilized and embedded in the program. And then the funding actors, they provide the economic resources. But in other situations, you know, there are dynamics of really trying to push a certain agenda or these kind of white saviour complex dynamics that play out. Have you been part of situations where you've seen that happen? And if so, what was it like to kind of negotiate that or be witness to that?
Filiberto: Yes, I mean, after working on the project at the Tumul K’in Centre of Learning, while working there, Tumul K’in was approached by an agency, an international agency because they sort of liked what Tumul K’in was doing, and they wanted to develop curriculum, develop a program for implementation at the primary school. And so we got pretty excited about that. So we started an initiative. But for indigenous peoples that were involved, it was important to challenge thinking around education and to talk about the concept of intercultural education, which is about creating a space for indigenous knowledge in the way that Tumul K'in was doing it. And in order to do this, we proposed to get teachers from the different schools and provide them with a kind of training that wasn't technical but rather political. In other words, getting them to think about what is the purpose of education, what counts as knowledge, and to think about what is the kind of education that their communities might need, and then for the project to support these teachers to do whatever changes that they thought were necessary in their school context. The agency in a sense was also excited, so everything was going well, until we started encountering pushback from the Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Education was concerned that this initiative that was happening at school, seemed to support the Maya Land Rights movement. So they began to see this as too political. And they started exercising pressure on the international agency. And so they started to pull back. And so the agency came back and wanted to change the approach, for example, saying, well, let's not talk about intercultural or indigenous education. Let's talk about child-friendly schools, okay? Which is kind of a much more domesticated kind of concept, and didn't really have at the core what it is that indigenous peoples had to do. So that's kind of the situation there. You know, the Maya organizations in Toledo are pretty well-organized. That became part of their strength. So they were able to lobby, you know, international headquarters of the agency to say: Hey, we have to support indigenous peoples in this process. It might seem like a simple thing. But in changing the the title, we also begin to change the goals of the initiative. You know, so being able to mobilize other actors, I remember organizing an international conference in Belize and inviting people from places like Bolivia and Mexico to come and speak, in a sense also for local actors, local state actors to see that really, this is not a situation that's happening only in Belize, but it's an international thing. That there are people who are doing this work, that there are international legal instruments, actually, that supported the work that indigenous peoples are doing, so being able to draw on those international instruments, as well. So I guess in terms of negotiating to move indigenous peoples aspirations forward, it required, you know, organization. It required allies in the international sphere and it required making use of international instruments. And even the courts. Even though in this case, the courts were not used, but the Maya people in southern Belize have made use of the courts, you know, to defend their rights and advocate for a space for themselves.
Safa: Wow, what an interesting example, as you say, sometimes changing the name of an initiative, for example, from intercultural education to child-friendly schools, of course, there's a politics to that, and it also changes the goal, but that example of using international mechanisms and allies, it's so interesting that in that case, it was successful because in some cases, in terms of the history of maybe indigenous communities and the the way that international legal mechanisms have failed to protect them, that history also exists. When it comes to your experiences with international allyship and solidarity and your work and your research in different countries globally with different indigenous communities, what have been some of your experiences and reflections between, you know, the solidarity that exists among different indigenous communities worldwide and the way that they can support each other in their different struggles?
Filiberto: That is critical, I think, global indigeneity and solidarity among the indigenous movement is critical. If I reflect, for example, on the experience of indigenous peoples in Belize, my background, as I said, is Yucatec Maya. And in Belize, the Yucatec language has largely disappeared. There are fewer and fewer people that speak the language. In the context of, and it's not like the Yucatec Maya people did not struggle, right? They did. They struggled. They tried to defend their ways of life. They tried to defend their lands and so on. They have a history of struggle. They were not as successful as the Kekchi and Mopan in southern Belize. Southern Belize was largely isolated for many, many years. And in the 1990s, the recent Maya resurgence, the May struggle in Toledo in southern Belize came out as a result of the government awarding logging concessions in their land. And so people reacted against that, and this was kind of in the 1990s. And of course, they made known their dissatisfaction to the state. Things didn't work out in the national courts, so they took their case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. They lobbied international agencies and they lobbied indigenous organizations and communities in other places in order to move forward their struggle. In 2015, the Maya people in southern Belize obtained court ruling at the highest court in Belize, affirming their rights to land, making use of instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Now, I say all of this to point out that what was different, say for example, in the struggle of the Yucatec people, compared to the struggle of the Kekchi and Mopan people. There is a big difference in that there has been a growing global indigenous movement that has been able to support, that is the backdrop of the struggle in southern Belize. All of these international instruments, whether it is the International Labor Organization Convention 169 or the UNDRIP or Article 8(j) of the Convention on Biological Diversity, they all have been the result of global indigenous solidarity. And those international instruments then provide a framework for national action. The Maya people, in the case of Belize, were are able to draw on that and to be able to draw on organizations such as the Central American Indigenous Council, or Canadian Indigenous Peoples, or Canadian or American lawyers who can help their case. So that has been critical to their struggle. I cannot emphasize how important the global indigeneity and global solidarity is.
Safa: And as you say, a lot of these conventions that are used have actually been advocated for and imagined and drafted and created by indigenous communities themselves. It's not like the, for example, the UN entity came up with it, but it's through the work and the efforts of indigenous communities that they were established in the first place. But you know, you mentioned relationship to land and all the conflict and the histories and the issues that come up in terms of relationship to land. Also thinking about the context of global climate change and the way in which many indigenous communities are on the front line or are really being significantly impacted by the effects of climate change, and how there's really a growing urgency to address that and change the way in which we all relate to land and nature. How do you see how indigenous knowledge systems are being applied or integrated or used when it comes to addressing these issues, whether that's through development projects or local community projects - on different levels?
Filiberto: There's a growing interest in indigenous knowledge in terms of responding to challenges such as climate change, food insecurity, and so on. There's a growing interest in that. I don't think that it is as widespread or as profound as I personally would like it to be and I think as indigenous peoples would like it to be, but there is certainly some progress on those fronts. Sometimes the challenge is that from the mainstream, we tend to think of indigenous knowledge as something that could be abstracted and taken in pieces. So, you know what indigenous peoples are good at managing wildlife or fish or a particular tree or whatever, you know, so that knowledge can be extracted and isolated and therefore applied in other areas. When, in fact, the reason why that knowledge works, and the reason why that might work is because of a holistic system. Let me start from a different point to illustrate that. I work a lot in Belize and in Central America, so the Mesoamerican region. When you look at biodiversity in the region, so you look at maps where you have the highest levels of biodiversity, and you superimpose on that a map of where indigenous peoples are. You will find that the highest biodiversity happens to be on lands that are occupied by indigenous peoples. So that tells you something. It tells you something that there is a different kind of relationship with the land that seems to be much more sustainable. That's good for the land in its totality, right? And it's good for people, it is good for the environment. Now, we all recognize that that is critical to climate change. But the reason why those lands seem to be greener and there seems to be a higher level of biodiversity, it's connected to indigenous ways of understanding the world, understanding themselves and relating to each other and relating to the land. So it's, it's not a question of isolating a particular piece of knowledge. But how it is then that we can support this indigenous world, indigenous society, indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing. That to me is the critical part. So when I say that, there's a growing interest in the role that indigenous knowledge might play in climate change and food security, that it tends to be atomized. So one of the things that I think I'm beginning to see an interest in is in supporting indigenous peoples and their relationship with the land. And I think that is really critical. Let me share two things. One of them is that in the case of southern Belize, one of the initiatives that the Maya people have done is to articulate a vision of the future. And that vision of the future is anchored in this concept that they call ral cho'och'. Ral cho'och' means people of the land, people who depend, care and belong to the land. And their goal is how do we strengthen this relationship and what does that mean going forward? And so in a sense if we're going to talk about supporting indigenous peoples knowledge and making use of indigenous knowledge, it is not only a practical set of knowledge, we're talking about the axiology, we're talking about the philosophy of indigenous peoples, this way of being that needs to be supported. So they're saying, if we're going to make a contribution to climate change, and we're going to survive this notion of ral cho'och', and what it embodies, needs to be supported. I recently had an opportunity to review a number of initiatives, a number of projects being proposed by indigenous communities in Latin America, through an initiative called the Indigenous Conservation Initiative, through IUCN Conservation International, the global environmental facility. I was quite pleased to see that these agencies are moving towards that direction of supporting that notion of ral cho'och', the holistic way of being, rather than isolating these pieces of knowledge.
Safa: Mm hmm. Very interesting, and in terms of this holistic way of being and just generally your thoughts and your research on imagining indigenous futures, what would you say are some other critical elements? I know we've touched on a few, but some others that are necessary or really integral to realizing these types of futures?
Filiberto: Right. So let me go back again to the recent work that I have been doing, collaborating with Maya communities in Toledo. As I said, the relationship with the land is at the core of what has emerged. One of the things that we did was to have a cross section of Maya society envision their future by making drawings of that future and also making drawings of how they see themselves, and it was amazing that things like land were important, things like community were important, things like reciprocity was very important, things like self-reliance were very important. All this came across. The land we have spoken about already, how important that is. People always drew the land as vibrant, as green, as providing life. Food always figured out in those drawings, so the land provides all of this. That seemed to be really important. And then the other thing that they also kind of drew was drawings that represented leadership as something being very important. So in going forward, some of the things that the organization, the Maya leadership is recognizing is that we have to strengthen, revitalize our relationship with the land. Two, we have to revitalize and strengthen this sense of community, what we call junajil, a oneness, and to recognize that we have to revitalize and strengthen governance. Governance, however is not seen as the coercive enforcement of laws, but governance as the facilitation of right relations, right relations with each other, right relations with the land and what all that means and right relations with other people. Those have become some critical issues. And one last thing is that, of course, the question of the economy as drawing life or our sustenance from the land, ultimately it is about the relationship with the land. And so one of the things that Maya people are beginning to think about is, what does it mean to relate to the land? What does ral cho'och', being from the land, depending on the land and caring for the land mean? What is that going to mean going forward, for building a future?
Safa: Mm hmm. In your own work, in your own relationship with your colleagues, with your partners, what would you say are some of the biggest lessons that you've learned or something that you've learned throughout these years of experiences that you've had that has stuck with you, till today and that really continues to guide the way that you approach your work?
Filiberto: Right. One of them is the question of trusting, trusting people. When we started the Tumul K'in initiative, we thought that, you know what, people do not have much resources. And we need to provide resources so that the children can come to school. It became a nightmare because we had to do a lot of fundraising, and to the point that we realized that it cannot be sustained. And as the leaders of that initiative, we realized that despite all the talking, you know, despite al the thinking about trusting people and seeing people as having assets, as being strong, we were operating still from a kind of a sense of deficit. And one of the elders involved said no, we are approaching this from the wrong direction, our people have a lot of resources, okay, they don't have money, okay. But they have corn, they have beans. And so it should not be a problem, for example, to feed their children. And he was questioning that why is it that we cannot take it to the parents and to the community to sort out this problem? So even though we're indigenous peoples ourselves, even though we talk about these things, sometimes it is very difficult to put into practice and when you do, you know, many times, you are proven wrong of your assumptions. You know, that people can rise to that. The other thing is, again, an issue that I mentioned earlier. How, you know, sometimes you want people to take control, to have the power, to decide their destiny, and as leaders, or directors or as professional, sometimes we go there thinking, you know, I'm pretty progressive, I am aware of these things, and I can engage in this - and finding out that it's not as easy as we think. And I always tell people that one of the greatest criticism I've ever received was, at the same time one of the greatest compliments. While engaging in the Tumul K'in initiative, the goal was that you know what, the parents should actually be in control of the initiative. And one point in time, maybe having been there four years, we were having a meeting. And a parent who had been participating for quite some time, he got up to speak. And he said: You know what, I've been coming here for about, you know, four years. And you know, we talked about how this is a Maya school, but I do not see that. And that, to me was like a big criticism, having spent four years trying to lead this initiative, but in the same breath, in the very same sentence, he went on to say, and what I think needs to happen here, and he gave a list of things that he wanted to see happen and engage in. So I went into this thinking: Okay, you know what, this is what I want and this is what we want, people to take control of this. But once people began to take control and began, perhaps, to be critical of what I was doing, that was really hard to take. So I guess what I'm saying here is that sometimes, I've thought, you know, I'm okay, I'm ready, I know how to do this and then come to find out that I have still a lot yet to learn.
Safa: Wow, absolutely. That's a very powerful example. And I'm sure many people can relate to that, that experience of realizing that, wow, there's so much more to learn so much more to think about, and so many perhaps better ways that we could, we could be approaching this work. And also when you mentioned how oftentimes we approach maybe a project with a sense of deficit, like that topic of struggling with fundraising is something that we often talk about on the podcast, but that ability or that option of turning it around and not approaching it from Okay, what don't we have, but what do we have, I think that can also be very empowering and is definitely a great way to think about a situation. You know, we've talked about a variety of different issues, but thinking about just generally perhaps, broadly speaking, the development sector or indigenous futures or the challenges of our times in different ways, you know, all the various challenges that exist - are there some other final thoughts that you'd like to share in terms of ways we could be doing better or how to work together, how to address the the work that we I think are all committed to doing but maybe everyone has different ideas about what the best ways and strategies are?
Filiberto: You know, working in engaging in building a future can be challenging, can be energy zapping. One has to be positive; one has to be hopeful. One thought that comes to me because I was recently in conversation with a colleague at the helm of an organization doing amazing work, but also feeling tired and sometimes frustrated with the fact that, you know, progress is not made as speedily as we would like. And we were talking about how we have to approach this work with a kind of humility that can perhaps be best expressed in this manner. He said, you know, you have to think about who am I that I could change the world? I'm just a grain of sand, you know, I'm just a speck in the universe. But balanced against that, who am I not to be able to change the world? And that, to me, is something I think that has been helpful. I always think, okay, you know what, sometimes I feel like I alone, I can change this. I'm going to take it upon my shoulders and change it, right - and then I have to realize that, you know, I'm just a little grain, right? A little drop of water in the ocean, but you know what, all of these drops make the ocean, so it is not only for me to carry, so do not become disillusioned by the fact that maybe there are setbacks and progress is slow. But at the same time, you know, be reminded that despite the fact that we are just a grain of sand, a little drop of water, that we can. I always go back to that, especially in moments where I feel frustrated. The other thing that has been important to me is to always think about how reality is a lot more than whatever people say about it, that I have my own ideas of, but you know what, whatever it is that I'm seeing, it's not the totality of it, I need to make space for other voices, I need to listen. You know, it requires a kind of humility. I think if we're going to come up with solutions, it requires a lot of dialogue and a lot of listening. You know, among the Kekchi peoples for example, there's a word that is used to refer to meeting which is ab'ink, people say _____ ab'ink, I'm going to a meeting, it could be translated to that, but really, it translates to: I'm going to listen. And I think it's important. So there is an amount of listening that needs to be happening, we have to listen to each other, we have to make space, especially for those who are generally not heard, and perhaps out of that we can come up with visions, with ways of moving forward that might be more successful.
Safa: As you say, listening, dialogue, humility. They're such, you know, powerful words to wrap up this conversation. Thank you so much, Dr. Penados, for speaking with us and sharing your experiences and your reflections. I really appreciate it. And it's been really wonderful. So thank you so much.
Filiberto: Thank you and all the best with your initiative. It's fantastic work that you're doing.
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