Indigenous Education and Cultural Preservation

INDIGENOUS EDUCATION AND CULTURAL PRESERVATION

A few years back, a school for indigenous people was founded in Davao City. It's called the Pamulaan Center for Indigenous People Education. On its introduction article on the web, Pamulaan was described as: "aiming to create culturally appropriate and relevant pathways of professional training and formation for indigenous youth and leaders. It offers degree programs such as BA Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development, BS Indigenous Peoples Education, BA Peace Building and Multi-Cultural Studies and BS Indigenous Agriculture. It will also offer associate degrees and short-term courses for community leaders and development workers. "

From the same article, it also boast of its "design to provide a variety of school and community-based academic formation addressing crucial role of various indigenous communities of the country and the employment of a theory, reflection and practice system in which the students will have the chance to develop quality academic formation thru formal sessions in the university and practical training and implementation in various IP communities. The Center hopes to produce graduates equipped with knowledge and abilities to initiate collaborative actions towards sustainable development of Indigenous People communities."

Reading the said article has got me thinking, are we really empowering indigenous people to preserve themselves and their way of life or are we influencing them by our way of life thru formal education?

Indigenous peoples have long contended and amply demonstrated that Native peoples have their own forms of local knowledge, practical expertise, and culturally specific means of transmitting knowledge, although marginalized (and in some cases violently suppressed) by the dominant agents of national society. Formal education has often been associated with language death and those forces undermining indigenous peoples' distinctive identities, worldviews, forms of social organization, and cultural practices.

Formal education on indigenous people I believe is a form of colonization as we were by Spain and United States decades back. We were the negritos, malays and ______. We had Bathala and the forces of nature as gods. We read and wrote in Sanskrit. That was what we were. But we barely recognize these identities now. Although we read about them now in books as part of our formal education curriculum, we no longer practice nor appreciate these elements of our historical identities. We no longer identify to these and at some point sometimes ashamed of our own culture and heritage.

Although it's sure that Pamulaan's intention to incorporate the traditional knowledge with structured academic formats and construct a curriculum that serves cultural, political and economic needs of indigenous people as well as suggests principles for ethical and respectful understanding, indigenous people cannot help but be influenced by contemporary ways hence, cultural extinction is increasingly eminent.

On the other hand, cultural survival as described by Cultural Survival co-founder David Maybury-Lewis (2003), as not a matter of maintaining a way of life,