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This article illustrates how Mapuche Indigenous knowledge (Kimün) and language (Mapudungun) incorporated into an Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) program of a school in a Mapuche context in Chile creates decolonizing counter-hegemonic narratives as forms of culturally relevant pedagogy. Based on a six-month school ethnography, this study focuses on the role of an ancestral educator (Kimche), who as a teacher in the IBE program becomes an agent of Indigenous cultural and linguistic transmission as he brings Indigenous knowledge into the classroom as his main curricular objectives. Framed in the complex historical, sociocultural, and political contexts of Indigenous education in Latin America and in Chile, this article highlights the current debates about IBE inside and outside Indigenous communities, which are defining the sustainability of these programs.
Introduction: Intercultural Bilingual Education and Indigenous Knowledge Since early European colonization, ancestral Indigenous knowledge, languages, and other Indigenous forms of meaning construction have not been validated or legitimized by the Western academy or by its formal schooling systems (Battiste & Youngblood Henderson, 2000; Macedo, 1999; Smith, 1999). Despite the persistence of colonial and neocolonial ideologies that devalue and marginalize Indigenous knowledge as a lesser form of knowledge construction, Indigenous epistemologies have remained at the heart of the counter-hegemonic narratives of resistance enabling the survival of Indigenous people's cultural heritage (Cajete, 2008; Semali & Kincheloe, 1999).
The Mapuche people of Chile are no exception to this rule as historically, schooling for this population has been part of the modern nation-state's ideology based on Eurocentric, assimilationist, monocultural, and monolingual perspectives anchored in its Spanish and Catholic roots (Marimán & Bello, 1997). This has created abysmal gaps between the culture and language of schools serving Indigenous populations and the Indigenous knowledge and languages that already exist in the communities they serve (Díaz-Coliñir, personal interview, 2004).
Nevertheless, times are changing in Latin America as the Indigenous Emergence, a regional political movement that began in the early 1990s, has caused Indigenous people across the Americas to begin deconsrructing Western paradigms and (re)constructing Indigenous ones. Nowadays, embedded in new forms of national and international dialogues, the movement proposes Indigenous setf-determination and social justice (Bengoa, 2000; Stavenhagen, 1997). The Indigenous Emergence has placed Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) programs at the center of its educational agenda (Williamson...