Indigenous Voices and Decolonising Lifelong Education

Indigenousness is about long-term occupancy of a place and the knowledge and consciousness that arises from place. In this edited volume, global Indigenous voices engage in truth-telling about 500+ years of colonisation, including loss of population, language, culture, spirituality, and land. Education has been central in facilitating colonialism. To decolonize lifelong education and learning is to redress the persistent inequities in education for Indigenous Peoples. It is to recover and revitalize cultural and place-based knowledge, practices, and identities. To this end, Indigenous voices from Uganda, India, Mongolia, Mexico, Japan, and numerous voices from the Blackfoot, Metis, and Cree in Canada speak to: the five steps of colonisation, self-decolonization, resurgence in Indigenous knowledge systems, the African Renaissance, cognitive justice, holistic learning, the process of intended extinction and resulting resilience, the vitality of intergenerational transmission, reconstituting tribal pedagogical frameworks, symbolic violence and the rebuilding of pride and identity, the importance of blood memory for restoring ancestral knowledge, the ancient tradition of hospitality, healing individualism, and elevating the rich plurality of self-determining grassroots communities and their regeneration of what it means to be human and an intact community. This book is for scholars, researchers, policy makers, educators and students across multiple fields including Indigenous studies, decolonial studies, education, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. It was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Lifelong Education.