Indigenous Territoriality: External Discourses and Native Perspectives on the Space Inhabited by Tegria’s U’wa Community

Abstract

Tegria’s community is part of the U’wa indigenous people, who have inhabited the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy since the pre-Hispanic period, in the jurisdiction of the current municipality of Cubara in Boyaca (Colombia). However, this region known as Sarare has been described from anthropological, ethnohistorical, linguistical, and to a lesser extent, geographical approaches, which have generated representations of territory that ignore the historical process of indigenous people. To account for the present territoriality, it was proposed to contrast these external discourses with the community’s visions on its history of occupation and the transformations of the inhabited space, compiled through participatory methodologies that sought the collaborative construction of knowledge based on joint recognition of the place, the participant observation and the constant dialogue between indigenous and researchers. In this way, it was established that the external discourses show a territory that does not correspond to the processes of appropriation, adaptation, and reconfiguration of the space that the U’wa indigenous community has lived through and are evident in everyday settings such as the cultivation plot and the school. Therefore, it is only possible to recognize indigenous territoriality by exploring other alternatives, expressions, and perspectives that involve directly the communities and are not external to the context of the inquiry itself.

Fortalecimiento de la cultura ambiental desde los saberes ancestrales zenúes en el currículo educativo

“…Para resolver problemáticas medioambientales son indispensables las influencias formativas promotoras de actividades cognoscitivas, prácticas, axiológicas y comunicativas, caracterizadas por la conservación del medio ambiente y el mejoramiento de la calidad de vida, y representen una conexión real y dialógica con el contexto y el territorio propio en el que se presenta el problema y que afecta el desarrollo sostenible de la naturaleza y la sociedad (Magni, 2017;Pérez, Bravo et al, 2017;Wals, 2019;Grosseck et al, 2019). Esta idea se apoya por el discurso de Gamba-Barón et al (2021), cuando mencionan en su estudio que: [...] para dar cuenta de la territorialidad presente, se contrastaron estos discursos externos con las perspectivas propias de la comunidad sobre su historia de ocupación y las transformaciones del espacio habitado, recopiladas a través de metodologías participativas que buscaron la construcción colaborativa de conocimiento a partir de la observación participante y un constante diálogo de saberes. (p. 2) los procesos de investigación pueden utilizarse como estrategia pedagógica para la educación ambiental en las escuelas (Vásquez-Thorné et al, 2018;Gaviria-Paredes et al, 2018).…”