Elizabeth Sumida Huaman

Selected courses taught

OLPD 5122 Indigenous Education: Research, Policy, and Practice

OLPD 5080 (Special Topics) Qualitative research design: Applied Indigenous methods

DSSC 8111 Ways of Knowing

OLPD 8101 International development and education

OLPD 5132 Intercultural Education and Training: Theory and Application

Profile

Situated in the Mantaro Valley of Junín, Peru is an autochthonous Quechua Indigenous community that I call home. My mother and her siblings were born and raised in an adobe family house built by my grandparents, Antonieta Jesusa Carhuamaca and Antonio Huaman. Two floors of small rooms are linked by a wooden ladder that leads up to a balcony where a view of the entire valley includes one of our sacred mountain glaciers, Waytapallana—source of epistemic and ontological affirmation and renewal for the Indigenous people of this region. I am an educational researcher because of my connections to this place and my people and my dedication to using research and educational design for the caring of Indigenous lands and more than human beings with who share this earth with us. As a Wanka/Quechua woman scholar, my projects collaborate with Indigenous communities, schools, and institutions across the Americas on Indigenous visions and responses to social and educational inequalities compounded by the economic and environmental insecurities linked to globalization, climate change, and political instability. We use research to address severely endangered cultural practices, languages, and environments. The work crosses colonial demarcations/geographical borders, viewing Indigenous lands as contiguous while (re)imagining good global relationships. With community members, Indigenous educators, and youth, we consider in and out-of school Indigenous education systems, environmental justice, and Indigenous pedagogies.

 Centering Indigenous Knowledge Systems, this work explores three themes--first, the interfaces between ideas and discourses of modernity (and progress), exogenous and endogenous development, and Indigenous places; second, Indigenous family and community land-based educational design and generative environmental pedagogies; and third, Indigenous and decolonial frameworks and practices of rights and responsibilities. I am especially interested in how Indigenous peoples negotiate and transform in and out-of-school educational development for our knowledge systems and the ways that teaching and learning explicitly address threats to Indigenous ecologies. Our projects are community-focused and make empirical contributions that are inseparable from Indigenous self-determination and self-development, the centrality of land and more than human relations, ecological adaptations, and political struggle. 

 As an educator, I work closely on decolonial epistemologies and educational design, i.e., how family and community nature-based philosopies, emplaced work, and embodied relationships serve as vital educational processes. Over several decades, I have had the honor of working with community members, schools, and tribal institutions in farms, forests, and cities in Canada, the U.S., and Peru on projects that reaffirm humanity defined by love of land and inherent Indigenous responsibilities. Trained by Pueblo Indian researchers in New Mexico and my own Wanka and Quechua community leaders and extended kin, I specialize in ethnography, case studies, narrative, grounded theory, and mixed-methods approaches while advancing Quechua research methodolgies, comparative Indigenous education research (CIER--a subfield of Indigenous Research Methodologies and Critical Indigenous Studies), and mentoring students to co-construct Indigenous protocol and language-based research methods in their own work.

 For more information on my work: http://www.sumidahuaman.com