For at least the past few weeks, education has been the story in Chile; news of Chile’s education protests has, in fact, made it around the globe. Although the protests involve many issues related to education, at their core they are about improving access to education within Chile.
This, of course, includes improving indigenous peoples’ access to education. Thus, as one would expect, many indigenous individuals and organizations have participated in the protests or shown their support for them. What many do not know, however, is that Chilean law actually makes certain guarantees to indigenous peoples that do not exist for other portions of the population. Many of these guarantees are only beginning to be implemented and indigenous peoples are in the middle of the fight to have them fully realized.
Photo credit: Gobierno de Chile
In 2008, the Chilean government signed Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization into law. Convention 169 is a law that seeks to give indigenous peoples far more input into the decisions that affect their own lives. This law includes several provisions related to indigenous education.
For instance, the law states that indigenous peoples should be involved in the creation of education programs and services and that such activities should, “incorporate their histories, their knowledge and technologies, their value systems and further their social, economic and cultural aspirations.” This guarantee means that indigenous peoples should be involved in the curriculum where their children go to school and that their histories, cultures and values must be integrated into education.
It is provisions like this one in Chilean law that have been the basis for recent demands by Mapuche students for a Mapuche university. It is also the reason that more and more intercultural education programs are sprouting up throughout Chile. For example, on Tuesday, Aug. 9 in Lampa, a town approximately 40 kilometers northwest of Santiago, a meeting was held to begin the process in which the municipality of Lampa, pre-kindergarten organization JUNJI and indigenous leaders from the area will work together to hopefully transfer control of a new pre-school to an indigenous organization. This type of endeavor would have been nearly impossible under Chile’s laws just a few years ago.
Despite some recent success stories in the area of indigenous education, there is still much work to do and many barriers for indigenous peoples to overcome before laws like Convention 169 are fully in effect. One particularly important barrier is the need to raise social awareness about why indigenous peoples have special rights with respect to education in the first place.
The fact of the matter is that international law as well as Chilean law, at least in writing, takes indigenous education seriously precisely because education is one of the most meaningful ways that culture is passed on from generation to generation. Teaching one’s own language, worldview, history, religion, etc., to one’s children is the primary way that culture survives. And for more than 500 years, indigenous peoples have been locked out of the formal education process. This has resulted in many indigenous peoples having lost valuable parts of their culture, such as their languages or religions.
The goal of today’s laws in Chile is to reverse that process and allow indigenous peoples to regain control over their own culture in order to ensure its continued existence. In order to accomplish this goal, indigenous education must look different than that of the larger societies they live within. Despite these differences in rights, however, the protests in Chile ultimately serve as a reminder for us all that, at the end of the day, having access to education in one’s own culture is something strongly valued by both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples alike.
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If you are aware of any Indigenous education initiatives or programs in Chile, then we encourage you to take a look at a project we’re involved in called “El derecho de los Pueblos Originarios a la educación: Avanzado hacia una efectiva libre determinación” at the following website: http://www.educacionindigena.org/. If you are involved in an Indigenous education initiative in Chile, then please consider filling out the survey on that site. And if you are just interested in Indigenous education issues, then please check back at that site in a few months as we hope to have a number of case studies about how Indigenous peoples are exercising their right to education in Chile posted by then.
And then we also have the law for children with disabilities (Ley20.422) that intersects the laws protecting the rights of indigenous people. They become twice impacted (or twice forgotten) when disabled and Mapuche.