Amanda Nascimento Miranda

Ways of returning: Indigenous-Alien networks and hybrid methods of a pedagogy of webs in institutions of art and education

In this study, intersections between three cultural workers’ experiences with displacement, isolation, resistance, and connection, and networks on the complex fabric of the uncommons (De la Cadena & Blaser, 2018) highlight existing ways of working together (Benites & Lafuente, 2018) guided by transamerican Indigenous and hybrid epistemologies as they exist in the contact zone with historically Western-centered institutions of art and education. My ways of engaging with knowledge and my experience as a Brazilian-United Statesian migrating to the US, constitute the guiding methodological threads for this project, resulting from a combination of active search and “serendipitous encounters.” Acknowledging and reflecting on both challenges and potentialities of Indigenous presence within culturally formative spaces ranging from museums to higher education institutions, I considered examples of the practices of the educators, artists, museum professionals, and researchers Michelle Brownlee (Ojibwe), Kelly Church (Ottawa/Pottawatomi/Ojibwe), and Uýra Sodoma (Munduruku), currently in the United States and Brazil, through interviews, observations, site visits, written exchanges, and biblio-videographic materials. Journal entries in my sketchbook, written reflections and poetic essays on my shifting identity and perspective within a new institutional context, as well as my artistic production, supported the interpretation of documentation obtained through verbal, observational, embodied, and written exchanges. Inspired by Indigenous-Alien encounters (Caboco, 2020) and published articles, interviews, and books by Brazilian and other Latin American and Indigenous scholars and cultural workers, this study identified paths for dreaming and creating other possible institutional practices as they suggest methods of expanding decolonial cracks where alliances and transculturation result from a search for symmetry between institutional and non-institutional cultural practices. Creating an ecology of practices, this project functions as a political-pedagogical archipelago to document and indicate other possibilities of meaning, knowledge, and worlds to be shared, using the tools and wide-reaching position of the academic context as a knowledge-producing place, with and beyond the everyday locality of these efforts. This transamerican web-like movement that grows from the margins – the invisibilized worlds and their holistic educational practices – into the center – the institutionally established worlds, methods, and definitions of art and education – produces a transpedagogical and hybrid networked system of coexisting ways of working, that operates as a pedagogy of webs by articulating researcher’s and participants’ walkings (Gogan, 2016) – a geopoetic artistic and pedagogical concept aligned with Paulo Freire’s notion of andarilhagem – while navigating through institutional spaces.