Childhood

“Only the collaboration between the children and the adults will be able to solve the problems of our time.” – Maria Montessori from Madras on 11 November 1939 (Report on the First Indian Training Course in Education); quoted in Maria Montessori Writes to her Grandchildren: letters from India, 1939-1946 (Amsterdam, 2020), p. 38
https://montessori-pierson.com/india.html
https://worldcat.org/en/title/1273931392
https://indiantribalheritage.org/?p=16037

“Irulas are very knowledgeable about medicinal plants”: Interview with Zai Whitaker, Director of the Irula Tribal Women’s Welfare Society – Tamil Nadu

by

The ITWWS is a women’s community-based development organization established in 1986. It was founded with the aim of protecting natural resources, empowering Irula women and using the Irula tribal knowledge of forest resources for economic prosperity. The organization started with five villages and now covers an area of over 100 villages in 4 districts. Because … Read more

Schooling of Scheduled Tribes in India: Lessons from the indigenous people of Brazil – Odisha

by

Amarendra Das and I have visited a set of schools in the tribal villages of the Gajapati district of Odisha state (in India) early this year. Since these tribal communities speak a different language (namely Soura) (and they don’t speak the main language of the state – Oriya), schools here practice bilingual education in 1-4 … Read more

Time for an apology to the world’s Indigenous peoples: Residential schools, exploitation of natural resources and ill treatment in the name of “progress”

by

One of many broken agreements was that children were to be educated “whenever the Indians of the reserve shall desire it” in schools on the reserves. But rather than instruction being optional for those bands who desired it, as agreed, the state abducted Indigenous children and forcibly confined them in residential schools far from their … Read more

Video & Slideshow | “Visible Work, Invisible Women” by photographer P. Sainath

by

‘Visible Work, Invisible Women’, is a fully curated, online still-photo exhibition. This video tour takes viewers around the entire physical exhibition, with original photographs and texts reproduced below as an article. All the photographs were shot by P. Sainath across ten Indian states between 1993 and 2002. These roughly span the first decade of the … Read more

Listen patiently to the tribals, with their immense knowledge and creativity: The key to preserving nature while ending widespread exploitation and stigmatization of women

by

In contemporary practice, the tribal memory is greatly undermined. There is general insistence that tribal children attend schools where non-tribal children attend schools, that they use medicines manufactured for others and that they adopt common agricultural practices. All because the world has very little time to listen patiently to the tribals, with their immense knowledge … Read more