After centuries of colonization, the ongoing struggle to preserve communal knowledge, rituals, language, traditions, and teaching and learning practices has taken on even more significance in the increasingly standardized world of globalization. For many indigenous societies, protecting community-based customs has involved the rejection of state-provided education, raising a series of interconnected issues regarding autonomy, modernity and cultural sustainability.
In New World of Indigenous Resistance, these questions are approached from multiple perspectives by means of an innovative exchange between linguist and human rights advocate Noam Chomsky, and more than twenty scholars, activists and educators from across the Americas.
In response to Chomsky’s ideas, voices from Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Peru, the United States, and Uruguay draw from their first-hand experience and scholarship, speaking to, with, and at times against Chomsky’s views.