Extending and seeking
“The stories we tell about the past shape the methods we use to imagine more equitable futures….we cannot build the liberatory worlds we hope for and imagine without grappling with the inequities we face unevenly Today” D. Rosner
Colonial education and its structure erased much of the aboriginal literacy that was part of the rich cultural background of aboriginal peoples in America. Religious doctrines that came to America to “civilize” and “Christianize” the barbaric “Indians” put a lot of effort into deleting or deviating aboriginal ways of knowing and communicating. It not only denied the value of these different literary traditions but also tried to instill Eurocentric knowledge and written literacy as the only valid way of education/literacy. In Paraguay the Jesuits with their “Missions”- (1587-1767) created an infrastructure during two centuries where every aspect of European culture was transferred to the aboriginal peoples as the ultimate way of living. They stablished the written guarani language, adopting the latin alphabet with specific grammatical and orthographical rules similar to Spanish language.
In my research, I am studying the possibilities of decolonizing design through rewiring the memory of voices that once heard, were disfigured and confused with colonial knowledge. The guarani language which was printed and “hotwired” as if that would make it better, “civilized”…
This is a journey that is starting and will take me through two incommensurable paths, the one that has the memory of the land in the voice of its people, and the one of the settler, who set vastly on printed paper their version of our entangled history.
