Indigenous Expertise, Exchange, and Education in Ecuador, 1930–60

In the 1930s, policy makers across the Americas claimed expertise about Indigenous people’s experiences and needs, and often oriented their policies toward entrenching Indigenous communities more deeply into the capitalist market. In Ecuador, Indigenous laborers challenged repressive policies by identifying autonomous education as essential to political and economic liberation. These efforts culminated in 1944, when they created Indigenous schools to teach children Spanish so that they could demand land and labor rights, while also fostering a Quichua language pedagogy. Indigenous teachers in these new schools taught using Quichua literature and grammar books produced by non-Indigenous scholars. Indigenous educators were both competing with education projects that aimed to Christianize and civilize them, while also adopting outsiders’ conclusions that Indigenous people should integrate into the dominant society. Sometimes, however, Indigenous people challenged outsiders by offering them moral tales of land dispossession, community leadership, and respect for nature. Sometimes their stories were set in ancient Indigenous societies, at times they include animal protagonists, and often they positioned Indigenous egalitarian relations as superior to modern hierarchies of power. My research asks: What are the historical contexts in which outsiders sought Indigenous knowledge? What do the narratives they produced reveal about non-Indigenous perceptions of Indigenous oral traditions? Are the traditions that they wrote about distinctly “Indigenous,” or can we gauge imported concepts that informed Native discourses as they evolved to respond to modern social conflicts, especially regarding colonialism and its enduring structures? To answer these questions, I analyze the themes and voices that comprise various artifacts of Quichua literary tradition, such as textbooks and oral histories, as well as ethnographic essays and field notes of scholars and missionaries who worked in Indigenous communities. I argue that in attempting to collect and record Indigenous traditions, outsiders and locals often redefined the very traditions they labeled Indigenous.