Using Biomimicry as approach to create teaching and learning spaces that incorporate indigenous wisdom and knowledges

I have been bristling with indignation since the day I was born. My mind oscillates between two extremes, at all times. As is the case with many young people, I keep yearning for a time that did not even exist while adjusting to constant changes in the world. In the beginning it was about the little things like, being told to speak in English only, attend church service every Sunday or eat my greens. Fortunately, I am more sophisticated at 26 then I was at 6, and now my shampoo of choice is the current state of environmental governance in the world. Having a deep interest in marginalised communities and environmental matters, means my mind is filled with stories of violence, information, exploitation and data. This poster reflects on and expands on my lived experiences as an educator and environmental activist to protect my childhood home in Goa, (a former Portuguese colony and the smallest state on the west coast of India which is also one of the eight biodiversity hotspots in the world). As a Luso-Portuguese woman of colour, I grew up listening to my grandparents tell us stories about their experiences living through the colonial and post-colonial era. My ancestors, like many others were not able to learn much about our colonial past to truly understand where we come from and what we’re truly made of. I have had friends who travelled to parts of Goa, Mozambique, Angola and Brazil to learn more their family history. Growing up in small community like Goa taught me a lot about interdependence before I even knew the term. I understood early on how the past affected the present state of this colonial land and its people. It is these experiences that rooted the core of who I am today. These experiences inspired my research on developing nature-based learning modules to guide my teaching practices and my current work that has been guided by this way of being and knowing. This poster draws on literature around the socio-political history of Goa, nature-based education, critical place-based education to support my thinking by presenting the theory/practice/ontology of biomimicry as an approach that incorporates feminist, indigenous and decolonial thought to resist and work outside of the Cartesian binary of humanism and systems of power such as capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. The purpose of using Biomimicry as a theory is to make sense of indigenous wisdom and knowledges, and as a way of being, seeing, perceiving, and doing “education” that intentionally reconnects humans and all earth beings.