the Cohesive and Revitalizing Nature of Maya Dance Art and Oral History

Introduction: A "Culture and Development" Intervention in Caribbean Fundamental Americ

We think that these expressions of cultures, peoples, and different identities are not only to be recovered, put on display for exhibition, and used to depict who nosotros were, without attending to the present. It is important to remember not merely about who the indigenous peoples are but, given their differences, how they tin provide central motivations for alter; change from that other idea, from that thought that, obviously, is in directly contradiction with Western thought... ⁱⁱ

(^{Macas, 2005, p. 37}. My translation) ³ .

During my commencement visit to the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua in 2009, I witnessed how civilisation and politics are inseparable. People introduced themselves referencing the Afro-descendant or Indigenous civilisation of belonging: "My proper noun is... and I am Creole" or "I am Mayangna". For me, this was a completely new experience. At this moment, I had the epiphany that self-identification in greeting was an act of agency and cultural resistance ⁴ . I self-consciously became a Mestiza participating in the ability dynamics of international cooperation and its rhetoric of "culture for evolution". Bated from that, I was from Costa Rica, not just ane of the four countries nonetheless imagined as White in Latin America (^{Telles & Flores, 2013}), but also a land with a complex history of border and immigration problems with Nicaragua (^{Sandoval-García, 2004}).

My interlocutors –Nicaraguan, Indigenous and Black women and men– were more aware of cultural and identity politics than I was. Amid the many lessons almost Nicaraguan history, I learned that their "radical" embodiment of culture and politics ^five was not just a performance for executing a mega-project of Cultural revitalization, nor the achievement of a political musical instrument to go on building autonomy, it was a "way of being" in the earth (^{Urrieta, 2013}).

The programme "Cultural Revitalization and Creative Productive Evolution on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua" took place from August 2009 to August 2012. In the framework of international cooperation initiatives, the Millennium Evolution Goals Accomplishment Fund (MDG-F) financed a "Culture and Evolution" intervention ⁶ , providing $viii 864 166 "to assist to reduce inequalities in the human, social and economic development of these communities through cultural reclamation, productive development, and a deepening of knowledge of tangible and intangible heritage" (^{MDG-F, 2008, p. 5.} My translation) ⁷ . The plan aimed to achieve the following outcomes:

1. Strengthen the capacities of Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups living in Nicaragua's Caribbean declension (Miskitu, Garífuna, Creole, Ulwa, Mayangna and Rama) in the areas of cultural revitalization, management, production and administration.

2. Strengthen cultural policies aimed at revitalizing and promoting the cultural variety of the Ethnic and Afro-descendant groups of Nicaragua's Caribbean coast and safeguarding their cultural heritage.

3. The completion, systematization and dissemination of studies on tangible/intangible cultural heritage of the Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups of Nicaragua's Caribbean coast.

4. Strengthen the cultural identities of the Ethnic and Afro-descendant groups of Nicaragua's Caribbean coast through cultural/creative industries.

5. Promote the cultural/natural heritage of the Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups of Nicaragua's Caribbean area coast through sustainable cultural tourism, contributing to social development and the safeguard of tangible/intangible cultural heritage (^{MDG-F, 2008, p. vi.} My translation) ^eight .

The program required collaboration between national institutions, United nations agencies and authorities from the Caribbean Autonomous Regions of the Due south (RACS) and North (RACN) of Nicaragua. The main governmental partners were the Nicaraguan Constitute of Tourism (INTUR) and the Nicaraguan Institute of Culture (INC). The autonomous authorities included the Regional Autonomous Council of the Caribbean South (CRACS), the Regional Democratic Council of the Caribbean area North (CRACN), the Regional Autonomous Government of the Caribbean South (GRACS), and the Regional Autonomous Government of the Caribbean area N (GRACN). In addition, viii local governments, and vii communal and territorial governments, participated in the program, as did two regional universities: the Academy of the Autonomous Regions of the Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast (URACCAN) and Bluefields Indian and Caribbean Academy (BICU). This intervention prioritized subaltern populations of the Nicaraguan Caribbean as the principal beneficiaries of the program. Those populations were the Miskitu, Mayangna, Ulwa and Rama, Ethnic communities; and the Creole and Garífuna, Black and Blackness/Indigenous ^nine communities, respectively.

Among the UN executive agencies, UNESCO was largely responsible for most of the activities and products linked to the first iii goals listed above. The Regional Part of UNESCO in Central America is located in San José, Costa Rica. From there, the project was managed and supervised by the Culture Sector Specialist, a White Andorran woman, and a Technical Monitor, myself, a Costa Rican Mestiza. The local team included the UNESCO National Projection Officeholder, an Indigenous Miskitu woman; the Administrative Banana, a Blackness Creole adult female; the Technical Assistant of RAAS, a Blackness Creole human; and the Technical Assistant of RAAN, a Mestiza woman who cocky-identified every bit Miskitu ¹⁰ . Equally the Costa Rican skillful and post-obit guidelines from the Specialist, I visited the site in Nicaragua approximately every three months to assess the squad's implementation strategies and achievements. The UNESCO Specialist visited the Coast towards the showtime and the terminate of the plan, sharing UNESCO'due south expertise in working with diverse cultural heritages with other United Nations agencies and stakeholders.

Given the political, economic and social contexts surrounding the Caribbean declension of Nicaragua ^xi , also as the different actors involved, the challenges of intervention and political negotiation were significant. Many questions well-nigh power dynamics and colonial legacies arose throughout the process: Who was really leading the "cultural" initiative? Was the program genuinely responding to the communal interests of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples? Were these efforts orchestrated past a programmatic bureaucracy of international cooperation, past Mestizo government interests, or by partisan movements? Responses to these tensions and internal contradictions included an endeavour to situate the casher communities as the protagonists of the project's interventions. For instance and thanks to their networking and experience, the local UNESCO team consulted the Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations on the pattern and scope of the activities. My colleagues too privileged participatory inquiry, using intercultural, not-academic teams to atomic number 82 customs-based research and workshops. Nonetheless, these decolonizing intentions continually collided with a Western arroyo to conducting development projects and inquiry amid subaltern populations ¹² .

My function in this process embodied the challenges of being an intercultural mediator, as described by Jaqolb'due east Lucrecia Ximena García and Sergio Mendizábal (²⁰¹¹). From their experience working with Mayan epistemology, they depict intercultural mediation as a crucial attribute of the everyday life of cross-cultural teams. They go along to describe this process of dialogue and exchange every bit crucial to "edifice inclusive and emancipatory intercultural identities" (^{García & Mendizábal, 2011, p. 296}). In this sense, I was not only part of an intercultural team, just also the interlocutor betwixt San José, Costa Rica, and the Caribbean area coast of Nicaragua. This role involved the translation of authoritative processes and conceptual approaches for my UNESCO colleagues in the field. My counterparts pointed out the discrepancies between the arrangement's requirements and the realities on the basis. Nosotros faced a constant claiming in finding alternate avenues for building an agreement and productive engagement between two seemingly polarized worlds.

Equally my contact with the on-site team and Indigenous and Black leaders increased, they taught me to recognize their knowledge production non but as a function of their cultural revitalization processes, but also as a form of continual anti-racist struggle and resistance ¹³ . Through long meetings and breezy conversations in Bluefields, Bilwi, Managua and via Skype, I realized that identification and promotion of cultural expressions may invigorate cultural self-esteem, but also reinforces political mobilization, amidst historically marginalized groups throughout the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. The cultural revitalization processes questioned the hegemonic ways of imposing a Western/Mestizo perspective of doing projects, over the endogenous knowledge; moreover, they destabilized the complex relation of power –and coloniality ¹⁴ – betwixt the international cooperation system and the regional and communitarian authorities. From that position, the program was claimed non to exist just another intervention "from to a higher place", but an opportunity for funding and generating dialogue and action around certain Indigenous and Black struggles that were already happening "from below".

Throughout the following sections, I illustrate how the local and not-local UNESCO teams, working side-by-side with representatives from each of the cultural groups, were driven to question the political economy of noesis ¹⁵ (^{Rivera-Cusicanqui, 2012}), and to engage with decolonizing methodologies ¹⁶ (^{Smith, 1999}). The execution of cultural revitalization processes in full general, and those related to oral traditions and narratives of Blackness and Indigenous populations in particular, entails the emergence of alternative epistemologies (^{De Sousa Santos, 2014}; ^{Mallon, 2012}; ^{Collins, 2000}), which not simply unveil the contested human relationship between the then-called racial and indigenous minorities and the Mestizo bulk in Nicaragua, just as well the dynamics of colonialism crossing cognition production and cultural cooperation projects in a broader scope. Ultimately, and following Catherine Walsh's (²⁰¹²) cess of "other knowledges" and critiques: "the ways that such positionings cross and build thought, and the means that such thought orients praxis is of increasing interest to the movements themselves and to their intellectuals; information technology is constitutive of what nosotros might term as new shifts or turns toward a politics, ethics, and epistemology of decoloniality" (^{p. 16}).

Revitalizing and/or Decolonizing the Cultural Knowledge of Indigenous and Black Populations

One of the activities nether UNESCO's supervision required "the revitalization and preservation of at to the lowest degree four expressions of intangible cultural heritage at risk, as emblematic experiences that volition nurture the training, management and cultural promotion processes that characterize cultural revitalization deportment" (^{MDG-F, 2008, p. 27}. My translation) ¹⁷ . The Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage (^{UNESCO, 2003}) was the framework for the deportment and scope of the revitalization process, understanding safeguarding as: "measures aimed at ensuring the viability of the intangible cultural heritage, including the identification, documentation, research, preservation, protection, promotion, enhancement, transmission, particularly through formal and non-formal education, likewise as the revitalization of the various aspects of such heritage" (^{UNESCO, 2003, Art. ii. three}).

During the 3 years of the plan, the team organized diverse deportment for revitalization and heritage protection in a tripartite process. The commencement phase was devoted to communitarian research for identifying and documenting endangered cultural expressions. The second stage involved inter-generational exchange. This procedure was executed through workshops with elders, children, and young adults. These meetings were focused on sharing the research results and reflecting on the scope of a shared cultural heritage. The 3rd phase was dedicated to disseminate the cultural expressions of each of the participating groups. This process included a entrada communicating the results of the previous phases, and the publication of the "Identidades y Patrimonio Cultural" ^xviii collection (Collection Identities and Cultural Heritage).

The three-phase construction echoed the logic backside the intervention, an "inside-out" experience. The goal was to move from working with the cultural identity of the community to facilitating cultural diffusion and promoting initiatives that would ensure the community's cocky-sustainability. When selecting the forms of cultural expression that required revitalization, we took into consideration UNESCO'south criteria. These guidelines suggested a focus on expressions that were rooted in cultural tradition, served as a source of inspiration and intercultural exchange, constituted a unique testimony to cultural traditions, were at adventure of disappearing, and possessed exceptional value (^{UNESCO, 2003}). Later on several workshops and agreements with communal and regional authorities, they activated at least 10 processes of cultural revitalization. These programs were all straight or indirectly focused on oral traditions.

The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage defines oral traditions and expressions, including language, every bit a vehicle of intangible cultural heritage ^{(UNESCO, 2003, Art. 2. two}). 4 Indigenous and Black-Ethnic populations –Ulwa, Twahka, Miskitu and Garífuna– selected their languages and oral traditions as a priority for cultural recovery activity. The Miskitu aimed to recover the oral history of the community of the Wangki River and gain recognition of a transnational cultural community across the borders of Nicaragua and Honduras. The Rama people selected to revitalize their toponymy, also equally the oral stories, myths, and legends linked to their traditional places and place names. In improver, the Rama community chose to recover their gastronomy which, according the UNESCO Convention of 2003, falls inside the domain of social practices tied to "noesis, and practices about nature" (^{Art. two}). Meanwhile, the Black Creole community chose to revitalize their May Pole celebration. According to the UNESCO Convention, this expression may be catalogued equally both a performing art and a festive commemoration (^{Art. two. two}). It is also considered an oral tradition because it includes the operation of myths and songs.

These various oral traditions are crucial constituents of the cultural distinctiveness of the Indigenous and Black populations we worked with. The participants proudly recognized its cultural value and knowledge: specific worldviews transmitted from generation to generation, and historical efforts to rescue ancestral knowledge equally daily acts of cultural resistance confronting mestizo hegemony. The process generated a dynamic dialogue between elders, youth, and children who shared oral literature (including legends, myths, stories), songs, proverbs, prayers, recipes, memory, and everyday forms of exact interaction.

The noesis of Indigenous and Black communities was as well gathered through the publication of an intercultural book, Cuentos, Leyendas y Tradiciones del Caribe Nicaragüense ("Stories, Legends and Traditions of the Nicaraguan Caribbean") (^{Kauffmann, Antonio & Zamora, 2012}), and through the publication of the collection "Identidades y Patrimonio Cultural", mentioned above. Additionally, the Wani ^nineteen mag served every bit a platform for disseminating communitarian research and workshop experiences, while the Sahlai ^twenty magazine was defended to publishing the literature of the Mayangna people in their Twahka language. These publications were handed over to the communities' regime, schools, and cultural organizations at the finalization of the program.

While these were gains in terms of documentation, some methodological and linguistic contradictions emerged throughout the revitalization procedure. Commencement, the formats for organizing and systematizing the research conducted by communitarian researchers were adapted to Western bookish models; for example, framing the findings and supporting the sources. The transition from oral to written forms contradicted the very nature of knowledge transmission practiced past the Ethnic and Black communities with whom we were working. Additionally, the cultural revitalization arroyo was supposed to recognize not-Western knowledge systems and promote the visibility of alternative epistemologies. Ultimately, these alternative noesis systems and forms of transmission were confined by Western scriptural economies (^{De Certeau, 1984}). The paradox is illustrated by Linda Tuhiwai Smith's critique who, as a Maori scholar states that research in the West:

is more than than just research that is located in a positivist tradition. It is research which brings to bear, on any study of indigenous peoples, a cultural orientation, a ready of values, a different conceptualization of such things as time, space and subjectivity, dissimilar and competing theories of noesis, highly specialized forms of language, and structures of power (^{Smith, 1999, p. 42}).

Smith's critique illuminates the tensions I observed and experienced during the UNESCO program. Western paradigms seemed to prevail by ways of external (and colonialist) mechanisms for gathering, organizing and displaying information, and the same linguistic difficulties of the program. While most of the initiatives and activities were executed using native languages, Castilian was used for internal communications, reports, and publications. For the target communities, cultural and linguistic revitalization become mitt-in-mitt. Therefore, the apply of their traditional languages during the program represented an important counter-point to the Hispanic cultural and political impositions mentioned before ²¹ . There were moments in discussions where language represented a barrier for communication, and Spanish was imposed equally the lingua franca. Divulgation of the products was likewise in the language of the colonizer and the Mestizo majority, and translation worked once more every bit expose ²² .

How, and so, might a relationship betwixt oral traditions and a decolonial shift become central to these cultural revitalization processes? Drawing from the experience of the participants and the local UNESCO team, the answer requires focusing on ii levels: start, the content of the tradition being revitalized and the dynamics of its functioning; 2d, the inclusion of the discussions nigh the cultural and social meanings of cultural traditions and identities within the plan authorities construction. To expand, I discuss two key cases of cultural revitalization which, on the one mitt, demonstrate the entanglement of oral traditions and other worldviews and alternative cognition; on the other hand, and as an epistemological turn, destabilized the project implementation and its political economy of knowledge (^{Rivera-Cusicanqui, 2012}). The first example I present involves the cultural traditions of the Indigenous Rama community and their celebration of Shauda. The 2nd case considers the May Pole festival of the Creole, Black population.

Rama Teachings nigh the Indivisibility betwixt Humans and Nature

In the example of the Rama, the research team included two representatives of the Rama customs and a mestiza researcher. They documented the customs's gastronomic expressions by dialoging with elders and participating in their kitchen experiences. The team identified twenty-three recipes, some of which indicate similarities to other regional foods ²³ . In their findings, the researchers reported other stories, myths, and legends invoked during the meals preparation. One instance of this coupling of gastronomy and oral tradition is the celebration of the Shauda, a cultural expression that includes dances and rituals. The Shauda allows u.s. to sympathize the correlation between worldviews, knowledge systems and oral traditions for the Rama people:

The Shauda is an ancient commemoration related to the cuisine of the Ramas; it is the hunting of the manatee past indigenous Ramas. Once hunted, the manatee was brought to the customs, cooked, and distributed in every habitation, and a manatee rib was given to each house. Each Rama community celebrates it. When the ancestors did not find manatees in Rama Cay, they sought information technology in any Rama territory, prepared it, and brought it back. The Shauda is a vacation remembered with joy by Rama elders considering it celebrates the triumph of a man when trapping the manatee, since the manatee gives plenty to feed the entire population who, at the fourth dimension, lived in the Rama Cay Island. When a fisherman catches a manatee, the inhabitants hear the audio of a cow horn, and they know that the island had to gloat Shauda. Women and so prepare to melt soup with manatee meat and to feed all the people (^{UNESCO-CRAAS, SP.2012, p. 12}. My translation) ²⁴ .

The previous description suggests a collective sense of feeding. The individual human action of a hunter is recognized as a common experience. His prey is distributed amidst the inhabitants of the community and several people are involved in meal training. Eating become then an experience of solidarity. Complementary, the ritual that accompanies the Shauda includes an amends to the possessor of the animals, "because all animals have their owners, who are spirits. If forgiveness is non asked, in a few days the hunter or someone in the community will die. To prevent this from happening you demand to celebrate the Shauda" (^{UNESCO-CRAAS, SP.2012, p. 29}. My translation) ²⁵ .

While some people may argue that hunting manatees is problematic considering these animals are considered endangered species, this deed is non for individual consumption, nor conducted for commercial purposes. Instead, hunting is part of the Rama's subsistence economy and preserves community livelihoods. The content and functioning of the tradition recognizes that actions of individuals affect nature. For Rama people, equally for other Ethnic groups, the indivisibility between man and nature traverse their social practices and offers an alternative and embodied epistemology ²⁶ : if forgiveness is not requested, the act of aggression against the animate being returns to the community in the grade of human expiry, as a cocky-devastation metaphor.

The worldview of Rama people, by which nature is understood as a living entity, is also illustrated by the publication "Ngalingtupkiyubusukaakar: Debajo de cada piedra vive united nations espíritu" ("Ngalingtupkiyubusukaakar: Under every rock lives a spirit"). This document offers the results of the Rama's cultural mapping ²⁷ . The community consider their worldview as an intangible heritage that crosses their cultural resources inventory. Their ancient knowledge may become even tangible in the class of sacred stones with a specific identify in their cultural mapping. These traditions and epistemics of nature are also invoked by Rama leaders when defending their territories against Mestizo peasants and the extension of the agronomical frontier (^{UNESCO-CRAAS, SP.2012, p. eight}).

The publication "Stories, Legends and Traditions of the Nicaraguan Caribbean" mentioned higher up (Kauffmann, Antonio & Zamora, 2012) also included other oral traditions of the Rama, along with the Shauda. The Rama community identified these oral texts, including legends and beliefs as a vehicle for the transmission of the community's values. They besides saw them every bit a way of understanding their lives and those of other non-Western communities. The introduction to this compilation of oral traditions states that when a story references nature, information technology is normally accompanied by moral values. From this perspective, "the relationship between indigenous people and nature and how to care for flora and animal is highlighted" (^{Kauffmann et al., 2012, p. 10}. My translation) ²⁸ . Reflections about the identify of humans in nature, the relationships with their community, and with other homo beings outside of their customs too arise in the 2nd example of cultural revitalization.

The Creoles Celebrate Black Solidarity

The second case written report turns our attending to Creoles, one of the Black communities of the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua ²⁹ . Representatives of this customs in the RACN and the RACS participated in the recovery and enhancement of their May Pole celebration ^xxx . This ritual is a cultural expression rich in heritage and integrates music, dance, performance, ritual, entertainment, gastronomy, and oral traditions. As in the previous cases, the research team dialogued with the elders and documented their conversations and experiences. In the 2d phase, they organized workshops to promote exchanges betwixt the elderly, youth, and children. These sessions generated debates virtually the current meaning of the celebration for Creoles and the inhabitants of the Caribbean coast in full general. The participants critically remarked, time and time once again, that what was routinely performed on the stages of Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, did not represent Creole culture and reproduced anti-blackness racist stereotypes ³¹ . The performance of May Pole has been reduced to a choreography of sensual (and sexual) movements, and to a costume that hypersexualizes the bodies of the dancers, particularly (and unsurprisingly) Black women (^{Morris, 2010}). Members of these racialized and cultural customs engaged with a cultural revitalization plan distinguishing between a private May Pole celebration that reinforced their Black heritage; and a public brandish of "some other" product rooted in the cultural tradition, only designed for the economic sustainability of the community.

Whereas the 2d product needs to exist revised and validated by the customs, the offset space of May Pole transcends an creative operation, and entails an endogenous Creole episteme of the myth, the sacred, and the so-called curvation of fraternity. Ms. Lizzie ³² , an emblematic cultural performer of May Pole in Bluefields, evokes this "other" experience of May Pole:

I tin see places in my neighborhood, Cotton Tree, where they danced May Pole, appreciating the dancers with their long skirts and head ties moving effectually the tree like a canvass boat. I could also capeesh the musician that from fourth dimension to time entered in the circumvolve, wearing his old jacket, trying to compete with the lady in the circle. The voice of the vocalist and the echoes of the choir sounded loud and articulate. When we dancing in the evening and nosotros took down the tree, nosotros ate the fruits, in the meanwhile, the adults went on the street with the tree forming the arch of friendship, under which they passed request people on the street to join them with Tulululu (^{Forbes-Brooks, 2011, p. 16.} My emphasis).

The passage reinforces the human relationship between May Pole and communality for the Creoles. According to the team of researchers, younger Creole generations are currently being encouraged to engage in a cocky-consciousness procedure of beingness Black within their private spheres (^{Omier et al., 2012}). Their cultural awareness is nourished by the story tellers who recount the roots of the festival during the "celebraciones de barrio" (neighborhood celebrations). The elders insist on the present value of the myths and foundational beliefs that inform May Pole celebrations. They too celebrate other oral traditions such as legends, stories, songs, and riddles. For case, they emphasize the importance of recognizing Mother Earth as the origin of all appurtenances, singing a song in her honour. As Miss Lizzie, explains:

…May Pole should be 1 of our traditions, because Maya Ya is the goddess of fertility. In my younger days we celebrated Maya Ya during May. Every bit kids, we used to be the first to start the party, presenting a little dance effectually the tree ... There is a tree especially called May Pole considering information technology gives no fruit. Instead, information technology only gives flowers, like many humans, men and women, who cannot bear fruits. They had to know which tree to cut: it is called the Pole because its body is long and all branches are at the tiptop of the tree. The kickoff vocal they sang was "Maya Ya laas im central" (Maya Ya lost her key), saying that the goddess of May cannot bear fruit. That is, she cannot have children (^{Omier et al., 2012, pp. 8-9}. My translation) ³³ .

During the revitalization process, Creole cultural agents constantly referred to the subversive graphic symbol of this practice. Participants noted that May Pole was a celebration that came to the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua with the British during the nineteenth century. The colonized populations embraced the practice through mimesis and parody, congruent with the cribbing and adaptation processes of the May Pole celebration that took place within the inland regions of the Caribbean. The enslaved community'due south transformation of a tradition claimed past the British masters served as a challenge to colonial authority. The European customs, dances, myths, and rituals associated with the May Pole were Africanized, defying the control exerted by Anglo civilization and systems over the domestic spaces and bodies of the Blackness population. The performance of the May Pole celebration was so, and is still considered, an human action of resistance (^{Hodgson-Deerings, 2008}). As a celebration in the private sphere, it represents values and experiences of beingness and surviving as an Afro-descendant community. When May Pole festivities move from house patios (internal) to the street (external), and from one barrio to the next, the community celebrates blackness and Creole camaraderie within the public sphere:

On the last twenty-four hours of May, the "Tulululu" was danced, and they marched through the streets designated by the coordinators for ending in another neighborhood, equally the acme point. The three participating barrios were Quondam Bank, Appreciative, and Punta Fría. All the public participated in saying cheerio to May. In those days, in that location was no band, and they used instruments they built themselves. These included the drum tub, the maraca, and the trumpet cardboard which was used to gently blow Tulululu. All the participants shouted "pass anda," meaning "passing under the curvation of friendship". Sometimes, yous may not take seen a person for a long time, but the Tulululu attracted the unabridged population (^{Omier et al., 2012, p. 9}. My translation) ³⁴ .

From a dynamic and transformative perspective, the cultural revitalization of May Pole embodies a rereading of what information technology means to be Black on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. The festivities introduce blackness in public and private spaces, both symbolically and physically. Participants recognize their celebration honoring life and building solidarity. They identify the relationship between their oral traditions and "other" knowledge. The parade, costumes, trip the light fantastic toe, songs, and artistic performances function then equally an embodied Black epistemology ³⁵ (^{Collins, 2000}) which speaks over again nigh the human relationship between humans and nature.

From that stance and through both revitalization processes, the UNESCO team was immersed into other worldviews and systems of knowledge. We also learned that this knowledge is relational, involving interaction and exchange between humans and nature, and humans within communities. For Shawn Wilson, indigenous systems of knowledge are built "on the relationships between things, rather than on the things themselves" (^{2008, p. 74}). Comprehending culling epistemologies departs, then, from the view that concepts or ideas are not as of import as the relationships that went into forming them. It besides requires the recognition of a wide range of relationships, including "interpersonal, intrapersonal, environmental and spiritual relationships, and relationships with ideas" (^{p. 74}).

Compared with Western epistemics, the experiences of the Shauda and May Pole celebrations create an annal of alternative knowledge. Moreover, they entail a performance of cultural identities that contest Mestizo cultural hegemony. Throughout the account and functioning of their traditions, they confront –and challenge– the spread of prejudices and stereotypes produced by Mestizo-dominant groups among younger generations of Miskitu, Mayagna, Rama, Ulwa, Creole and Garífuna. Despite efforts to guarantee the reproduction of their inherited traditions within their private spaces and communities, children and young people confront the selection to either assimilate to hegemonic culture or participate in cultural resistance on a daily ground. Cultural traditions and their epistemological frameworks become, then, political in relation with the dominant grouping. Forth the aforementioned lines, the mere execution of the revitalization processes destabilized the structure of governance and views of the cultural cooperation program, and the positionalities of every participant and collaborator, as explained in the post-obit department.

A Place for the Oral, a Correct for a Distinctive (Southward) Vocalization in a Cultural Cooperation Project

In his volume, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon urges 3rd World countries to resolve the global problems caused past Western colonial paradigms. He argues that the invention of a new humanity will emerge from the voice of the wretched, and consequently, from a non- Western perspective (^{1963, p. 160}). Fanon articulates the scope of decolonization non only in terms of political liberation, but likewise in terms of an epistemological turn. The rise of epistemologies of the South are an example of this shift which, for Boaventura De Sousa Santos, is essentially political as well (²⁰¹⁴). As a scholar and activist, he points out that "without a conception of an culling society, the current state of affairs, however violent and morally repugnant, will not generate whatsoever impulse for strong or radical opposition and rebellion" (^{2014, p. 24}). For De Sousa Santos, other non-Western conceptions of the world include grammars of resistance, particularly "those of indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples who have become very politically active in the last xxx years, particularly in Latin America" (^{2014, p. 21}). The revision of these alternative grammars allows societies to craft their own answers for contemporary social struggles, every bit Fanon (and others before and after him) have demanded. Epistemologies of the South open the possibility to believe that "commercialism, colonialism, patriarchy, and all other satellite-oppressions can be overcome" (^{2014, p. eleven}).

From generation to generation, and despite extensive forms of official and non-official repression ³⁶ , Indigenous and Black populations of the Nicaraguan Caribbean take been sharing their cultural traditions and their own episteme via oral manual. As native minority groups continue to narrate, experience, and perform their oral traditions, they challenge the conception of subaltern populations as passive. They demonstrate their agency past reproducing their worldviews within a contemporary cultural realm and an ecology of knowledges ³⁷ . Additionally, those who share oral traditions are tied to their traditions non just by the act of transmitting them, but through the actualization of their social functions. Bauman (¹⁹⁷⁵) fifty-fifty suggests that performers have the potential "for subverting and transforming the condition quo" (^{p. 305}) in their society (e. g. Miss Lizzy in Bluefields). The agency involved in transmitting and reflecting on oral traditions entails a dynamic movement from the private to the collective, from the private to the public, from the marginal to the center. This move helps form a path for recognition and transformative politics through a rigorous questioning of the Mestizo order and its Western political economic system of cognition (^{Rivera-Cusicanqui, 2012}).

The execution of each of the cultural revitalization processes questioned the incompleteness of Western paradigms and opened a window to wider epistemological projects. And notwithstanding, the participants faced the challenge of validating their knowledge, regularly labeled every bit folkloric or "local, traditional, alternative, [or] peripheral" (^{De Sousa Santos, 2014, p. 200}). The prejudices against Indigenous and Black worldviews permeated the planning and strategic meetings of the plan. For example, there was a constant questioning of why revitalize superstitions (legends, myths, beliefs) and obstructing customs admission to "evolution and modernization". During one of my visits, i Mestizo political leader pointed out that legends such as the Líwa Mairin (for the Miskitu) and the Sea Maid (for the Rama), paralyzed the inhabitants of the communities, rendering them unable to fish or piece of work. Our UNESCO Miskitu officer pointed out the alternative worldviews deployed through the stories "between the lines". She invited him to rethink how ideas about progress and development –Modernity– ignore cultural backgrounds. Although his reductive comprehension of oral traditions was grounded in notions of White and Western supremacy, his fashion of judging the Indigenous noesis verbalized vox populi which, in Nicaragua, is the Mestizo voice.

The participants involved in the cultural revitalization processes, including the native technicians who were hired past the different United Nations agencies, did not consider their oral traditions as expressionless and something that needed to exist resuscitated. Neither did they consider ancestral knowledge as something that was distancing them from evolution. They recognized that the Miskitu's Sihkru Tara or Urah-Li, the Garífuna's Walla Gallo, the Ulwa's foundational myths, the Creole's May Pole celebrations, and the Rama'south Shauda were part of their cultural identities and experiences of being, doing and knowing in the globe (^{Urrieta, 2013}). In other words, their traditions arose not only as an object to intervene with or to be "revitalized". They were an embodied experience through which Indigenous and Black participants chosen in to question the implementation of a project of cultural cooperation.

In engaging these perspectives, I realized that every time the plan participants advocated for their own intellectual framework, they were invigorating the systems of knowledge and grammars of resistance of the S (^{De Sousa Santos, 2014}). Past embracing cultural revitalization as an ontological quest, and recognizing the persistence of their oral traditions, they embodied distinctive, autochthonous knowledge systems which contested Western epistemologies, and ways of doing and working with culture (^{Smith, 1999}). For some Ethnic and Blackness communities in Central America, everyday ways of narrating and interpreting the earth rearticulate the South every bit locus of enunciation, and as a site of agency and political transformation.

I am not romanticizing the situation of Ethnic and Blackness participants. When navigating Mestizo (and donors) politics, I have too viewed contradictions betwixt their interests, driven by historical clashes between regions and power distribution amongst the indigenous ascendant group, the Miskitu ³⁸ , and the Blackness majority, the Creoles. Yet, through their contingent and somehow counterhegemonic alliances, participants creatively deployed their tactics –through the recurrence of "isolated actions, blow by blow" (^{De Certeau, 1984, p. 37})– of questioning, negotiating, and navigating power imbalances, sometimes as simple as claiming a "language switching". Counter narratives of their own cultural practices subverted the voices of the external "experts"; particularly during methodological or planning meetings, where they non only demanded the right to be present, simply also voiced their ideas and expectations in the institutional sphere.

Participants denounced the racism and patriarchy at play during the so-called validation meetings, pointing out the moments where Ethnic and Black people's opinions –especially those of women– were existence undermined. They criticized the paternalistic, colonial approach taken by international agencies that claimed the knowhow, the results, and the intangible products of the program as their own, and so displayed "cultural products" with their institutional logos. Whereas at the end the cultural knowledge was "returned" to the community in a series of publications, other formats of commutation may have emerged through a deeper date with the participants' agreement of their traditions; for example, non-written, not in Spanish, and not displayed in Managua, the upper-case letter of Nicaragua, just to name a few options.

Every 24-hour interval of execution and decision-making was intersected past power relations related to race, gender, class (^{Collins, 2000}) and the pervasive dominance of the western understanding of development and civilisation. Even though the programme's design and its cultural revitalization approach departed from a consultative process, tensions surrounding the distribution of funds and the nature of program activities unveiled the different hierarchies at work. Power structures operated not only at the national, regional, and institutional level, only ultimately through the overall dominance of the White-Mestizo male vocalisation that prioritized the interests of the donor over the expectations of the "target populations".

Despite these contradictions, Indigenous and Blackness communities recognized that this was a cultural intervention without precedence on the Caribbean declension. From that opinion, they embraced the possibilities of having the opportunity and the resources to invest in the revitalization of their culture. But they did it critically, proving that their alternative systems of cognition represented a viable and pertinent response to electric current social demands. Their struggle for cultural –and political– autonomy surpassed the script of the donor, the UNESCO conventions, and the neoliberal multicultural apparatus ³⁹ (^{Hale, 2005}). Ultimately, the experience of the program challenged the structural governance of cultural cooperation, and our understanding of alternative epistemologies, traditions and ways of living, knowing, and existence in an imagined Mestizo Central America.

In my own experience, the insistence of people offering alternative worldviews triggered a abiding reflection about who has the right to ascertain a cultural program's agenda, format, and leadership. Each revitalization process helped me understand the communities' insistence on differentiating their worldviews from those of the Mestizo ascendant group (myself included). I witnessed how the program'south participants continually and actively claimed the cultural distinctiveness of the six Ethnic and Black populations, the beneficiaries of the intervention. They invoked the words and knowledge of their ancestors as the foundation of their cultural distinctiveness, while questioning values of liberty, justice and solidarity. After these three years of intensive work and personal growing, some of us "whether Native or non-Native, recognized a certain commonality in our intellectual piece of work equally translators, as people who inhabit frontiers between worlds, or as bisagras (hinges) who serve as connections betwixt disparate knowledges, cultures, and places" (^{Mallon, 2012, p. 4}).

I traveled back to Nicaragua in Nov 2014. I was invited to give a presentation almost the human relationship between civilisation and development for the launch of the Diplomat "Gestión Cultural Para el Desarrollo" (Cultural Direction for Evolution) at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in Managua. I was involved in the design of the curricula. During my presentation, I invited the audience to collectively rethink culture and development, recognizing the economic, social, and political urgencies of our Key American countries. This time we tried to name and unmask the colonial legacy of our ain understanding of evolution.

At the end of the presentation, I spent some time in the hotel to share ideas and experiences with my colleagues from the Caribbean coast. I asked them if they were even so committed to the cultural revitalization processes that we started together five years ago, or if the efforts had dissipated due to a lack of funding. They laughed, every bit they normally do when faced with my questions. They asked me: "Why practice you call back we are here?" They then pointed out the presence of a new generation of "costeños" participating in our forum. 1 immature Miskitu woman of the RACN and one young Creole adult female of the RACS are currently supporting the revitalization of their oral traditions, despite not knowing each other. The Miskitu woman is part of an Ethnic women'due south collective called "Mujeres creativas". The Creole woman is conducting her ain research as function of her undergraduate degree at the intercultural Academy of the Autonomous Regions of the Nicaraguan Caribbean coast (URACCAN).

As mentioned in the introduction, their "radical" entanglement of culture and politics surpasses the execution of a mega project of cultural revitalization, even the achievement of legal instruments that "grant" their autonomy, as the Police 28. Their circuitous and fluid identities inform their political struggles and vice versa. Their interventions keep transforming mine too. Echoing Mallon and her decolonization project ^forty : "I know myself to exist part of the system of power yet am also in abiding conversation with other forms of knowing, thinking, speaking, and silencing" (^{2012, p. 87}). I too believe that an unexplored Key American Caribbean space is embedded within the systems of knowledge of dissimilar Indigenous and Black peoples. This space goes beyond the historical epitome of poverty and violence that international cooperation tries to redeem. A decolonial epistemic turn is non only ontological for the communities in question, but likewise an imperative in the pursuit for new avenues of racial, sexual, gender, ethnic, and class justice(s) for the Central American region.

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