For Indigenous peoples, knowledge and
science are written onto the landscapes our languages ‘‘talk into being’’ through the ‘‘individual and
collective consciousness of our communities (Cajete
2000, 284).’’ Our landscapes are the storied histories,
cosmogonies, philosophies and sciences of those
Indigenous knowledges which are increasingly being
pushed aside by the ‘gray uniformity’ of globalization
and its progenitor, European colonization. It is within
storied places that we can still glimpse alternatives to
this gray uniformity of globalization which brings
with it a rhetoric of capitalism, modernism, abstract
space and Western science. It is this rhetoric produced
through globalization which erases the storied landscapes, destroying the libraries embedded within
Indigenous toponyms, creating a terra nullius: an
empty land awaiting a colonial/neo-colonial history and economy. As Paulo Freire has challenged
us to see, critical consciousness requires us to ‘‘read
our world,’’ decoding the images of our own concrete,
situated experiences with the world (Freire and
Macedo 1987, 35). A critical pedagogy of place
recognizes the concrete experiences of communities
grounded in shared histories, stories and challenges
based within a politics of place.