Ecuador’s Indigenous university, Amawtay Wasi, prepares to graduate its first class

Amawtay Wasi students make an offering to Pachmama, or “Mother Earth.”

By Micheal Fox

On a Saturday morning in mid-July, hundreds of students sat in an outdoor amphitheater in Quito, Ecuador. In the center, flowers, fruits and vegetables were laid out on the ground — an offering to Pachamama, commonly translated as “Mother Earth,” from the Quechua language.

This was a meeting of the country’s first and only Indigenous university, Amawtay Wasi, which translates to “House of Knowledge” in Kichwa, Ecuador’s primary Indigenous language. Students and teachers traveled from around the country for the rare in-person meeting.

Azuncena Sanchez from Los Ríos is one of 1,600 students at Amawtay Wasi. She studies Indigenous languages and culture.

In the coming weeks, roughly two dozen students will become the inaugural graduates from Ecuador’s first public Indigenous university. Students and professors say they are finally receiving higher education in sync with their worldviews. They believe the university is poised to have a significant impact on the country’s future.

Most classes at the university are online. Professors say it’s the only way to cater to the diverse group of students scattered across the country, without uprooting them from their communities.

That includes people like Azuncena Sanchez. She’s studying Indigenous language and culture,and took a 6-hour overnight bus with 45 other students from the province of Los Ríos to attend the gathering. “This is really important,” she said. “I’m so happy to be here. And to share these experiences.”

Sanchez is one of 1,600 students from around the country studying in 10 departments at Amawtay Wasi, including programs in tourism, education, sustainable development, community economy and agro-ecology. Classes are free.

Students gather in an outdoor amphitheater at Amawtay Wasi University.

While the degree is official, Amawtay Wasi Law professor Daqui Lema says their focus is very different from traditional education in Ecuador. “For decades, our elders said that we were being taught in a monocultural education system,” he said. “From early childhood, we were raised with education exclusively in Spanish and from a Western perspective.”

Lema said Amawtay Wasi is offering a different path: infusing formal higher education with Indigenous knowledge, culture, philosophy and cosmovision. University directors say it’s a means of training thousands of future leaders with an Indigenous worldview.

They have their sights set high.

“This student could become a mayor in their territory or a congressional representative,” Freddy Simbaña, the school’s assistant director for Community Administration and Research, said. “And they will have political training and organizational capacity for decision-making.”

Jeferson Peña said he gets goosebumps when he thinks about the first graduates and the many more to come. He’s a student leader from the Waranka tribe who’s in his final year at the university. When he graduates, he hopes to teach and develop community projects to strengthen Indigenous identity. “A whole group of people from different towns and different Indigenous nationalities are going to come out with this knowledge,” he said. “And that’s going to break many deeply rooted stereotypes in society.”

Hugo Guatatoca hopes to share what he’s learning at Amawtay Wasi with his community in Pastaza, Ecuador’s largest province.

Indigenous peoples in Ecuador comprise almost 8% of the population. But they have long faced discrimination, and roughly two-thirds of Ecuador’s Indigenous peoples live in poverty, three times that of white people.

Many students at Amawtay Wasi say they would never have had the chance to pursue higher education elsewhere due to the cost and the distance from their homes. “For me, it’s been an achievement just to be in this university,” said Hugo Guatatoca. He’s a communications student from the Amazonian region of Pastaza.

Guatatoca is in his second year, but he said he’s already using what he’s learned. Like most students, the goal for most is to apply their new knowledge to their communities. “I’m putting into practice the activities I do here at school, with the children in the community, teaching all of these communication techniques,” he said. Things like video, messaging and storytelling.

But there are many challenges.

Amazonian students often struggle to access the internet when it rains heavily, which frequently disrupts their online connections. The school also lacks resources for professors and tutors to visit students in communities that are far away and difficult to reach.

Amawtay Wasi became an official public university only in 2018. But university leaders say it was decades in the making. There are only a handful of colleges like it in Latin America.

Amawtay Wasi University director Armando Muyolema says U.S. institutions could learn a thing or two from his school. Muyolema did his PhD in the United States and led the Quechua language department at the University of Wisconsin for many years.

He said universities in the United States should strive to incorporate Indigenous worldviews, with a greater emphasis on the community, rather than just the individual.

For millennia, Ecuador’s Indigenous people have found ways of living harmoniously with their surroundings. And, he said, people should start to value the knowledge that Indigenous peoples have collected … if society is to exist for millennia to come.
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Credit: The World