Organizers: Global Ecovillage Network; Gaia Education

 This event invites indigenous participants to participate in the first steps of our indigenous village restoration program. This is a program based in Paolo Freirean approaches, permitting villagers themselves to analyze the differences between the past and present. They identify the cultural values, practices, ecological conditions and economic and social factors that they wish to restore, and the modern services they wish to maintain and improve. They align at the same time these solutions with the aspects of both traditional and modern life that they wish to discontinue. The next stage, not fully covered in our interactive presentation, occurs as the village takes ownership of their restoration project by appointing their local leaders in the various aspects of the four dimensions of sustainability defined by UNESCO (Spirituality and cultural values, ecology, economy and society). Gaia Education and GEN provide pictorial representations chosen by the villagers, according to Freirean methods, to facilitate the villagers' own internal presentations and discussions of both the aspects to be discarded and to be kept and improved. We work with these village leaders through training and by providing appropriate ecological equipment. Those villages that succeed most rapidly also are aided by their dedicated educated sons and daughters who live in the cities or in diaspora communities.

 A Q&A session will follow.

 Facilitator: Marian Zeitlin, Professor Emerita of Tufts University, has worked and taught in Senegal's ecovillage movement for the past 20 years

 Moderator: Sarah Queblatin, Filipina expert in Babaylan culture, and GEN's outreach program coordinator.

Location: Indigenous Peoples Pavilion (Round House)

 Contact: Marian Zeitlin, marian.zeitlin@gmail.com