Ancestral plantings. Knowledge in the AfroPacific

Abstract

In this text, Juan García Salazar and Catherine Walsh draw from and extend portions of their conversations begun a number of years ago about the sowing and re-sowing of knowledge and life in the communities of the Colombo-Ecuadorian region-territory of the AfroPacific. The conversation invokes and thinks with a third voice, that of Grandfather Zenón, considered the Grandfather of all those beings who reside in this territory. It is Zenón’s voice that expresses and brings to life the words, teachings, and collective memory of the elders past and present, and, in so doing, continues the ancestral plantings, giving meaning and force to the collective philosophies, knowledges, and memory that persist, resist, and re-exist in the AfroPacific and beyond in these present times.