Drawing heavily from Paulo Freire's influence, I push students to name their world- that is, map their inherited cultural knowledge and lived experiences onto formal academic descriptions of nature. It is not my goal to give a neutral education which simply integrates the student into existing institutions, rather, I seek to give the pupil a means to transform the material relations of their world. The clock is ticking and it is not enough for scientists to merely describe impending ecological devastation; we must personally have the tools to redirect our course.

Being from the Chicano communities of Northern New Mexico, I have watched as the denial of education was used as an oppressive tool; drawing deep class division via expropriating cultural capital and the traditional homelands from our people. At a superficial glance it seems contradictory that New Mexico, a state with vast mineral and natural resource wealth, is also one of the poorest. But it is no coincidence that the extraction of this wealth has come at significant cost to our Indigenous and Chicano communities and has only been possible through centuries of colonization including the expropriation of traditional homelands.

I see a clear link between formal ecological study and the empowerment of our communities. Through scientific investigation we diagnose with precision the exact economic relations and social structures which intentionally divorce our labor from sustainable land tenure. With the clear understanding of which productive relations must be challenged, this analysis thus informs the actions we must take to achieve sovereignty within our communities. Despite centuries of exclusion from governmental and academic power structures, our Indigenous communities survived through the production and safe keeping of knowledge. Only through the synthesis of traditional knowledge of sustainable land tenure can we hope to transform our social relations to build an equitable, just, and habitable world.