Indigenous Peoples' Land Life Knowledge Collective

The policy of assimilating indigenous communities by putting their children in boarding schools has been increasingly disproved and abandoned, most publicly throughout North America, Australia and Canada since the 80s. In India, this history and its dangers are little known, with relatively little awareness of how residential schooling is being used as laboratories of de-indigenisation of Adivasi communities. This disguised growth of extractive schooling of Adivasi children has now reached an unprecedented scale, with many similar manifestations of the cultural genocide that have evoked resistance elsewhere. Boarding schools for Adivasi children, more particularly in mineral-rich regions, have almost become a rite de passage to becoming a part of an extractive society, and not a means for achieving social justice Mega boarding schools like Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS), in Odisha, India not only receive large amounts of capital from corporations that wrest control over Adivasi lands, but have emerged as nodal agents for extractive corporations and Hindutva organisations to engineer indigenous identities and agencies to justify India's booming neoliberal economy.