ABSTRACT
In the Tabasará river valley of western Panamá, the Indigenous Ngäbe people have innovated a religion (Mamatada), and an associated orthography, which has also spawned a critical literacy program. Ngäbere, their language, is spoken by 171,840 people, according to The Ethnologue. This case study covers the recent portion of a 56-year (1962–2018) span of this revitalization movement. The core school is located in Kiad, a hamlet in the district of Müna in the Comarca Ngäbe-Buglé. We seek to learn about this linguistic landscape with the help of the genre pedagogy used in the Sydney School, a genre-based approach to language education and discourse semantics. We use writing samples from two boys, 11 and 12 years old, and one 13-year-old girl. The chapter analyzes the children’s written responses to questions about their people’s culture and history. Given their particular religion and current politics in the landscape of colonialism, we discuss how language pedagogy is related and made possible by the unique environment.
