ABSTRACT
Although Mexico is a multiethnic and multilingual society, the epistemologies and ontologies of Mexican Indigenous peoples have long been regarded as inferior and part of coloniality, the darker side of modernity that emerged from the expansion of European capitalism in the Americas. Mexican Indigenous peoples, nonetheless, have resisted the discourses of modernity and have maintained and resignified their ways of being and knowing. Hence, the purpose of this chapter is to present the resistance and re-existence of the self-identified Ayuk jä’äy (people of the mountain/flowery language) ethnic group of Oaxaca, Mexico and to think through the ontology and epistemology of the Ayukjä’äy as reciprocally constructed into an apparently unique onto-epistemology by way of the Ayuk language. Utilizing decolonial, border-thinking, and paradigm-other theories as well as epistemology of the South, we explore the onto-epistemological perspectives of three Ayuk speakers by presenting and then analyzing their life stories according to three emergent themes: (a) customs, (b) binary resistance, and (c) beyond-humanism. We conclude by discussing how this onto-epistemology impacts on Ayuk language teaching and how this teaching bears significance to applied linguistics in general.
