The word academy returns us to the gardens or groves in which Plato first held conversations or teachings. Our experience of the academy is long removed from and even in erasure of the garden, a place of sowing and tending what has been sowed. Though the human body is nourished by many knowledges, so many centers of knowledge exist outside of the human body. How can we avoid the extractive nature and reaping of knowledge? Let us instead think of our relationships of knowledge beyond the harvest and turn our attentions toward the relationships of “tending” and “caretaking.” 

This teaching fellowship is a collective imagining through the lens of the Mojave word and practice, “ich chuuvawve.” Ich chuuvawve could quickly be interpreted as a garden, however, it is an action and practice more than it is a place—“to place into the earth and to care for what grows there.” The guests who engage with us in the Ich Chuuvawve Teaching Fellowship are those who challenge traditional centers of knowledge, and who engage with “teaching” or “pedagogy” as practices of remembering the myriad ways of relationship, language, and energy necessary for our collective imaginings of any kind of freedom, in the abundant gardens of language, body, land, water and one another.