Gregory Cajete
Gregory Cajete is a Tewa educator and scholar whose work describes Indigenous education as ecological — grounded in relationship with the natural world rather than in institutional structures.
Core ideas
- Indigenous education as ecology: in Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education (1994), Cajete described Indigenous education as a process of learning through sustained relationship with the land, with community, and with the natural world. Education is not confined to institutions; it occurs through observation, participation, ceremony, and the transmission of knowledge across generations.
- Holistic learning: Cajete emphasized that Indigenous education engages the whole person — intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual — in contrast to Western models that isolate cognition from embodied experience.
- Place-based knowledge: knowledge is understood as tied to specific places and the relationships those places sustain. This aligns with land-based education as articulated by other Indigenous scholars.
Notable works
- Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education (1994)
- Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (2000)
- A People’s Ecology: Explorations in Sustainable Living (1999)
Related
- Indigenous pedagogies — the tradition his work belongs to
- land-based education — the framework his work develops