If the school does not reflect the forest, how will our children find their way home?”
-Adivasi Elder, Gadchiroli

In Gadchiroli’s dense forests, dawn begins not with bells but with the rustle of bamboo leaves and the chatter of birds returning from the Sal trees. For generations, this rhythm was education, the forest itself a classroom, the land both text and teacher. Yet, when the state replaced these organic spaces with concrete hostels called Ashram Shalas, the forest fell silent. Children were relocated to buildings that looked like prisons of progress, iron sheets for roofs, grey walls for memory, and rules for learning.

During my fieldwork in one such school, a Gond child, barely ten, pointed at a wall and said, “Didi, where is our forest here?” That question became the thesis of this essay and the spark for what I call Spatial Sovereignty in Education, the right of Indigenous communities to design, inhabit, and learn in spaces that honour their cultural memory, ecological intelligence and collective identity.

The Architecture of Erasure

In India’s tribal regions, schooling has long been shaped by an architecture of control. Ashram Shalas and Eklavya Model Residential Schools were established to uplift Indigenous children, yet they often reproduce the very colonial hierarchies they claim to dismantle. Their corridors mirror discipline, their classrooms echo silence. The blackboard replaces the storytelling circle. Uniforms erase difference, and concrete replaces clay.

These are not neutral spaces. They are physical embodiments of a worldview that sees standardization as progress and diversity as disorder. The Gond cosmology, rooted in cyclicity and relational balance, finds no reflection here. Instead, children internalize a spatial message: that to learn, one must first unlearn who they are.

Listening to the Children

To challenge this logic, I began a series of participatory sketch workshops with 118 Gond children across six villages. The prompt was simple: “Draw your ideal school.” What emerged were not blueprints but acts of resistance.

In their drawings, classrooms opened into forests. Trees shaded courtyards where children studied beside streams. Birds, animals, and deities shared the same space as teachers. Murals of Gond art covered the walls, not as decoration but as pedagogy. Every sketch was an argument for coexistence: education, they seemed to say, must grow where culture breathes.

When asked why they drew animals and rivers, one child replied, “Because they teach us too.” That sentence dismantled centuries of educational hierarchy more eloquently than any policy document.

Mendha-Lekha: The Living Classroom

A few kilometres away lies Mendha-Lekha, a self-governed Gond village known for its declaration, Mava Nate Mava Sarkar – “Our Government in Our Village.” Here, learning was never confined to walls. The Ghotul, a traditional youth house, once served as a vibrant civic school. Young boys and girls lived, learned, and grew together, practising songs, rituals, farming, and collective decision-making.

When I visited the village, an elder took me to the old Ghotul. The mud walls were cracked but warm, bamboo beams still held the memory of laughter. “This,” he said, “was our university. We learned not for jobs but for life.”

That statement captures what modern schooling forgets -that education is not merely transmission but transformation. The Ghotul was relational architecture, built from the earth, sustained by the community, and responsive to the rhythm of seasons. It embodied an ecological curriculum long before sustainability became a global buzzword.

Design as Defiance

To design for Indigenous education is not to add cultural motifs to colonial models. It is to unlearn architecture’s complicity in assimilation and rebuild from Indigenous epistemologies. Spatial Sovereignty begins where standardization ends, in listening to communities, in designing with rather than for them.

Using insights from the sketches and dialogues, we co-created a prototype Ashram Shala grounded in Gond aesthetics. The structure integrated courtyards for gatherings, mural walls for storytelling, and earthen plinths for thermal comfort. Roofs sloped to harvest rain, classrooms opened to forests. Each element echoed local memory and ecological logic.

This prototype was not just architecture; it was activism. It asked the state a fundamental question: can education exist without colonizing space?

Global Parallels, Shared Struggles

The Gond experience resonates with Indigenous struggles worldwide. Māori Kura Kaupapa schools in Aotearoa, or New Zealand, teach entirely in Māori language and cosmology. Sámi schools in Scandinavia align their calendars with reindeer migration. Aboriginal bush classrooms in Australia teach through land walks and Dreamtime narratives.

Across these geographies, the message is unified: when learning returns to land, culture survives. Yet, most Global South education policies still treat Indigenous architecture as folklore, not philosophy. The result is a crisis of belonging, schools that alienate rather than empower.

The Emotional Cost of Erasure

In Gadchiroli, I met a teacher who whispered, “They call this progress, but every year we lose a word, a song, a ritual.” Her voice trembled not from nostalgia but exhaustion. When a community’s stories vanish from its classrooms, what remains is not education but exile.

This erasure carries emotional weight. Children internalize shame for speaking their language, parents lose trust in institutions, and teachers become enforcers of silence. The school becomes an agent of displacement, not just from land but from self.

Toward Spatial Sovereignty

Spatial Sovereignty in Education is not a metaphor; it is a movement. It asserts that Indigenous communities have the inherent right to design, build, and learn in environments that reflect their cosmologies. It recognizes architecture as pedagogy, as a vessel of memory and a tool of liberation. Spatial Sovereignty invites architects, educators, and policymakers to step back and listen. It calls for participatory design rooted in dialogue, reciprocity, and care. It demands that schools cease to be temples of assimilation and become sanctuaries of identity.

When the Gond child asked, “Where is our forest here?” she wasn’t just describing a missing tree, she was naming a missing future.

A Call to Reimagine

If education continues to mirror colonial blueprints, the next generation will inherit not wisdom but amnesia. But if we design spaces that echo forests, songs, and stories, we may yet reclaim what the state could not erase, the Indigenous imagination.

In the red soil of Gadchiroli, under the shade of a Sal tree, I once watched a group of children draw their dream school on the ground with sticks. It had a Ghotul, a garden, a pond, and a mural of their ancestors. When they finished, they looked up and said, “This is how we will learn.”

Maybe defiance begins there, not in protest but in design.