"Seguimos en la lucha". Indigenous peoples' experiences in conventional higher education in Colombia

In Colombia, indigenous leaders and organizations claim that among the problems that indigenous youth face in relation to their participation in conventional higher education there is the potential loss of their indigenous identity and their acculturation (Muñoz 2007; ONIC, et al. 2004; Green et al. 2004). In the light of these claims, this thesis explores how indigenous students experience their participation in university and academia and how their ethnic identity is constructed and challenged in this context. Based on a qualitative study consisting of six in-depth interviews with six indigenous students enrolled in university studies at a public university in Cali-Colombia and coming from different rural indigenous communities, this study has identified the tensions and challenges that indigenous students experience in the university context in relation to their ethnic identity and their self- identification as indigenous. In addition, it has identified how these students face these challenges and tensions as a way to negotiate their sense of belonging to a rural indigenous community and their participation in a conventional university. Consequently, this thesis challenges the idea that ethnic identity is lost. On the contrary, the findings show that the students are actively involved in the construction of their ethnic identity which is perceived as reaffirmed as they commit themselves to strengthen their communitarian values both locally and trans- ethnically. It also explores how academia still reproduces a Eurocentric view on knowledge and on the producers of knowledge (Mignolo 2011; Quijano 1992, 2000, 2014), hence underestimating indigenous knowledge and their participation in university. As a response, these indigenous students put forward an indigenous organizational process under the idea of resistance, linking their struggle for real inclusion in university to what they regard as a historical struggle for autonomy and recognition