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Global South and Indigenous communities often represent the contexts of international service learning (ISL) programs. However, rarely are the effects of historical colonization and the potential colonizing impact of Global North visitors being investigated. Central to this article is our story as Global North and settlerCanadian researchers who are learning to experiment with decolonization as a theoretical framework for ISL research. We offer an account of the development of an encuentro (symposium); a culminating event for a fouryear study, in which Guatemalan and Nicaraguan host community members share of their experiences as Indigenous hosts. The findings reveal challenges in future ISL research in such contexts and offer ideas about how institutions and organizations may develop ISL in ways that honor community visions of reciprocity. Focusing on Community Impact in International Service Learning Research on the impact of international service learning (ISL) on student participants including our own work (Balzer, 2011; O’Sullivan & Smaller, 2013) and that of others (Ash, Clayton, & Atkinson, 2005; Kiely, 2004; Moely, McFarland, Miron, Mercer, & Ilustre, 2002; Ogden, 2007; Pompa, 2002) has been a growing field of study. As with much research, ours had mixed beginnings. Because of opportunity and curiosity, we have travelled; because of a belief in social justice and a responsibility to live well in the world, we were drawn to ISL; and because of growing awareness of our position as settlercolonists and the impact of colonization on Indigenous peoples in the Americas, we began to question our previously held worldviews. What began as a conventional research project, examining the impact of ISL experiences on secondary school students, validating opportunities to travel and connect with the Other, morphed into a realization that we were the Other in these contexts. 144 | LUKE HEIDEBRECHT and GERALDINE BAKER We brought with us power and wealth that had the potential to undermine local communities and perpetuate existing power imbalances. Broadly examining the literature on the topic reveals that there is comparatively little research conducted focusing on the impact of such experiences on host communities and organizations (Brabant, 2011; Crabtree, 2008; Erasmus, 2011; Larsen, 2016; Sutton, 2011). This omission constitutes an important gap that we sought to address in a recently concluded study. Identifying an emerging field of study, we hoped to learn alongside literature that shares these aims, taking into consideration Bringle and Hatcher’s (2011) suggestion that “identified community needs” (p. 19) should be a central component of their definition of ISL, the absence of which, according to Crabtree (2008) and Erasmus (2011), raises the issue of neocolonialism if student engagement in the host community is dismissive or disruptive of local practices. More recently, Larsen (2016) has highlighted the lack of problematization of the underpinning “values, knowledges and assumptions” of ISL (p. 10), and while representatives of Global North sending agencies insist that they enter into rewarding partnerships with their Southern counterparts (Dear, 2012), the literature, while asserting the importance of such practices, and often espousing reciprocity as a central tenant, ultimately lacks evidence of such experiences from Southern partners and communities. Indigenous Communities, Resource Extraction, and Problematized Research Our experiences working ISL programs and these observations form the background and set the focus of a fouryear research project in which we contributed as members of a broader research team offering a connection to four Mayan Guatemalan communities who participated in the previous study. Our ongoing relationships with these communities and the fact that they all identified as Indigenous, we would realize, transformed the project by bringing to light the importance of decolonization. The project culminated in August 2017, when residents from the four Guatemalan communities as well as residents from four Nicaraguan communities gathered for an encuentro (symposium) to discuss their experiences hosting ISL participants from the Global North. This encuentro was intended to be a concreate expression of decolonizing theory. This theoretical framework was intended to provide a lens from which to understand the ways colonialism and the imposition of Western Eurocentrism has impacted these particular Mayan host communities as it relates to ISL. To provide a bit of background, as a result of marginalization and discrimination exacerbated by political conflict and violence, these communities in the context of Guatemala have been forced “to drop out and reside in ‘internal colonies’ with little or no hope of upward mobility” (Kanu, 2006, p. 8). Local exemplars in each of these communities have responded to these internal colonizations through the creation of grassroots organizations that aim to promote sustainable and developmental goals such as employment, improved education, food security, and health measures (Howard & Henry, 2010; Sabas, 2016). These social justice initiatives have often been interconnected with the work of NGOs, which though hopefully beneficial to the grassroots organizations, may further complicate the colonial and neocolonial relations of power in which these communities find themselves. Despite and sometimes in spite of their experiences working MICHIGAN JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY SERVICE LEARNING, VOLUME 26, ISSUE 1, PG. 143–160 | 145 with NGOs, the grassroots initiatives may be seen as expressions of decolonization as Indigenous communities seek selfdetermination and identity reclamation. This is an important detail for our study and for this article as we are awakening and deepening our understanding of the necessity of relationality in working toward decolonization: seeking first to understand the ways in which communities are already working toward their own liberations. We will say more about this learning as we further outline our selfsituatedness. Furthermore, of particular importance for the Guatemalan participants to share at the encuentro were their stories of epistemicide (Santos, 2014) and subsequent journeys of reclamation of Mayan Indigenous knowledges. The histories of violence— whether they be physical or epistemic— experienced by the Mayan communities differed in ways from the Nicaragua communities in the study and cannot be overlooked as they have profoundly affected their perceptions of education and contributed to a weariness of programs like ISL that are perceived of as external and disconnected to community aims. Estrada (2012), a Mayan Indigenous scholar, unpacks some of the complexities present, making specific note of the way the relationships between “nation building, citizenship, democracy, and development tie back to the issue of knowledge production” (p. 73). National curriculum development in Guatemala has traditionally tokenized Indigenous peoples’ participation (Estrada, 2012, p. 68) and excluded Mayan ontological and epistemological perspectives, which situates these communities as foreign, although they reside within the national education systems borders. Parallel to this, the history of resource exploration and extraction in Mayan regions (Deonandan & Dougherty, 2016) and the lack of consultation between government and Indigenous communities exacerbates feelings of disregard and generates worries of further exploitations and displacements. In fact, one community in Guatemala received visitors claiming to be ecotourists who were incognito working for mining companies. Examples such as this are of paramount importance when considering bringing outsiders such as Northern ISL participants into these communities. Interconnected and further problematic is the growth of the development industry in the last decades in Guatemala, sometimes responding to the injustices created by resource extraction (Balzer & Heidebrecht, 2017), accompanied by the growth of ISL programs that focus, sometimes myopically, on student experience (Jefferess, 2012; Mitchell, Donahue, & YoungLaw, 2012) and too often cater to the objectives of NGOs and their stakeholders rather than the trajectories of, for example, Mayan communities reclamation efforts. This kind of development work could be likened to “colonialism in sheep’s clothing” (Walsh, 2014, p. 9), and within the context of Guatemala, it is also hard to ignore how entangled this work is within the history of U.S. interventions (Grandin, 2004), the exclusion of Indigenous voices within the Guatemalan national education curriculum, and the previously mentioned experiences of deception some communities have encountered. Understanding the context and particularities of each of the communities within the larger frameworks of colonialism, globalization, and neocolonialism is helpful in developing sensitivity to the ways that research within these communities may either be misconstrued as similarly problematic or may, in reality, become further expressions of neocolonization. One of the sensitivities to develop is, as Kovach (2009) highlights, becoming aware of the alltoocommon reality that Indigenous communities “are being examined by nonIndigenous academics who pursue Western research on Western terms” (p. 28). Considering this, we wished to interrogate the way that the Western academy and research methodologies have represented colonialism (see Wilson, 2008, 146 | LUKE HEIDEBRECHT and GERALDINE BAKER pp. 45– 52) for many Indigenous communities. Such research often “called into question Indigenous peoples’ humanity” (Henhawk, 2013) in a blatant disregard for reciprocity and, furthermore, by focusing on knowledge as something to be extracted. One of our fears for the process of research was to echo the issues related to community experiences with resource extraction industries. Given the embeddedness of education research with

Decolonial Experimentations in International Service Learning Research and Practice: Learnings from Mayan Indigenous Host Communities