Jenipapo, lápis e urucum: (des)conexões entre educação mẽbêngôkre e educação escolar na aldeia gorotire

Abstract

This research focuses on indigenous school education and aims to understand the (dis)connections between Mẽbêngôkre education and school education in the Gorotire village, located in the Brazilian Legal Amazon, Kayapó Indigenous Land, in the municipality of Cumaru do Norte-PA. The theoretical methodological approach was inspired by phenomenology and based on an ethnographic case study, with a qualitative, basic, descriptive and interpretive approach. The construction of information, data and evidence was carried out in three stages: a bibliographic study (state of knowledge of (dis)connections between indigenous education and indigenous school education), a documentary study (written and iconographic sources) and a field study (participant observation, semi-structured interviews and a drawing workshop). Mẽbêngôkre education, or rather, me mari mex mẽbêngôkre, is distinct, peculiar and complex. It is present in all the activities carried out in the village, guided by the action of seeing, hearing, speaking, playing/imitating and doing, with a view to building sociocultural bodies anchored in the temporal link (past and present), which bring them closer to the body of knowledge accumulated mille nnia ago by their ancestors. The process of schooling, which has been present in the village for 51 years, has been seen from two perspectives: non-institutionalized (1973-1985) and institutionalized (1986 to the present day). Of the 38 years of institutionalized schooling, 24 years have been spent offering primary education from 1st to 4th grade, today the initial years of primary education; and after 2011 there has been a continuation of school provision, such as Youth and Adult Education in 2011, Early Childhood Education in 2012 and the final years of Primary Education and Secondary Education in 2014. The clarity of what they want from the school: to apprehend the ways in which the Kubẽn operate, with a view to defending their territory and their survival as a culturally differentiated people, as well as the nature of the learning that circulates in their territory, reveals the perception of existence and habituality between the different modes of knowledge, especially when seen in the light of the structuring elements of the school: curriculum, mẽbêngôkre teachers, mẽbêngôkre teaching practices and the production and use of specific and differentiated didactic-pedagogical materials. The aspects of connection and disconnection include, respectively, the re-founding of the school environment, confluence with desires and expectations, involvement in instructional guidelines and mẽbêngôkre teaching practice in the school environment; and the absence of the State with the production of specific and differentiated teaching materials, school time for learning in the Mẽbêngôkre language, silencing of the Pedagogical Political Project with aspects of the Mẽbêngôkre me mari mex and Mẽbêngôkre teaching practice 37 years after the start of the schooling process in the village, 22 years after the promulgation of the Federal Constitution/1988 and 14 years after the establishment of the Education Guidelines and Bases Law/1996. However, it is important to emphasize that for the Gorotire, school is undoubtedly a remarkable place of learning that is also present in the village.