Ancestry as indigenous and decolonial epistemologies in the education of teachers working in intercultural teachers’ courses
RPGE – Revista on line de Política e Gestão Educacional, Araraquara, v. 27, n. esp. 1, e023016, 2023. e-ISSN: 1519-9029
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22633/rpge.v27iesp.1.17929 6
In the history of our people, the body, the person is a social achievement, since
when we are dreamed. We came into the world for our family, our mother's.
We are dreamed and then we are accompanied, spiritually, for us to be human.
So, the human being is not an event, it's not a thing that pops up there, popcorn
here. He's a construct. In most of our stories, the human person is a construct.
The indigenous bodies-territories embody the struggles that cross their narratives and
identify the social markers of the subjects. They are bodies under construction, enabling, with
each change of skin, new constitutions of the teaching practice, mirroring a formation against
the indigenous epistemology.
The intersection of knowledge favors the embodiment of knowledge, manifested in the
social bodies of the teaching experiences, evidencing perceptions and memories exposed in the
indigenous intercultural narratives, reproducing defragmented knowledge, in a dialogical
relationship of knowledge, conducted on the look and voice of the original peoples. In this
sense, it is worth declaring the importance of orality for the original peoples, as an expression
of their way of being and living in society. Baniwa (2016, p. 67, our translation) states:
Indigenous civilizations allowed the construction of many complex linguistic
systems, focused on the dimension of orality. For these peoples, orality is
more important than writing. The word spoken and spoken is almost sacred,
and to keep it is a matter of honor. This created many problems for the Indians
in their relationship with the white settlers. Because the Indians took seriously
what the white chief said, and they were always betrayed, because the white
almost never fulfills what he says, especially the white chief or politician.
Orality finds expression in the "living books" represented by the leaders and/or the
elders of the indigenous communities, enunciating the struggles of this people, their conquests,
their way of being. His memoirs manifest his historicity and social markers through the oral
narratives of his people, declaring their ancestral knowledge, values and traditions. Baniwa
(2016, p. 69, our translation), corroborates: "we can be more concerned with taking care of our
ways of living, our knowledge, values, traditions, with which we can help our society. We are
peoples of reciprocity, of hospitality, of solidarity."
The indigenous way of being evidences a life in community, among other significant
values for our society, transmitting knowledge distinct from the exacerbated consumerism of
the current society. According to Apinajé (2017, p. 77, our translation):
Education is the fundamental science in the life of the human being that makes
us understand such occurrences with flexibility. It does not refer to literate
knowledge and scripture. We learn from character, that is, nature catches our
attention, and many times we do not notice. We learn every day and we don't