Kanata T-Ykua: Escola indígena Kambeba, valorização de saberes tradicionais e (re)afirmação identitária

Abstract

Since the colonial period, schools and educational projects implemented in Brazil's Indigenous communities have been geared toward serving integrationist and assimilationist interests. Changes in the organization of this school model only recently occurred through intense mobilizations by the organized Indigenous and Indigenous rights movement, which led to changes in national legislation targeting the Indigenous population, particularly the 1988 Federal Constitution. Another legal guarantee that directly impacted the Indigenous peoples of our country was the right to ethnic self-identification. This guarantee, expressed in the 1988 Federal Constitution and in Convention No. 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILA), dated 1989 and ratified by Brazil in 2004, enabled Indigenous groups considered extinct by historiography and the State to regain their ethnic identities. Among these groups are the Kambeba, a people originally from the Middle and Upper Solimões River, considered extinct since the 18th century, who, in the last decades of the 20th century, reaffirmed their indigenous identity, seeking to revitalize and strengthen their mother tongue and some of their identity elements. Within this struggle for recognition and valorization of Indigenous identity, the Kanata T-Ykua Indigenous School emerges as a strategic space for the (re)affirmation and strengthening of identity for the Kambeba Indigenous people of Três Unidos Village. Reconfigured and appropriated by the Kambeba themselves, it can operate in a perspective opposite to that of the assimilationist school, acting as a place for the valorization of traditional knowledge and identity strengthening. In this sense, we analyze the pedagogical actions of the Kanata T-Ykua Indigenous School as a space for the legitimization of traditional knowledge and the (re)affirmation of identity for the Kambeba people of Três Unidos Village, using an ethnographic approach. We also problematize the appropriation of the school by Indigenous groups in a situation of ethnic emergency, using the Kambeba case as a reference, studying strategies that break with colonial perspectives of school organization and its transformation into a place for the valorization and strengthening of ethnic identities.