Devir-mulher-indígena: trajetória de empoderamento e reconhecimento das mulheres indígenas na ciência

Abstract

This dissertation maps the life story of Alva Rosa Tukano as an inspiration-becoming, tracing lines of flight that call upon girls and women to inhabit the strata of the STEM field in insurgent ways. We name this feminine force a becoming-Indigenous-woman, an emergence inscribed in resistance to a dominant power machinery, operating as a counterflow to hegemonic captures. Her trajectory serves as an intensive assemblage, a rhizome that resonates in the researcher-cartographer’s multiple encounters, producing living intersections among gender, race, and ethnicity. The concept of becoming-woman, grounded in the philosophy of difference by Deleuze and Guattari, allows us to conceive the construction of a becoming-Indigenous-woman not as a fixed identity or a teleological path, but as a movement of deterritorialization and openness to the new. The research embraces cartography as a process, outlining a qualitative life history not merely to represent a preexisting reality, but to produce difference through the encounter with the participant. The desire to listen to and give voice to historically silenced women emerges as a movement of resistance against the capture of thought by hegemonic logic. The production of subjectivities unfolds in the folds of the Indigenous protagonist’s life story, composing a field of forces in which researcher and protagonist mutually affect one another in an intersubjective connection that opens spaces for exchange, listening, and the joint construction of knowledge. The dialogue was built through semi-structured interviews, understood as a becoming-device—a field of encounters and assemblages. These encounters were activated by moments of free and informal conversation, interwoven with document analysis. To activate the life story of Alva Rosa Tukano, we delineated some guiding lines: the historical context of the Indigenous child in becoming; gender issues in Tukano culture; the relationship between basic education and mathematics; Indigenous knowledge in Tukano culture; Indigenous education and Tukano pedagogy; connected lines: becoming-teacher, becoming-leader, becoming-researcher; structural prejudice and external forces; becoming-Indigenous-woman; the empowerment of Indigenous women. Thus, this research affirms the presence of Indigenous women in the scientific field, committed to questioning the erasure of women in the history of mathematics as narrated through a hegemonic lens. Between the lines of this historical context—marked by repression, silencing, and resistance—we find ourselves in becoming, tracing new cartographies and possible experimentations.