Ethnic awareness of indigenous teaching work in Ceará (1988-2018)

Abstract

We analyzed the formation of ethnic awareness of indigenous teaching work in the state of Ceará, in Brazilian Northeast, between the years of 1998 and 2018. We selected as the preferenced source of our study the stories of teachers’ professional life, who, among other things, consciously claim the right to indigenous teaching practice, that is, the resumption of the leading role of indigenous peoples in their own education. Politically, for the indigenous movement, the guarantee of a specific, differentiated and intercultural education necessarily requires compliance with the Indigenous School Legislation, which ensures that the community school teacher has to be indigenous. Thus, this means that the political claim for the right to indigenous teaching practice reaffirms the understanding that “the educator himself must be educated” (MARX, 2002) by the physical and social realities of indigenous culture. In this regard, Mariátegui (2007) analyzes the issue of indigenous education in Latin America, still in the first decades of the XX century, in the perspective of Marxist-inspired Indianism. The author argued against the alienating education imposed by the colonizers, claiming the need for an anti-capitalist, anti-hegemonic, autonomous and horizontal education “promoted by the Indians themselves”, which would necessarily articulate with the criticism of private land-ownership. For Mariátegui (2007) “the Indian problem is the land problem”, therefore, a matter of “education beyond capital” (MÉSZÁROS, 2008).