Educação Indígena Escolarizada e Relação com a Sociedade Nacional: o caso dos Tembé do Alto Rio Guamá

Abstract

Indigenous school education started in Brazil in the colonial period with the religious missions. However, only recently - in the 70's and 80's - this theme started to guide the discussions on the indigenous issue. This paper discusses indigenous schooling among the Tembé of the Upper Guamá River - an area located on the border between Pará and Maranhão - with the objective of analyzing the possible contribution of this education to the process of cultural strengthening of the group and the mediation of their relations with national society. This is an anthropological approach based on a bibliographic survey of indigenous schooling in Brazil (Francheto -1994; Silva-1995; Grupioni - 2001); and on the Tembé (Wangleye Galvão-1961; Alonso -1996), also counting on interviews with Tembé leaders, employees of FUNAI, SEDUC, CIMI, and the Roots Program, through which we came to know and analyze the work of these organizations with the Tembé of Guamá. The "Project to Train Literacy Teachers", created by SEDUC, and the "Project to Train Indigenous Tembé Students from the Upper Guamá River", created by CIMI, stand out. Although there have been many legal achievements in relation to indigenous schooling, there is still a long way to go to build a differentiated indigenous education based on the interests of the Indians. As for the Tembé of the upper Guamá River, who have undertaken the so-called "rescue" movement, whose objective is to recover elements of their culture, especially their language, this question, besides being recent, does not find room for discussion in their schools because they are in the hands of non-Indian teachers - state employees and technical experts - with this discussion being limited to the interior of the villages. Only when these schools are administered by the Tembé themselves, who are already mobilizing to do so, will this discussion become part of the schools' space and thus they will be truly committed to their interests and will contribute much more to the cultural strengthening of this group and to its intercultural relationship with national society.