From the Kayapó Mebêngôkre Indigenous Land to the Santuário dos Pajés Indigenous Land

dilemmas and challenges for intercultural education

Abstract

This text aimed to present two pedagogical experiences carried out with high school students in different moments and contexts: one in 2022, in Ourilândia do Norte (Pará — PA, Brazil), and another in Brasília (Federal District — DF, Brazil), in 2023. These experiences began in Sociology classes, with a central focus on the theoretical and methodological content of anthropology, specifically the concepts of culture, ethnicity, cosmologies, and rituals, as well as, on the methodological level, ethnography through participant observation. In both cases, based on this theoretical-methodological framework, the condition of Indigenous peoples in Brazil and of those living in the aforementioned regions was presented in the classroom — in PA, the inhabitants of the Kayapó Mebêngôkre Indigenous Land, and in the DF, those of the Santuário dos Pajés Indigenous Land. After the classroom instruction, students in PA had a field experience in the Krankrô village, while students in the DF carried out their experience in the Santuário dos Pajés Indigenous Land. Through a comparative exercise, this study sought to demonstrate how engaging with the cosmologies and epistemologies of Indigenous peoples, followed by field experience, was fundamental to disrupting the coloniality of power within these educational institutions, providing empirical foundations for intercultural education.