Mathematics of memory

epistemologies of the South and counter-colonialism in Pataxó teacher training

Abstract

This article sought to investigate the training of Indigenous teachers within the Intercultural Indigenous Teacher Training program at the Federal Institute of Education, Science, and Technology of Bahia, state of Bahia, Brazil, through the project “Mathematics of Memory”. Its main goal was to analyze how Pataxó oral knowledge and graphic art can provide the foundation for a decolonial teaching practice. The study was grounded in Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s critique of abyssal thinking, proposing an ecology of knowledges to confront epistemic racism and validate Pataxó mathematical logics. It also drew on Antônio Bispo dos Santos’s concept of “biointeraction”, which understands knowledge as an organic and counter-colonial practice, and on Frantz Fanon’s theory of mental decolonization and the rehabilitation of the “whole human being”. Methodologically, the research adopts a decolonial, qualitative, participatory approach based on encounters with traditional knowledge holders and the analysis of orality and graphic art as cutting-edge technologies. The results indicate that reclaiming ancestral logics in mathematics education functions as a mechanism of cognitive justice, transforming teachers into emancipatory educators capable of mediating the convergence between academic knowledge and the intellectual and territorial sovereignty of their people.