Indigenous School Education and Socio-Natural Calendars

an experience report from the Sororó Indigenous Territory (Pará, Brazil)

Abstract

This experience report presents participatory processes for the development of socio-natural calendars with the Suruí-Aikewara people in the Sororó Indigenous Territory, southeastern Pará, Brazil. The study integrates teaching, research, and university extension through participatory methodologies that foreground Indigenous leadership and community engagement. Elders, women, youth, teachers, and children actively participated in community workshops, discussion circles, participant observation, and collaborative graphic production to document socio-natural cycles, productive practices, cosmological references, and socio-environmental changes. The results, developed in the Yetá and Akamassyron villages, highlight the strengthening of intergenerational knowledge transmission, the expansion of community participation in territorial discussions, and the systematization of strategic knowledge to support the development of Indigenous school education in the territory. The experience demonstrates that Indigenous socio-natural calendars, when grounded in community autonomy, constitute important political-pedagogical tools for resistance, education and territorial governance.