Remapping Writing: Indigenous Writing and Cultural Conflict in Brazil

Abstract

IN THE FORMULATION OF ITS PRESENT CONSTITUTION in 1988, the Brazilian nation chose to put an end to centuries of disrespect and marginalization of its populations by officially recognizing the existence of languages and cultures within the boundaries of the nation and by recognizing the rights of its peoples to full citizenship and political representation. This historic recognition was followed up later, in 1996, by one of the potentially most critical instruments for implementing this new found respect for the in Brazil, namely the creation of w education policy and the establishment of the school. The official buzz-words used to describe the new policy and the new school system were and intercultural; as Such, their primary objectives were the recuperation of their historical memories, the reaffirmation of their ethnic identities and the valorization of their languages and sciences'; all this besides guaranteeing to the Indians, their communities and their peoples, access to information, technical and scientific knowledge of the national Society and other and non-indigenous societies. (1) The new policy allowed each community to have its Own 'bilingual and intercultural school and to make its own decisions as to medium of instruction, content, pedagogy and curriculum, with the interference of the state in a merely advisory capacity. Previous constitutions had denied full citizenship to the populations, attributing to them the status of wards of the State. Schooling had existed in areas, but with no specific legislation, it followed the norms of non-indigenous rural schools and was generally run by local authorities or by missionaries. Far from being bilingual and intercultural, these older schools implemented policies of varying degrees of outright cultural and linguistic assimilation. In spite of the obvious radical differences between the policies of today and those of yesteryear, a common element to both is literacy. In other words, in both cases the school is seen as the place for the dissemination and production of written knowledge, be it in the language of the community concerned or the national language, Portuguese. In spite of the well meaning official indigenous turn and the newly-established physical, institutional and discursive space of the school, conflicts persist on both sides; perhaps forseeably, these conflicts appear to stem from what constitutes knowledge. Given the amplitude of this problematic, I shall concentrate my discussion here on some of the conflicts related specifically to writing as emblematic of the problematic aspects of this recent official commitment to knowledge in Brazil, and its purported claims to valorize (2) languages and cultures. If this commitment and its policies are taken as indicative of the need to remap the history and place of contact between the nation and its unities, then I propose to read writing as a map of the conflicts involved in this re-mapping process. One of the most palpable results of the new policies has been the recent surge in the publication of written narratives and other school-related materials, mainly in Portuguese, in general collectively authored by members of the various communities. (3) Significantly, a large proportion (if not the majority) of these texts is produced by groups of adults undertaking Indigenous Teacher Education courses, with the purpose of producing previously unavailable written materials to disseminate knowledge to be used in the new schools. In general, like the courses, these materials tend to be produced under the tutelage of Brazilian non-indigenous, monolingual specialists, for the most part, linguists and anthropologists. …