ABSTRACT

The text addresses the presence of Kaingang children, along with their families, in the city of Maringá, Paraná, Brazil, for the collection of food, production and sale of handcrafts. It problematizes the reduction of indigenous territories, the urban advancement on traditional hunting, fishing, and gathering areas and new indigenous strategies for the sustainability and sociocultural and linguistic maintenance of those groups, with an emphasis on their children’s education. Through documentary and empirical research, we seek to show that, despite the existence of a plentiful international legislation for the protection of indigenous rights, which was improved from the 1980s onwards, these populations suffer prejudice and discrimination in cities, places where they seek to support their families. In a strategy of resistance and (re)territorialization, cities have become learning spaces for Kaingang indigenous children who, by accompanying their families, are taught to “make a living” and keep their identities and language preserved despite all the exclusion they experience.

Keywords:
Kaingang Children; Cities; Handcrafts; Indigenous Sustainability

RESUMO

O texto aborda a presença de crianças Kaingang com suas famílias, na cidade de Maringá - PR, para a coleta de víveres, produção e comercialização do artesanato. Problematiza-se a redução dos territórios indígenas, o avanço urbano sob áreas tradicionais de caça, pesca e coleta e as novas estratégias indígenas para a sustentabilidade e manutenção sociocultural e linguística dos grupos, com ênfase na educação das crianças. Por meio de pesquisa documental e empírica, buscamos evidenciar que, apesar da existência de uma farta legislação internacional de proteção aos direitos indígenas, incrementada a partir dos anos de 1980, estas populações sofrem preconceito e discriminação nas cidades, locais onde buscam o sustento familiar. Em uma estratégia de resistência e (re)territorialização, as cidades têm se tornado espaços de aprendizagem de crianças indígenas Kaingang que, estando junto às suas famílias, são ensinadas a “ganhar a vida”, mantendo suas identidades e língua preservadas, apesar de toda a exclusão que vivenciam.

Palavras-chave:
Crianças Kaingang; Cidades; Artesanato; Sustentabilidade Indígena

Introduction

The conquest of indigenous territories in the American continent was implemented with the economic policy of land occupation, local wealth exploitation, colonization, and slavery of indigenous peoples. After being captured, those native inhabitants’ workforce was destined to several activities from large-scale agricultural production to the work in silver and gold mines recently discovered all over the continent (Hartmann; Oberem, 1981HARTMANN, Robert; OBEREM, Udo Quito. Un centro de educación de indígenas em El siglo XVI. In: HARTMANN, Thekla; COELHO, Vera Penteado (Org.). Contribuições à Antropologia em homenagem ao Professor Egon Schaden. São Paulo: 1981. Coleção Museu Paulista, Série Ensaios, v. 14, p. 105-127.).

The populations that lived in the American continent when the Europeans arrived were estimated to amount between 90 and 112 million individuals, according to Dobyns (1966). In Brazil, the estimates range between one and three million two hundred thousand people (Hemming, 2007HEMMING, John. Ouro Vermelho: a conquista dos índios brasileiros. Tradução de Carlos Eugênio Marcondes de Moura. São Paulo: Edusp, 2007.). Organized in different social ethno-linguistic groups with hundreds of different languages, (Rodrigues, 1993RODRIGUES, Aryon Dall’Igna. Línguas indígenas: 500 anos de descobertas e perdas. DELTA: Documentação e Estudos em Linguística Teórica e Aplicada, v. 9, n. 1, p. 83-103, 1993. https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/delta/article/view/45596
https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/delt... ) and diverse lifestyles, those populations were strongly impacted by the conquest violence, due to both the different diseases brought by the inhabitants of the Old Continent - against which they had no natural defenses (Thornton; Miller; Warren, 1991THORNTON, Russell; MILLER, Tim; WARREN, Jonathan. American Indian population recovery following smallpox epidemics. Arlington - Virgínia/US. American Anthropologist, v.93, n. 1. p. 28-45, 1991. https://www.jstor.org/stable/681472
https://www.jstor.org/stable/681472... ) -, and by the forced labor system, as evidenced by Quijano (2005QUIJANO, Anibal. Colonialidade do poder, eurocentrismo e América Latina. In: LANDER, Edgardo (Org). A colonialidade do saber: eurocentrismo e ciências sociais. Perspectivas latino-americanas. Colección Sur Sur, CLACSO, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2005. p.227-278.).

When facing the adversities imposed by the invasion, exploitation, slavery, diseases and genocide, the original/ancient peoples were not inert. In fact, reacting to the European colonizing effort, they elaborated different resistance strategies, which enabled their survival. They fought wars, moved further to the interior of the territories, and were the protagonists of countless uprisings against the conquerors. On several occasions, they build up alliances and negotiated spaces, developing strategies of coexistence with the colonizers. This allowed many peoples to keep their existence, their language, and their own lifestyle.

According to the demographic census of 2022 (IBGE, 2022), the current indigenous population in the country is 1,693,535 individuals territorialized within different regions and speaking over 200 indigenous languages. However, the continuous reduction in their traditional territories as a function of the current advancement of agribusinesses, fire, deforestation of hunting, fishing, and collection areas, allied to the slow process of demarcation of traditional lands, as provided for in the Federal Constitution of 1988, has required the constant elaboration of new strategies for their sustainability and the sociocultural maintenance of those groups.

Considering this scenery, schools that in the invasion/colonization process were initially established as civilizing and disciplining institutions, have experienced a process of resignification as a result of the indigenous peoples’ organized resistance, and have emerged as relevant points of fight. For this reason, full compliance with the current law is mandatory (Novak, 2014NOVAK, Maria Simone Jacomini. Os organismos internacionais, a educação superior para indígenas nos anos de 1990 e a experiência do Paraná: estudo das ações da universidade estadual de Maringá. 342f. Tese (Doutorado em Educação) - Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Maringá, 2014.) to guarantee specific education for indigenous teachers and managers, as well as pedagogic projects and intercultural curricula elaborated by members of the indigenous communities.

Since the late 1980s, as a result of the indigenous social movements, a differentiated, intercultural, and bilingual education policy was achieved (Brasil, 1988; 1996; 1999). Such policy has been debated and broadened by the indigenous peoples in the National Conferences for Indigenous School Education (CONEEI - Conferências Nacionais de Educação Escolar Indígena) and in specific forums such as the National Indigenous School Education Forum (FNEEI - Fórum Nacional de Educação Escolar Indígena).

The decolonial approach discussed by authors such as Quijano (2005QUIJANO, Anibal. Colonialidade do poder, eurocentrismo e América Latina. In: LANDER, Edgardo (Org). A colonialidade do saber: eurocentrismo e ciências sociais. Perspectivas latino-americanas. Colección Sur Sur, CLACSO, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2005. p.227-278.), Lander (2005LANDER, Edgardo. Ciencias sociales: saberes coloniales y eurocêntrico. In: LANDER, Edgardo; CASTRO-GÓMES, Santiago. A colonialidade do saber: eurocentrismo e Ciências Sociais: perspectivas l atino-americanas. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2005. p. 1-128. (Biblioteca Ciências Sociais). https://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/clacso/sur-sur/20100708034410/lander.pdf
https://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/clacso/... ) and Mignolo (2008MIGNOLO, Walter D. Desobediência epistêmica: a opção descolonial e o significado de identidade em política. Cadernos de Letras da UFF - Dossiê: Literatura, língua e identidade, n. 34, p. 287-324, 2008.), points out the existence of several challenges and great struggle to overcome the remaining colonial power structures. In this sense, indigenous schooling cannot be discussed separately from the indigenous general education, belonging to each different people, without approaching historical, economic, cultural, and linguistic aspects involving the different indigenous groups and their territories.

Considering this context, the Kaingang communities have experienced harsh situations of social exclusion as a result of the invasion of their territories in the state of Paraná since the soil of the indigenous lands that were ascribed to them are worn out, the rivers and springs are polluted by the use of pesticides in the regions surrounding their areas, and their forests were destroyed. All these factors have made most of their traditional sustainability practices impossible. Moreover, there are few and rare inputs and public policies culturally suitable for the generation of local income and the offer of jobs - even if temporary - suitable for those individuals such as indigenous teacher, driver, health agent, education agent, and others, is also scarce within their communities or in areas close to them.

The Kaingang group have faced this situation by working to guarantee the compliance with national and international covenants and laws such as the OIT Convention 169 (Brasil, 2004), the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (ONU, 2008), the American Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (OEA, 2016), and others that have guaranteed their right to autonomy and participation and the enjoyment of other fundamental rights such as - one of the most relevant - the right to come and go.

This text is based on theoretical, documental, and empirical research and discusses current issues related to the sustainability of the Kaingang peoples living in the region of Vale do Ivaí, in Paraná, which involves the usual presence of families, mainly women and children, in the cities for the commercialization of their handcraft and collection of donations. We also discuss how the current education policy and indigenous schools can be organized to be in compliance with the rights and laws that guarantee differentiated curricula and calendar to those groups.

In this process, the children that accompany their families in the handcraft sale activities are constant topic of discussion by part of the civil society and public power, since they are numerous and vulnerable (Andrioli; Faustino, 2019ANDRIOLI, Lucina Regina; FAUSTINO, Rosângela Célia. Vivências de Crianças Indígenas Kaingang na cidade: elementos para a aprendizagem e o desenvolvimento. Humanidades & Inovação, 2019, v. 6, n. 15, p. 54-69. https://revista.unitins.br/index.php/humanidadeseinovacao/article/view/1541
https://revista.unitins.br/index.php/hum... ), they are in a situation of “beggars” and should be rescued from the streets for being out of school and exposed to dangers.

We sought to evidence that despite the existence of a vast international instruction and national law recognizing diversity and the protection of cultural rights, indigenous peoples and their children still suffer exclusion, embarrassment, prejudice, and discrimination in cities, which clearly aims at making their presence in urban spaces unbearable. In addition, according to Quijano (2005QUIJANO, Anibal. Colonialidade do poder, eurocentrismo e América Latina. In: LANDER, Edgardo (Org). A colonialidade do saber: eurocentrismo e ciências sociais. Perspectivas latino-americanas. Colección Sur Sur, CLACSO, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2005. p.227-278., p. 118, our translation), they are treated as “in a natural situation of inferiority [...] as well as their mental and cultural discoveries”, which are not given the real value. Thus, our studies reveal that their lifestyle and search for sustenance as well as their education and culture are disregarded in urban spaces.

One of the central issues highlighted in relation to their existence in urban spaces and that we discuss in this text, is the fact that indigenous families are within this process but still resist and teach their children the activities of urban collection and handcraft sales through mobility, and to keep their sociocultural organization, their identities, languages, and other cultural differences, in a hostile environment such as the one the cities offer to those peoples.

International Policies for the rights of Indigenous Peoples

The late 20th and early 21st centuries were marked by struggles regarding the broadening of human rights, aiming at greater tolerance, recognition, respect, and democracy. However, this is not a recent theme in the international agenda, in Latin America and in Brazil. When approaching such issues focusing on indigenous rights, Faustino (2006FAUSTINO, Rosângela Célia. Política educacional nos anos de 1990: o multiculturalismo e a interculturalidade na educação escolar indígena. Tese (Doutorado em Educação) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, 2006.) evidenced that due to the horrors of the World Wars, and social movements fighting for freedom and equality, some treaties related to human rights were elaborated to control racism, totalitarianism, and genocide.

Created immediately after the Second World War in 1945, as integral part of the United Nations Organization (UN) aiming at becoming a global agency, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) took over the education and culture are and was responsible for the organization of international conferences and documents addressing cultural diversity (UNESCO, 1950; ONU, 1959).

Regarding cultural diversity, it seems relevant to emphasize four significant international documents. The first one, is the founding document called “Constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization”, dating back to 1945. Apart from the Constitution, other documents were created such as the UNESCO Statements on Races of 1950, and the Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice of 1978, and the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity of 2002. Those documents promote a broad dissemination of the idea of recognizing difference. They support UNESCO do defend diversity recognition and tolerance by committing its member nations, Brazil included, to legal changes aiming to include minority groups for the creation of a culture of peace, when focusing on minority and vulnerable populations, by developing public policies of respect to difference, mainly related to childhood protection. Such policies express both the humanitarian aspect (Faustino, 2006FAUSTINO, Rosângela Célia. Política educacional nos anos de 1990: o multiculturalismo e a interculturalidade na educação escolar indígena. Tese (Doutorado em Educação) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, 2006.), which the capitalism seeks to evidence discursively, and an answer to the demands of social and indigenous movements.

The World Bank - another important hegemonic international organization -, in its action and publication areas, played a decisive role in the economic expansion process. In the 1980s, acting under the perspective of relieving poverty in peripheral countries, the institution started to incorporate vulnerable populations in its agenda. This is the case of the Operational Guideline 2.34 (Tribal Peoples in Projects Funded by the Bank), for example, published in 1982 and amended in 1991, by Guideline 4.20.

In 1993, the document Pueblos Indígenas y Desarrollo en América Latina (Indigenous Peoples and Development in Latin America), reinforced the importance of these peoples having access to citizenship and education, with the purpose of reducing extreme poverty. In 2004, in the document entitled Pueblos indígenas, pobreza y desarrollo humano en América Latina: 1994-2004 (Indigenous peoples, poverty and human development in Latin America: 1994-2004), instructions are given to countries towards social inclusion and poverty reduction. In 2006, the document by the Inter-American Development Bank (BIRD - Banco Interamericano de Desenvolvimento) called Política operacional sobre povos indígenas e estratégia para o desenvolvimento indígena (Operational Policy for Indigenous peoples and Indigenous Development Strategy), aimed to support development preserving the identity of indigenous peoples.

It seems relevant to highlight that those international agencies hired interdisciplinary research teams who reported that the indigenous peoples of the Latin American continent are the poorest of the poorest. According to CEPAL (2012, p. 2) data, those children have their lives marked by the violation of their rights and “in the general population 63% of children aged under 18 years live in poverty, as measured by privation of the basic rights to well-being; however, that figure is as high as 88% among indigenous children in the same age group”.

Psacharopoulos and Patrinos (1993PSACHAROPOULOS, George; PATRINOS, Harry Antony. Indigenous people and poverty in Latin América: an empirical analysis. Washington: Banco Mundial, 1993.) stated that due to the fact that indigenous populations live below the poverty line, they are linked to the discrimination that has excluded them from having their citizenship recognized. In addition, economic crises tend to affect more aggressively indigenous peoples, mostly due to their differences in relation to the dominant society: those populations do not master completely the language spoken in the urban spaces around them, present low schooling levels, and face difficulties when dealing with contemporary codes (Freitas; Faustino, 2020FREITAS, Suzana Cristine de; FAUSTINO, Rosangela Célia. Educação escolar indígena segundo os códigos da modernidade da CEPAL no século XXI. Revista Cocar, v. 14, n. 30, 2020. https://periodicos.uepa.br/index.php/cocar/article/view/3532
https://periodicos.uepa.br/index.php/coc... ). The inequality in the access to productive resources and their absence in social and political institutions of the societies where they live tend to deepen the economic deprivations affecting those populations. After decades of this discovery, the World bank published the report “Inclusion Matters: The Foundation for Shared Prosperity”, in 2013 and observed that “indigenous peoples across the world have faced historical exclusion, rooted in large part in their displacement from their traditional lands and forests” (BM, 2013, p. 70).

Moreover, in 2015 in the report “Indigenous Latin America in the Twenty-First Century”, the World Bank reports data regarding the main challenges faced by Latin-American indigenous peoples due to exclusion. The text highlights the advancements of rights obtained in the last few decades as well as some actions promoting tolerance and respect to diversity and difference.

About social and economic development issues, the indigenous poverty situation is emphasized, which continues extreme and far over the region average. As pointed out by the World Bank survey, “overall, they are 2.7 times more likely to live in extreme poverty when compared with the non-indigenous population” (BM, 2015, p. 6). According to the same document, despite the poverty reduction in the region in the first decade of the 2000s, there was no improvement in indicators related to indigenous populations since “poverty, in fact, afflicts 43 percent of the indigenous population in the region (more than twice the proportion of non-indigenous people) while 24 percent of all indigenous people live in extreme poverty (2.7 times more than the proportion of non-indigenous people)” (BM, 2015, p. 9).

Reports such as those by Popolo and Oyarce (2005POPOLO, Fabiana Del; OYARCE, Ana María. Población indígena de América Latina: perfil sociodemográfico en el marco de la CIPD y de las Metas del Milenio. In: SEMINÁRIO INTERNACIONAL PUEBLOS INDÍGENAS Y AFRODESCENDIENTES DE AMÉRICA LATINA Y EL CARIBE: relevancia y pertinencia de la información sociodemográfica para políticas y programas. Santiago do Chile: CEPAL, 2005. https://www.cepal.org/es/eventos/seminario-internacional-pueblos-indigenas-afrodescendientes-america-latina-caribe-relevancia
https://www.cepal.org/es/eventos/seminar... ) and the World Bank (2015) show the structural discrimination these populations live in, the inequalities and increased poverty, considering that “indigenous people today represent about 14 percent of the poor and 17 percent of the extremely poor in Latin America, despite accounting for less than 8 percent of the population” (BM, 2015, p. 12). Moreover, they evidenced that death mortality rates among indigenous children are two or three times higher than those of non-indigenous children.

Likewise, in education, inequalities appear from early childhood education and elementary school, hampering the possibilities of indigenous children achieving the learning objectives set in international agreements (ONU, 2000). For this reason, the indigenous movement has claimed exhaustively (CONEEI, 2009; CONEEI, 2018) and joined the Indigenous School Education National Forum (FNEEI - Fórum Nacional de Educação Escolar Indígena) for suitable school infrastructure, teachers’ education, specific public tests to hire qualified professionals, and intercultural curricula, so that they can achieve autonomy in teaching and learning using their own pedagogy.

Regarding more advanced schooling levels such as higher education, the data is unfavorable for indigenous individuals since “even if an indigenous person completes tertiary education, his or her earnings are often significantly lower than those of a non-indigenous person with the same qualification” (BM, 2015, p. 11).

In addition, indigenous peoples are excluded from new technologies since “While Latin America has become the world’s second-fastest-growing market for mobile phones, indigenous people own a cell phone half as often as non-indigenous Latin Americans.” (BM, 2015, p. 12). At the same time, we observed that the indigenous situation in relation to economic issues did not change, which represents a contradiction, that is, they show “important gains, such as the unprecedented expansion in their capacity to voice and decide what kind of future they collectively want”, on the other hand, they belong to the most excluded economic group, with the “persistent exclusion, which still limits their ability to contribute to and profit from the benefits of the state without renouncing their cultures and identities” (BM, 2015, p. 12).

The Unesco document entitled “Política de la Unesco de Colaboración con los Pueblos Indígenas” (Unesco Policy on Engaging with Indigenous Peoples), published in 2021, states that the indigenous peoples are among the most vulnerable groups in the world for living socially and economically marginalized, and for being victims of explicit racism. According to the

Likewise, when addressing their situation in Brazil, CEPAL (2020, p. 170, our translation) informs that “poverty among indigenous peoples is three times higher than that faced by the rest of the population”.

Regarding national laws, as a result of social movements and international guidelines, Brazil has created a specific and differentiated education policy, supported by the 1988 Constitution. From that initial document, an extensive legislation was elaborated that has enabled those peoples to enjoy their right of management of their territories and participate in decisions that involve their interests. In such context, articles 78 and 79 of the Brazilian Education Guidelines and Bases (LDBEN 9394/96), and the National Curriculum Reference for Indigenous Schools (Brasil, 1998), the Indigenous Teachers’ Education Reference (2002); the I and II National Conferences of Indigenous School Education (I and II CONEEI), held in 2009 and 2018, respectively, and the National Curriculum Guidelines for Indigenous School Education in Basic Education, of 2012, which are all based on the principle of specificity and bilingualism, guiding to the appreciation of traditional knowledge - the so-called ethnoknowledge - of each indigenous people, the use of their mother tongue, and their own learning processes.

With the changes in the law, general society and the state must recognize and make it evident that indigenous families, when sharing knowledge and inserting their children in their traditional ways and practices are teaching them - following their own processes of knowledge production and transmission - how to proceed considering their current territorial situation to keep their sustainability either in the scarce possibilities found in their villages or in other spaces such as the cities they reach.

In such perspective of fight for alterity in cities or for rights in these spaces, we refer back to the colonial situation in America, which according to Quijano (2005QUIJANO, Anibal. Colonialidade do poder, eurocentrismo e América Latina. In: LANDER, Edgardo (Org). A colonialidade do saber: eurocentrismo e ciências sociais. Perspectivas latino-americanas. Colección Sur Sur, CLACSO, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2005. p.227-278.) was rather intense in the past and remains until now, mainly in relation to indigenous populations. When discussing the European model of colonial domination, that author emphasizes that it was initially developed in such a way that the colonized populations would be deprived of their most relevant cultural achievements, thus favoring the capitalist progress that benefitted the Old Continent. In addition, there was a strong repression to the colonized peoples’ knowledge production models as well as their patterns of production of meaning, their symbolic universe, expression, and their subjectivity objectivation. Therefore, the “repression in this field was clearly more violent, deep and long lasting among the indigenous peoples of the Latin America, who were condemned to become a subculture, peasant, illiterate, depriving them from their intellectual heritage” (Quijano, 2005, p. 121, our translation).

According to Mignolo (2008MIGNOLO, Walter D. Desobediência epistêmica: a opção descolonial e o significado de identidade em política. Cadernos de Letras da UFF - Dossiê: Literatura, língua e identidade, n. 34, p. 287-324, 2008., p. 289, our translation), the dominant policy, derived from the imperial identity policy, requires the adoption of actions to “denaturalize the identity racial and imperial construction in the contemporary world in a capitalist economy”. Since the identities built up by modern European discourses are racial, of a colonial matrix , Mignolo (2008) developed the perspective of “identity in politics” which regarding indigenous peoples, must originate from the community demands considering their right to the difference and the exercise of their freedom.

Nevertheless, the emphasis of recent public policies has focused on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), organized in 17 goals/themes and 169 targets, which compose the UN “Agenda 2030”, which is a global pact signed by 193 member nations, at the UN Summit in 2015. For the education area, the Sustainable Development Goal for the sector (SDG 4) focuses on “ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all”. Despite not presenting specific actions for the indigenous school education, the SDG have been considered by international agencies, such as CEPAL, an important document to reinforce the collective rights of indigenous peoples, including their relationship with the rights recognized by the “UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” of 2007.

The emphasis of current education policies is based on the “Incheon Declaration: Education 2030: Towards inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning for all”, also known as E2030. This document was elaborated by representatives of 160 countries, along with representatives of multilateral and bilateral organizations, who met in May 2015, “invited by the UNESCO general director, in the city of Incheon, South Korea, for the World Education Forum 2015 (FME, 2015)” (UNESCO, 2015, p. 1).

The E2030 resumes the education commitments undertaken in the World Forum Education for All held in Jomtien, in 1990, and confirmed in the 2000 Dakar Declaration. Moreover, it resumes the logic of education as a relevant impulse for development and to achieve the SDG. It is also understood as responsible for the promotion of cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity, and confirmed as “a public good, a fundamental human right and a basis for guaranteeing the realization of other rights. It is essential for peace, tolerance, human fulfilment and sustainable development” (UNESCO, 2015, p. 1). Among the points highlighted, the need for inclusion with equity and gender equality in the access to education was reinforced.

In 2017, UNESCO published the document “Education for the Sustainable Development Goals: Learning Objectives”, aiming to be a guide for the “ESD use in the learning for the SDG and, consequently, contribute to achieving the SDG. The guide identifies indicative learning objectives and suggests topics and learning activities for each SDG” (UNESCO, 2017, p. 1).

What has been noticed from these global actions, as already pointed out by Novak (2014NOVAK, Maria Simone Jacomini. Os organismos internacionais, a educação superior para indígenas nos anos de 1990 e a experiência do Paraná: estudo das ações da universidade estadual de Maringá. 342f. Tese (Doutorado em Educação) - Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Maringá, 2014.) when analyzing documents by the international agencies and institutions, is the emphasis in changing attitudes. Aiming at peace and humanization, the discourses and actions by international agencies, whose principles are faithfully adopted in Brazilian public policies, act in the sense of abandoning any type of education that controls and shapes the individuals’ behavior. Such initiatives reinforce the indigenous peoples’ right to autonomy and decision making regarding the education of their new generations.

The Kaingang in Vale do Rio Ivaí in Paraná: socioeconomic situation and sustainability

The state of Paraná is inhabited by indigenous of different ethnic groups such as Kaingang, Guarani, and Xetá, whose origins go back to over two thousand years in the region. The Kaingang peoples constitute the third greatest indigenous population in Brazil, with about 38,000 individuals, according to the last census (IBGE, 2022). That ethnic group is territorialized in the states of São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. In Paraná, they are over 10,000 people distributed in 16 demarked indigenous lands, in addition to recovered settlements and reoccupation of old territories. Also called Jê do Sul, they speak the Kaingang language, present sociocultural organizations and ethnoknowledge (Mota; Novak, 2008MOTA, Lúcio Tadeu; NOVAK, Éder da Silva. Os Kaingang do vale do rio Ivaí, PR: história e relações interculturais. Maringá: Eduem, 2008.), which are transmitted between generations based on their own teaching and learning processes.

The territories of the Ivaí river water basin, in the mid-north region of the state of Paraná shelter three Indigenous Lands, namely, TI Ivaí, TI Faxinal, and TI Marrecas. Within those territories, 2,881 indigenous individuals live (IBGE, 2022): they are most from the Kaingang ethnic group, and some families from the Guarani group. According to archeological findings, the Kaingang and Guarani tribes have occupied the region since 2,500 CE (Chmyz, 1981CHMYZ, Igor (Coord.). Relatório das pesquisas arqueológicas realizadas na área da Usina Hidrelétrica Foz do Areia. Convênio Copel-UFPR. Curitiba, 1981.).

The Indigenous Land Ivaí, the largest in population, is located in the municipalities of Manoel Ribas and Pitanga, with a territory covering 7,200 hectares, after having been drastically reduced, since in 1949 it was 36,000 hectares, according to the agreements of demarcation executed between the indigenous communities and the government. Over 300 Kaingang families live in that community, totaling 1,699 people (IBGE, 2022). Their income and survival sources are family farming, retirements, and salaries from some temporary public jobs, and temporary work on the neighboring farms. Women and young individuals do crafts and commercialize them in neighboring cities, where they go with their children (Mota et al., 2003MOTA, Lucio Tadeu (Org.). Diagnóstico etno-ambiental da terra indígena Ivaí-PR. Programa Interdisciplinar de Estudos de Populações Laboratório de Arqueologia, Etnologia Etno-História [CD-ROM]. Maringá: Universidade Estadual de Maringá, 2003.).

The income generated by their crafted baskets, made of taquara (Bambusa sp) and buriti (M. flexuosa) is provided by the women of the three communities. They search for raw material for their crafts that include baskets, hampers, sieves, hats, and other items made of taquara and, more recently, because of the scarcity of this raw material, due to deforestation, they have used synthetic fibers to keep their production, which is sold in the largest cities of the region.

According to studies by the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL - Comissão Econômica para a América Latina), in such context, native cultural patterns have led the indigenous women to undertake a lot of responsibility in productive activities “many times taking over the total responsibility of supporting their families due to the instability of their partners’ occupations” (CEPAL, 2015, p. 67, our translation). In cities, without specific and suitable public policies, in the most diverse social areas, “indigenous women are exposed to new and serious situations of vulnerability due to the triple condition of women, migrant, and indigenous” (CEPAL, 2015, p. 69).

Deprived from most of their territories and their own sustainability means, the indigenous of the region depend on the handcraft production and commercialization to support their families and, therefore, their traffic, mobility, and search for the craft consumer markets have led to their increased presence in the urban centers of the region (Mota; Novak, 2008MOTA, Lúcio Tadeu; NOVAK, Éder da Silva. Os Kaingang do vale do rio Ivaí, PR: história e relações interculturais. Maringá: Eduem, 2008.).

According to Garlet (2010GARLET, Marinez. Entre cestos e colares, faróis e parabrisas: crianças Kaingang em meio urbano. Dissertação (Mestrado em Serviço Social) - Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, 2010., p. 135, our translation), not only does the Kaingang handcraft contribute to the basic needs of their living, but it is also an “important expression of cultural and political resistance, and preservation of cultural and ethnic specificities”. For the Kaingang groups, working with handcrafts, from the production to the commercialization, corresponds to a highly relevant process in the education of their children. Thus, in the context of their family organization, they are teaching their children to live and reproduce this vital activity that guarantees their family support, mobility, collection of donations and the group’s sustainability. One of the individuals in that community explained “we are teaching them so that in the future they do not have problems with unemployment as we do, they are going to say ‘Ah, we have our crafts, our culture, we are going to make it and sell’” (Chuva, 2009 apud Garlet, 2010, p. 171, our translation).

After their children are born, they are brought up by their mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and older sisters, brothers, and cousins. As pointed out by Andrioli and Faustino (2019ANDRIOLI, Lucina Regina; FAUSTINO, Rosângela Célia. Vivências de Crianças Indígenas Kaingang na cidade: elementos para a aprendizagem e o desenvolvimento. Humanidades & Inovação, 2019, v. 6, n. 15, p. 54-69. https://revista.unitins.br/index.php/humanidadeseinovacao/article/view/1541
https://revista.unitins.br/index.php/hum... ) and our field observations, when they are around 7 years old, they start to weave taquara strings prepared by their mother, grandmother, or older sister. They usually take part in the whole process from the taquara search and collection, always observing and learning. The next step for the children is to start to make their own baskets and, when acquiring the right skills, they can also contribute to the production of larger baskets or hampers.

When attending a community meeting in the Indigenous Land Faxinal, we sat next to a Kaingang elderly, Mr. Antônio Brasílio, and in that meeting the chief of the tribe talked to the Kaingang families insisting that they had to guarantee that their children attended school daily and did not miss classes. After the local authority speech, Mr. Antonio asked us: “teacher, when our children grow older, will the government guarantee employment for all of them?” (Brasílio, 2014). He knew the question would not be answered.

Even with the uncertainties, the indigenous children learn with their extended families through participating, observing, listening attentively, imitating, playing, and doing different activities. Due to lack of understanding or acceptance of their learning processes, great part of the society around them stigmatizes indigenous cultures, aiming at adjusting them to the market society. For this reason, many times, when they see children with their families on the streets, in bus stations, avenues, and at traffic lights developing their handcraft activities, non-indigenous people tend to label it as children work and provoke the public power to apply the standardized rules applicable to the Western world, disregarding the indigenous family sociocultural organization. Such approach originates in Eurocentric views that tend to judge others’ actions based on the Western economic and cultural patterns.

According to Lander (2005LANDER, Edgardo. Ciencias sociales: saberes coloniales y eurocêntrico. In: LANDER, Edgardo; CASTRO-GÓMES, Santiago. A colonialidade do saber: eurocentrismo e Ciências Sociais: perspectivas l atino-americanas. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2005. p. 1-128. (Biblioteca Ciências Sociais). https://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/clacso/sur-sur/20100708034410/lander.pdf
https://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/clacso/... ), the European liberal universalism produced a systematic process of exclusion, an “excluding Eurocentric universalism” developed by influential theorists such as John Locke, Hegel, and others.

Capitalist societies have established a separation between labor and life, as well as between children and their families. For this reason, since very early in life, they are sent to school so that the adults in the family can work, thus they are enrolled in day care centers - currently called early childhood education centers - where they stay all day long. Working became the job, loosing its humanizing function of transforming the environment and the individual. Conversely, Leontiev describes work as a creative and productive activity, developed in younger generations by the contact with older generations. According to that author

According to Tommasino (1998TOMMASINO, Kimiye. Os novos acampamentos (Wãre) Kaingang na cidade de Londrina: mudança e persistência numa sociedade Jê. Mediações-Revista de Ciências Sociais, v. 3, n. 2, p. 66-71, 1998. http://dx.doi.org/10.5433/2176-6665.1998v3n2p66
http://dx.doi.org/10.5433/2176-6665.1998... , p. 2, our translation), from the development of cities with the Jesuit Reductions, indigenous peoples have interacted with these spaces since “the very construction of cities used indigenous workforce conquered by the Europeans”.

Therefore, their presence in cities today, either siting on sidewalks in the commercial area or occupying the gardens of central avenues, producing, and commercializing their crafts, along with their extensive families, hold deep cultural meaning for indigenous individuals which go beyond survival issues. Adding to these factors, cities have grown a lot and got closer to their villages. It is necessary to learn to establish new relations, new reciprocities in activities such as donation collection, walking around, visiting churches, using urban transport, getting familiarized with escalators, elevators, revolving doors in the banks where they receive their financial support, medical appointments and treatments, and many other activities that indigenous families do together with their children, in which they also learn. Such dislocation of indigenous villages/cities is part of the indigenous mobility and, mainly for the children, it entails countless learning situations in a kind of education that occurs outside formal spaces such as schools, but in quite different spaces/institution in society.

In cities, “indigenous individuals recreate a kaingang space in the world dominated by white individuals, following a pre-existing pattern. Even if they had to alter their lifestyle, the Kaingang tribe did not lose their hunter-collector ethos” (Tommasino, 1998TOMMASINO, Kimiye. Os novos acampamentos (Wãre) Kaingang na cidade de Londrina: mudança e persistência numa sociedade Jê. Mediações-Revista de Ciências Sociais, v. 3, n. 2, p. 66-71, 1998. http://dx.doi.org/10.5433/2176-6665.1998v3n2p66
http://dx.doi.org/10.5433/2176-6665.1998... , p. 69, our translation). They constantly seek elements for their material life in cities, in a process of cultural dynamics, without abandoning their identity and other cultural elements.

In their villages, their children take part in outdoor activities and play. In general, regarding boys,

The Kaingang’s presence in the city is characterized as the need to dominate economic practices, by having to create or translate them within their own context, and they establish an economic relationship with non-indigenous individuals that generates the sale of their objects, since there is no other option than to be inserted in this economic model. Therefore, they develop participation strategies. The researcher also states that the Kaingang groups do not incorporate peacefully everything that comes from outside, but they develop “economic habitus, which is gradual and full of cultural elements”. Thus,

From the new social dynamics, the Kaingang (re)elaborated their territorialities. According to Pacheco de Oliveira (1998, p. 55, our translation), “the notion of territorialization is defined as a social reorganization process”. In this sense, the Kaingang occupied urban spaces and started a new process of (re)territorialization, and one of their survival alternatives is selling their handcrafts (Tommasino, 1998TOMMASINO, Kimiye. Os novos acampamentos (Wãre) Kaingang na cidade de Londrina: mudança e persistência numa sociedade Jê. Mediações-Revista de Ciências Sociais, v. 3, n. 2, p. 66-71, 1998. http://dx.doi.org/10.5433/2176-6665.1998v3n2p66
http://dx.doi.org/10.5433/2176-6665.1998... ). Their presence in the cities is one of the ways to adapt to the new/old natural, social, economic, and political environment.

According to the publication Securing Land Rights for Indigenous Peoples in Cities of 2011, by the United National Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat), the migration of indigenous peoples to cities results from territorial losses (UN-Habitat 2011, p. 1), as well as the advancement of cities over Indigenous Lands.

The publication A Cidade como Local de Afirmação dos Direitos Indígenas (The City as a Place of Indigenous Rights’ Affirmation), by the Comissão Pró-Índio of São Paulo (Pro-indigenous Commission), evidenced that the indigenous’ life conditions force them to go to cities, since this is a way to face the insecurity and deprivation they live in. Thus, it seems relevant to emphasize that

The public power of cities, aided by some non-governmental organizations, has created shelter conditions; however, these spaces are usually restricted and rarely include all groups. The permanence of provisional settlements in cities “is a historical and culturally updated reedition of an old Kaingang tradition” (Tommasino, 1998TOMMASINO, Kimiye. Os novos acampamentos (Wãre) Kaingang na cidade de Londrina: mudança e persistência numa sociedade Jê. Mediações-Revista de Ciências Sociais, v. 3, n. 2, p. 66-71, 1998. http://dx.doi.org/10.5433/2176-6665.1998v3n2p66
http://dx.doi.org/10.5433/2176-6665.1998... , p. 69). In the several settlements they organize, the indigenous groups “recreate, temporarily, a typically Kaingang social space: they dislocate in groups of relatives, and each one puts up their own tent (Tommasino, 1998, p. 69). By taking part in such experiences, the children are inserted in specific processes in the cultural learning of the group they belong to, along with a number of relatives.

In those settlements, in all activities they carry out in the cities, the children are inserted with their families. According to both the anthropological studies cited and the International Labor Organization - ILO (2004), in indigenous societies, work is part of their daily life and a source of learning. Working with their families means learning with them since their work is an exchange of experience, both collective and egalitarian, in which the family “works as a basic unit of production, accumulating and exchanging knowledge that is essential to the subsistence of all their members”(Brasil, 2004, p. 14).

The presence of children with their indigenous mothers and aunts in the cities, ends up fulfilling another function: sensitizing more people to donate clothes, toys, and buy their crafts to contribute to their families. However, it seems relevant to notice that cities, in general, are hostile environments for indigenous peoples, they might express different types of oppression, discrimination, prejudice, violence, abuse, and exclusion. Many city dwellers still ignore the indigenous culture, they see indigenous individuals as lazy beings, who do not like working, because in cities the prevailing model is the work in companies rather than the artisanal family production. Most non-indigenous people share the view that real, pure indigenous individuals should live in forests. Piovezana, Silva and Piovezana (2016PIOVEZANA, Giovana Didoné; SILVA, Maurício Roberto da; PIOVEZANA, Leonel. As crianças indígenas em movimento no cotidiano das ruas da cidade: entre o trabalho e a cultura lúdica. Educação & Linguagem, v. 19, n. 2, p. 1-25, 2016. https://www.metodista.br/revistas/revistas-ims/index.php/EL/index
https://www.metodista.br/revistas/revist... , p. 14, our translation) highlighted the existence of a view that converted “into the powerful stereotype that, still today, is present in prejudiced discourses. Such prejudice is kept due to the total ignorance of the life history of native peoples”.

For those authors, “the general indifference identified in people to the presence of little indigenous children that circulate on the city’s streets harms the human being’s dignity” (Bernardi; Bortoleto; Piovezana, 2015BERNARDI, Luci dos Santos; BORTOLETO, Edivaldo J.; PIOVEZANA, Leonel. A Infância Indígena: trabalho e educação das crianças kaingang. In: ARROYO, Miguel González Arroyo; VIELLA, Maria dos Anjos; SILVA, Maurício Roberto da (Org). Trabalho e Infância: exercícios tensos de ser criança: haverá espaço na agenda pedagógica? Petrópolis: Vozes, 2015. p. 339-365., p. 358, our translation). The exclusion and prejudice situation indigenous peoples live in ends up being naturalized. However, even in this difficult context and the city’s environment, indigenous families have sought to teach their children in a broaden and diversified way in different spaces since at the same time they need to somehow relate to the cities, they also struggle to preserve their own sociocultural organization.

Taking that into consideration, the indigenous school education, carried out by indigenous individuals such as teachers, community, and leadership, has acted in an attempt to articulate indigenous social movement agendas and the school curriculum (Domingues, 2020DOMINGUES, Jefferson Gabriel (Org.). Nhemboaty Yvy Porã: uma trajetória de luta e resistência na efetivação de uma aprendizagem intercultural. Programa Interdisciplinar de Estudos de Populações (PIESP/LAEE). Universidade Estadual de Maringá, 2020.). The movements of indigenous teachers and managers have sought to guarantee the rights already achieved and establish their own teaching and learning processes, via the continuous development of teachers inside the schools, which have managed to advance in interculturality (Domingues, 2020).

Final considerations

Historically, indigenous individuals are present or visit cities frequently, mainly, large centers where they can, currently, commercialize their crafts and obtain the donation of items they need since they lost a large portion of their territories and with them, their traditional work and sustainability means. This process represents a relevant learning space for children and young people.

Even in demarked areas, the sustainability conditions for native peoples are not sufficient due to the indigenous demographic growth, worn out soils, and scarcity of natural resources. The loss of forests that sheltered their food, medicinal plants, animals to be hunted, honey, palm trees, roots, and several other elements that were part of the ancient communities’ nutrition contributed to the intensification of such struggle.

Even the rivers that cross their villages, in most cases, are polluted by the activities developed by non-indigenous people close to them, for example, the use of fertilizers/pesticides in farming, the installation of slaughterhouses and industries with their waste, sewage systems, and other actions that compromise water quality and the presence of fish.

Without conditions for providing their subsistence in rural areas, the indigenous families migrate periodically to cities and make a point of bringing their children with them. They do not accept to separate from them, and also consider the cities as spaces that provide learning, strolling, playing, and entertainment. However, those are also hostile and excluding spaces, where they face different forms of prejudice and discrimination. In addition, the urban space is totally different from that of their villages, with codes, rules, language, and political organization that are unknown to them.

On the other hand, amidst the hostile reality of the cities, they also meet humanitarian people, who are aware of their presence and welcome them, helping, creating spaces, defending diversity and the right of all persons to come and go, as well as the right of different peoples having different habits and educating their children in a different way, outside the Western education institutions, such as daycare. The current indigenous reality has revealed that their resistance has enabled them to elaborate and re-elaborate dynamics, coexistence strategies, and (re)territorialization of spaces, in a way that allows the continuity of their autonomous existence.

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