Writing and literary listening experiences in indigenous cosmology with children from different cultural contexts

Abstract

Writing and literary listening experiences in indigenous cosmology with children from different cultural contexts

Abstract: This text deals with a study aimed at indigenous cosmologies of cultures in reference to two different cultures since childhood. The first group was made up from the ethnicity of Pataxó indigenous children from the Pé do Monte Indigenous Community, Monte Pascoal, BA;  the second one with children from a Municipal Child Education Center, in the municipality of Serra, ES.  In the research with Pataxó children, the objective was to get to know their worldviews in the knowledge of origins.  The other subject of discussion was woven from pedagogical exercises with an indigenous childhood literature that was produced from the first study.  In this circularity, this study analyzes the two fields of knowledge constituted in a multifaceted exercise, composing the ethnographic narrative of these processes.  The knowledge addressed in cultural productions constituted a qualitative research with children, in which their narratives of cosmological knowledge were analyzed in the reference of native peoples in the interactive cultural episodes in schools of indigenous education and formal education.  The discussions are anchored in the cultural studies of some indigenous authors and in the sociology of childhood, which recognizes the child as an active social subject and providers of cultures.  The text emphasizes the recognition and appreciation of the ethnic differences listed by the literary contribution in the two locus of research.  What underlies the discussion is the deconstruction of the processes of colonial oppression, weaving stigma of violation of indigenous populations that still remain in the minds of those who think the world is specifically Eurocentric.

Keywords: Indigenous culture.  Indigenous / formal school education.  Childhood