CADÊ O RIO QUE ESTAVA AQUI?
Veronica Pinheiro
23 de abril de 2024
1st grade class, Circle of Reading: The nature that lives here
Photo: Teacher Wagner Clayton
Brazilian history textbooks have always presented the lives of indigenous and quilombola peoples in a prejudiced way. The gaps intentionally established in basic and higher education have formed and deformed generations, making them conform. The systematic erasure of knowledge produced by counter-hegemonic groups¹ is called EPISTEMICIDE. When scientific knowledge becomes the only way to read and understand life, a monocultural structure is established, and it attempts to disqualify other forms of knowledge.
Last month, at an event at a federal university, I heard that "we are mongrels". The speech came from a well-intentioned PhD student who was trying to explain that mestizaje structures Brazilians' whole way of being and existing. Mongrels are dogs with no defined breed, with no delimited origin and mixed from two or more breeds. Despite all the love I have for mongrels, the thinking that compares the Brazilian people to dogs without a defined origin is perverse from start to finish.
I start telling Indigenous and Afro-Pindoramic stories as follows:
Five hundred years ago, there was no such people as Brazilians. The ones who lived here (in Rio de Janeiro) were from other peoples. They were nations that spoke different languages, they had their own way of being and their own name. And they always ask: Who used to live here?
The colonial trap is so well set that we only give children the information contained in books. We do this even though we know that the colonisers, who tried to identify the name of each people, caused a lot of confusion because they didn't know the language spoken or simply preferred to refer to nations generically.
The school where we are weaving memories is located near the rivers Acari (fish), Irajá (gourd of honey) and Pavuna (swampy place). The rivers give their names to the neighbourhoods. And on their banks, as well as the riparian forest, we find threads of memory for our weavings.
In the AYVU PARÁ in-person study cycle, which took place on 31 May 2023 at the Museum of Indigenous Cultures in São Paulo, Carlos Papá mediated classes with profound knowledge about the Nhe'ërÿ (the place where the spirits bathe, as the Guarani call the Atlantic Forest). During the days of the meeting, on the way to the restaurant where we had lunch, Papá asked me the following question: "What are you listening to?"
It was lunchtime on a weekday in Barra Funda, São Paulo. I could hear children going to and from school, cars and buses on Matarazzo Avenue, people passing by. Papá, noticing that I didn't understand his question, stopped, looked at a manhole cover and said: "Can't you hear the river? There's a trapped river inside here."
After being gently guided to listen, I heard the river. Its voice was different from the rivers I had just heard when travelling through Recôncavo Baiano. A dense voice. It was so strong and alive that I stayed there for a few minutes.
Rivers know many things. They certainly know the origin of many things. Nothing in this territory has an unknown origin. The question is: who are we listening to? Textbooks provide information about indigenous people and quilombolas, but indigenous and quilombolas are rarely involved in organising the contents. It's even rarer to find partnerships that don't treat indigenous and quilombola people as informant objects or informant interlocutors.
I dream of the day when, as a teacher, I'll be in a position to put the following in the references of my texts and lesson plans: "words from the Acari River" or "chanting of the hummingbird who landed on the window of the room".
Law 11.645 makes the study of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian history and culture compulsory in primary and secondary schools. In practice, books are the reference, and classes are meetings to go over numbers, data, dates and information about something unknown. Indigenous and Afro-diasporic history and culture are established in presence, not in reference. The myth or the itan are living memories of living peoples. Corporeality is the place of articulations and agencies of life. The territory vibrates the force of life; it is at once the body, the ground, the river, the air and all the beings that exist in that place. This is why we insist on talking about living schools. Schools of presence, with living memories.
To this end, we need to redraw the pathways. As a teacher, I must be open to processes of unlearning. De-education. I need to create another relationship with time/term/schedule/agenda. What the Acari River says matters more to me than what the books say. When children ask me: "Which people used to live here?"
I reply: "Where's the river that was here? Does any river pass through here? Because the rivers certainly know more about this place than the books I've read."
The question was fruitful: we now have a project together with the unit's pedagogical coordinator for the school and for the school community. Where is the river that was here? What do rivers say about us?
If you listen to rivers and know about liquid things, more or less torrential, we need you to build routes. We have a canoe called Enchanted to walk the waters. And there's always room for one more. Will you accept our invitation?
Reading room and 4th grade presentation to the school: It's not the rain's fault
Photos: Teacher Wagner Clayton
¹ Counter-hegemonic movements are understood as practices of resistance to dominant management discourses which seek to contest and escape the discipline of the capitalist system's order. SULLIVAN, S; SPICER, A; BÖHM, S. Becoming global (un)civil society: Counter-Hegemonic Struggle and the Indymedia Network. Globalizations, 8(5), 703–717. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2011.617571