Payayá Teaching: indigenous and geographic education to alterity

Abstract

In the movements against coloniality, a decolonial education gains meaning, in the Brazilian horizon, as affirmative actions that promote an antiracist education and for diversity. This is a set of actions that demand more than epistemological changes, as they collide with fundamental questions of the relations of identity and difference, of the constitution of the Self and the Other traversed by Eurocentric Humanism. Geographical Education, in particular, has the challenge of questioning the coloniality among the geographic discourse, which reproduces Western hierarchical systems that are at the base of the very formation of the Brazilian territory and society. Thinking about an indigenous education, therefore, may receive another dimension if we reverse the direction of action: not from academic-scientific knowledge to traditional communities, but from the irruptions that break with the centrality of the subject of modern knowledge. In this sense, this paper argues the potentiality of Payayá Teaching, an indigenous community from the interior of Bahia, for the construction of indigenous and geographic educational processes that turn to radical Alterity, in which the geographic itself is also an Other.