“THAT SAME WEAPON AGAINST THEM”: CAPITALISM, POWER, LANGUAGE AND INDIGENOUS EDUCATION

ABSTRACT

Among other processes of stratification and categorization within inequality in capitalism, we aim to describe and discuss, in this paper, the process of subversion of textual resources on behalf of Brazilian Native Guarani leaders seeking to respond to institucional requirements concerning documents regulating their schools. The ethnographic data that are here presented were generated within a situated context, particularly, within an extension action (within a federal program for indigenous teacher training), the Indigenous Knowledge at School Action, developed inside Guarani, Kaingang and Laklãnõ-Xokleng’s lands. The piece of data on which we focus makes part of a speech by Kerexu Yxapyry, Mbya-Guarani leader from Morro dos Cavalos Indigenous Land (Palhoça, Santa Catarina). The analyses and the discussion are supported by research works on linguistic-discursive realities from the applied field and by how ideologies are articulated to control and rule over linguistic resources in social practice. The results of the discussion reveal a subversive obedience in the way Native leaders such as Kerexu make some textual resources their own in literacy practices, thus creating, re-creating and deciding, so as to be able to dominate their reality and make culture. Textual genres, such as a political-pedagogical projects, become battlefronts concerning literacy and the heavy rules and demands that discursive polices seek to establish in order to diminish the power of indigenous discourses about their school education. Within those battlefronts, we understand that the subversion of textual elements can be interpreted as being a reexistence literacy practice, i.e. one that contests socially legitimated patterns and spaces in what concerns to language use. Those practices take place within the borders between textual obedience and subversion in the peripheries of capitalism.

Keywords:
discourse and power; indigenous leadership; language ideologies; literacy; Mbya-Guarani.