RitaWhen I was planning to visit Brazil to have an understanding of the current status of education of the indigenous people in 2017, Dileep Ranjekar, my senior colleague at the Azim Premji Foundation, wrote to some of his contacts there. Rita’s name was mentioned as a key person from who to know about the schooling of indigenous persons. Then, her name came up in conversations with a number of other people when I reached there, and also at the university which provided me with the affiliation. Contacting her and getting an appointment were not easy. Friends from the university and the office of a senator I knew in Brazil helped. That led to our first meeting at the office of the ministry of education. That meeting gave me indications that here is a very special person involved in the education of indigenous people in Brazil.

Here are some glimpses of her early life. Rita Gomes do Nascimento is from an indigenous group in Brazil called, `Potyguara’. Her roots are spread in different indigenous territories of the country. She is one of the twelve children of her parents and her father has been and continues to be an agricultural worker and a hunter. Their community (and many others) share the belief that the breast milk of a pregnant mother is poisonous. Since her mother became pregnant again when she was very young, Rita was given away to her grandmother. However, that turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Rita.

There was a school in the place where her grandmother lived and that facilitated her schooling. After schooling, she joined the only institute for higher education in the nearby locality, and that was an institute for the training of school teachers. After this education, she started her career as a temporary school teacher and was later appointed as a teacher in a rural school in a region with many indigenous people. While working there, the ministry of education in the state took her service to supervise the schooling of indigenous people. She was also made in-charge of the diploma-level training of school teachers from these groups.

With this experience in school education, Rita developed an interest in higher education. That led her to complete post-graduation and PhD in education and she became one of the first indigenous persons to have a doctoral degree in Brazil. She went on to do a post-doctoral training in education sciences in Argentina and became part of the academic circles of indigenous education in Latin America.

These educational achievements have not led her away from the immediate problems of her community. She became closely involved with the indigenous movement at a time when the indigenous people had started asserting their political rights at the national level. This was also a time when indigenous people and other marginalized groups of the country started coming together politically against the elites who were ruling the country until then. This led to her involvement in the then emerging politics of the marginalized and working class within the country.

Due to her long years of experience in the education of indigenous people, she was asked to serve the ministry of education in the Federal government of Brazil in different capacities and to facilitate the education of indigenous children when the Workers Party was in power in the country. She served as the General Coordinator of Indigenous School Education during 2012-2015, and the Director, Indigenous and Ethnic-Racial Relations between 2015 and 2018 of the ministry of education of the country. In the latter capacity, she was the one who would interact with newly contacted indigenous groups on behalf of the ministry of education. (It is to be noted that some of the indigenous groups are yet to be contacted or known to the outside world, and the process of contacting them still goes on there). She would discuss their needs with them. Even such groups want `education’. They would tell her that they need education to deal with the outsiders. They are fearful (genuinely) that the absence of such an education would reduce their capacity to deal with the powerful outsiders and that could lead to different kinds of exploitation.

When the Workers Party was in power, the indigenous movement became politically powerful or noticeable in Brazil. They did not want their education to be in the hands of outsiders – including the non-governmental organizations or benevolent individuals from the non-indigenous community. This is an interesting combination. On the one hand, they demanded formal or mainstream schooling and on the other hand, they wanted to control this education. They wished to indigenize modern education with two objectives: It should meet their needs to flourish in a society that became more and more connected with the rest. It should also enhance their ability to reflect and carry on (and to not accept or reject uncritically) their indigenous life and knowledge.

Rita has witnessed closely, and facilitated to a great extent, the process by which indigenous people have `repossessed’ their school education. They have separated indigenous education from school education for indigenous children. The former is about transferring their indigenous knowledge and culture to their younger generations for which they follow the traditional institutions. On the other hand, school education is to access the tools and instruments of the mainstream society so that they can deal with a fast-changing world. (In that sense, I don’t see a major difference between these people and any social group in the Indian society. Brahmins, the most educated ones in India have different ways of sustaining their traditional ways of life on the one hand, and acquire modern education to be part of global mainstream society, on the other). One challenge that they have faced then was the absence of a sufficient number of qualified teachers from indigenous communities. Rita played a leadership role on behalf of the government of Brazil to negotiate and work with the major universities of the country to develop a special teacher-training program for the students from indigenous communities. This is to meet the special needs of indigenous people which requires the preparation and delivery of learning materials that reflect their language and socio-cultural context, and also enhances their abilities to assert their rights and space in dealing with the mainstream communities. This process was not so easy since this was an `unconventional’ project for typical university academics. She has the first-hand experience of the process and these are insightful for academics like me.

Rita was in the Azim Premji University a few days ago. She has interacted with the students of our School of Education, and also the participants of a knowledge-sharing workshop on the education of Adivasi children in India. The workshop was attended by a few Adivasi community representatives, government officials, academics and representatives of non-governmental organizations which work for the education of Adivasi children.

Her remarks as an indigenous person and also an educationist who has overseen the transition of the education of these people in her country would help us to draw some important lessons:

  1. Indigenous people demand and need mainstream education. This, according to them, is important to enhance their ability to deal with the mainstream society.
  2. This does not mean that they want to neglect their culture, traditional knowledge and contextual reality. This is addressed by using traditional institutes for what they call indigenous education (which is different from school education) and the indigenization of formal schooling.
  3. They wish to change the pedagogy and delivery of school education so that it becomes connected to their reality, and to control the institutes which provide such education.
  4. However, such a change in pedagogy and control happens when these people can mobilize themselves politically and socially. This shows the connection between the political transition and educational change.

All these statements do not imply that the education of indigenous people in Brazil has reached a perfect situation. There are persisting challenges. As I have noted elsewhere, high school education (after 9th grade) continues to be a challenge. There are severe challenges in the university education of indigenous people too.

There has been a major political change in Brazil recently. A right of centre, `Trump’ian political formation has captured power in the beginning of 2019. As part of this change, Rita has been relieved from the federal government of Brazil and asked to go back to the service in the state government, nearly 20 days ago. We cannot predict what may happen to the education of indigenous people as part of this political change. Some of the rights of these people in terms of education have become part of the constitution there, and these cannot be easily changed. The political compulsions may encourage the current regime to negotiate with sections of indigenous groups (as against other marginalized groups, such as the blacks). Or since the indigenous people have undergone a transition in terms of social and political mobilization, that may help them to move forward.