IS INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE A DECOLONIAL MATTER?

Abstract

The article is a reduced version of the second chapter of the doctoral thesis, entitled “Encantaria e Imagem-spirit (utupë): a docufiction with the Tremembé indigenous people.” The article problematizes academically and scientifically the historical and social construction of indigenous knowledge, focusing on my experience as Tremembé. It is understood that indigenous knowledge is centered on their modes of existence: cosmogony, nature, orality, memory and dreams. The central issue is to understand the production of indigenous knowledge, as a practice of collective memory.

            It is also questioned whether indigenous knowledge can be considered indigenous decolonial knowledge. Decolonial Studies present a great contribution to the criticism of colonialism, in this present work I analyze how colonization imposed knowledge practices on the indigenous peoples of Brazil. Decolonial Studies emerges as a rescue to the knowledge of the indigenous and black people of Abya Yala, at the same time they produce epistemological resistance tactics.

            There is an influence of Decolonial Studies on our knowledge, but indigenous knowledge is marked by its own way of thought. The tradition of our thoughts is guided by our territory and the passing of knowledge from generation to generation. Indigenous people have their own subjectivity, which actively questions epistemological and political scopes for the collective elaboration of knowledge originating in Abya Yala, through memory, orality and dreams. In short, it is the practice of re-enchanting the world.