Para além do Nheengatu: políticas de educação linguística para povos indígenas do Amapá (1974-1988)

Abstract

In this study, we seek to elucidate the language education policies adopted, between 1974 and 1988, by the State and the Indigenous Missionary Council (Cimi) with the Karipuna and Galibi-Marworno peoples, located in the municipality of Oiapoque-AP. In addition, this is a qualitative and documental research, in which texts prepared by agents of the State and the Church, as well as by the indigenous people themselves and published in: newspapers, school booklets, minutes of meetings, guidance books for teachers, opinions, course proposals, activity reports, evaluations, textbooks, among others. Such research sources were surveyed and collected in two places: a) in the HemerotecaIndígena digital repository; and b) at the State Secretariat for Education of Amapá. To explore the sources, we used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which deneutralizes beliefs that support structures of domination and assumes that discourse should be understood as language and social practice (FAIRCLOUGH, 2001). As a result, our study demonstrates that, in the context of the Dictatorship, Cimi came with the intention no longer of erasing the identity of the peoples, but of guaranteeing, through a new model of school education, the right to linguistic diversity of the indigenous people, while the State, within the scope examined, instituted a school education that sought to dissolve the culture of the indigenous people and impose monolingualism in Portuguese. In this way, the study becomes relevant for historically approaching linguistic and educational policies aimed at this portion of the Brazilian population that has been violated and made invisible, as well as for promoting new research in the field of the history of indigenous education, in the Amazonian context