This research focuses on indigenous school education and aims to understand the
(dis)connections between Mẽbêngôkre education and school education in the Gorotire village,
located in the Brazilian Legal Amazon, Kayapó Indigenous Land, in the municipality of
Cumaru do Norte-PA. The theoretical methodological approach was inspired by
phenomenology and based on an ethnographic case study, with a qualitative, basic,
descriptive and interpretive approach. The construction of information, data and evidence was
carried out in three stages: a bibliographic study (state of knowledge of (dis)connections
between indigenous education and indigenous school education), a documentary study
(written and iconographic sources) and a field study (participant observation, semi-structured
interviews and a drawing workshop). Mẽbêngôkre education, or rather, me mari mex
mẽbêngôkre, is distinct, peculiar and complex. It is present in all the activities carried out in
the village, guided by the action of seeing, hearing, speaking, playing/imitating and doing,
with a view to building sociocultural bodies anchored in the temporal link (past and present),
which bring them closer to the body of knowledge accumulated mille nnia ago by their
ancestors. The process of schooling, which has been present in the village for 51 years, has
been seen from two perspectives: non-institutionalized (1973-1985) and institutionalized
(1986 to the present day). Of the 38 years of institutionalized schooling, 24 years have been
spent offering primary education from 1st to 4th grade, today the initial years of primary
education; and after 2011 there has been a continuation of school provision, such as Youth
and Adult Education in 2011, Early Childhood Education in 2012 and the final years of
Primary Education and Secondary Education in 2014. The clarity of what they want from the
school: to apprehend the ways in which the Kubẽn operate, with a view to defending their
territory and their survival as a culturally differentiated people, as well as the nature of the
learning that circulates in their territory, reveals the perception of existence and habituality
between the different modes of knowledge, especially when seen in the light of the structuring
elements of the school: curriculum, mẽbêngôkre teachers, mẽbêngôkre teaching practices and
the production and use of specific and differentiated didactic-pedagogical materials. The
aspects of connection and disconnection include, respectively, the re-founding of the school
environment, confluence with desires and expectations, involvement in instructional
guidelines and mẽbêngôkre teaching practice in the school environment; and the absence of
the State with the production of specific and differentiated teaching materials, school time for
learning in the Mẽbêngôkre language, silencing of the Pedagogical Political Project with
aspects of the Mẽbêngôkre me mari mex and Mẽbêngôkre teaching practice 37 years after the
start of the schooling process in the village, 22 years after the promulgation of the Federal
Constitution/1988 and 14 years after the establishment of the Education Guidelines and Bases
Law/1996. However, it is important to emphasize that for the Gorotire, school is undoubtedly
a remarkable place of learning that is also present in the village.
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