Indigenous School Education Forum Commission of Amazonas

The project intends to fight racism, prejudice and discrimination against indigenous peoples in the State of Amazonas through training, mobilization, information and improvement, with teachers, school administrators, parents and indigenous leaders who make up the Indigenous Scholar Education Forum Commission as the principal protagonists.

– Creation and release of the Educational Guide Manual on practices of racism, prejudice and discrimination.

– Training of teachers and indigenous leaders to spread information.

– Creation and maintenance of a denunciation hotline.

– Systematization and annual release of results from the hotline.

– Forwarding of denunciations to the Public Prosecutor’s Office and other public organs in the most serious cases received through the hotline.

Racism, prejudice and ethnic and cultural discrimination have always been a part of national society’s relationship with indigenous peoples in Brazil. Over the last few years in Amazonas, these practices have gotten worse, even in institutional environments, with the expansion of grazing and agriculture and developmentalist large infrastructure projects by the government. In 2013 three cases of racism and prejudice against indigenous peoples hit the national and international spotlight: hostility and violence in the municipality of Humaitá against the Tenharim people and others from the region; an Eirunepé district judge’s ordinance banning indigenous presence in the city; and the persecution of a professor and indigenous leader at the Federal University of Amazonas, labeled as formerly indigenous due to a subsequent academic title. With this worsening situation, teachers and indigenous leaders of the region are worried and understand that the problem must be urgently confronted through an educational, informative and legal plan, training, mobilizing and raising awareness among the educational community on how to appropriately deal with this problem.

The Indigenous School Education Forum Commission of Amazonas has been active since 2013 holding activities to organize and raise awareness among teachers, school administrators, parents and indigenous leaders. It creates socio-political conditions for the installation and functioning of the forum. There have been two meetings with municipal indigenous coordinators from indigenous schools, a statewide seminar on indigenous education and several visits to organize in local and municipal centers with indigenous teachers. The commission has also organized hearings with the executive secretary of the Ministry of Education in Brasília, with the State Secretary of Education and with the rectory of the Federal University of Amazonas. They also developed the document “Pact on Indigenous School Education in the Amazon”, which illustrates the biggest challenges and concrete proposals for overcoming these problems.

Training workshops, seminars, meetings, mobilizations and marches were organized, with the aim of drawing the attention of society, authorities, public institutions and the media to the problems of racism, discrimination and prejudice that afflict indigenous peoples since colonization. By taking the campaign into public institutions, schools and the street, some situations hitherto regarded as hypotheses or suspicions (such as the normalization of racism and prejudice) were identified and confirmed. Another result pointed out is the growth of the group. When the project launched, Foreeia was formed by more or less one hundred people associated directly with the organization. At the end they were a thousand people. An additional highlight is the fact that the organization was able to put the topics of the project on the local and regional agenda, through workshops, meetings, large street mobilizations (as well as in villages and schools), and through producing and disseminating informational materials.