Humanitas Institute promotes course on indigenous issues in Brazil

The Humanitas Institute promotes the free course Indigenous Emergence in Contemporary Brazil and invites the public to reflect on indigenous issues in the country. Shedding light on ideas about the actions of indigenous peoples in the past and the political and intellectual debate that surrounds these peoples' issues today, the event aims to explain the historical context and its influence on the current view of these populations. The course will be taken online, on the Institute's YouTube channel, and will take place on the 27th, at 4pm. Registration can be done through Sigaa.
To raise the discussion about the erasure of the invisibility of indigenous peoples and their experience in contemporary Brazil, as proposed by the event, internal and external audiences who are interested in the topic are invited to participate. The lecture will be given by Fátima Silveira, a doctoral student in Sociology at USP who works on topics such as indigenous issues, colonialism and racism. She explains her objective with the proposal as an incentive for reflection. “I intend to historically contextualize the process of invisibilization and exclusion of indigenous peoples from the Brazilian political scene”, he explains.
With this course, Humanitas, which already promotes free courses on its website, intends to discuss progressive acculturation, a term commonly used in anthropological literature that “describes the thinking in force in Brazil until a few decades ago, which understood that indigenous peoples would stop being indigenous, they would progressively lose their culture in contact with white people”, Fátima explains. In addition to contextualizing and exposing to the public the situation of indigenous people in Brazil today, the aim is to go through the nature of the occurrences of extinction, organization and the act of rebuilding these peoples.
According to the expert, even if there is a desire to increase the presence of this group in contemporary times, many things remain the same. “Just as indigenous territories continued to be invaded, expropriated and exploited by white people five hundred years ago”, says Fátima, they are still dehumanized by racism, with the idea that they occupy inferior or delayed roles in relation to others. On the other hand, the anthropologist states that, even with speeches like this, indigenous peoples have also undergone good changes over time, joining movements and having rights recognized internationally. “Their ways of life and knowledge are increasingly recognized by science as important knowledge for the world in crisis in which we find ourselves”, he concludes.
The debates will be based on conversations in which the ideas of anthropologists Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, a specialist in ethnology, Darcy Ribeiro, recognized for works on indigenous issues and education in Brazil, and Poliene Bicalho, who deals with citizenship and the rights of indigenous peoples in the country, are presented.
The course Indigenous Emergency in Contemporary Brazil takes place on May 27th, at 4pm, on YouTube. Registration is done through Sigaa and is open until the day the event takes place.