Gersem Baniwa and education in the Amazon: ancestral knowledge for a path of resistance

Abstract

This essay proposes a reflection on education in the Amazon, based on a lecture by intellectual and indigenous leader Gersem Baniwa, in dialogue with bibliographical production. The text analyzes the historical challenges imposed by the Western educational conception, marked by the process of colonization and by a Eurocentric perspective that, over time, denied and silenced indigenous epistemologies. Gersem Baniwa advocates an education based on a “living ontology”, which articulates the dimensions of the human being, nature, knowledge and spirituality as inseparable elements. Gersem Baniwa’s thinking calls us to build a pedagogical project committed to epistemic plurality, territorial justice and the strengthening of indigenous identities. By proposing the valorization of the epistemologies of traditional peoples, especially indigenous peoples, Baniwa calls on us to naturalize humanity and humanize nature, as a form of resistance to the colonial, ecocidal and monocultural logic that characterizes modernity.