Paper short abstract:

The process of construction and development of an indigenous school is a politically dangerous process for the Tikmũ'ũm-Maxakali, a Brazilian indigenous group, that faces it with its own shamanism categories. Like a shaman trip, the educational and formative one is a possibility to meet otherness.

Paper long abstract:

Since 1988 Brazil is endowed with a new Constitution that, for the first time, acknowledges the "right of difference", claimed for a long time by its indigenous people: that is, indigenous people have the right to set up the possession and the usufruct of their own traditional lands, the expression of their traditions, languages and cultural manifestations and of their specific processes of knowledge transmission.

So, twenty years ago, indigenous people gained the right and the opportunity to have and to do their specific and different schools in their indigenous areas; in the institution documents and in the public discourses that school is defined like "indigenous, differentiated, intercultural, bilingual or multilingual and community school".

School isn't something new for brazilian indigenous people who knew and suffer it with its disparate forms from the Jesuits arrival on the brazilian coasts; indigenous people - actually it's not possible to talk about them like closed and self-referenced cultural systems - have already invented relational strategies to interpret, within their symbolic systems, the experienced "otherness" such as other indigenous groups, animals, spirits and then white-men with their cultural objects. The school is one of these.

Tikmũ'ũm-maxakali group is one of the brazilian indigenous group that lives in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais and that entered ten years ago in the governmental project about indigenous schools. The post-colonial context, where they are deeply immersed, is the political, social and cultural setting that well illustrates the lots of characters and foreign "gift" that Tikmũ'ũm-Maxakali people historically met and that they are actually still meeting, suffering but also "domesticating".

The paper will discuss the recent brazilian anthropology concept of "domestication" and "pacification"; I refer to the wide perspective that allows to integrate and consistently crossing different levels, the historical dimension - colonial process - the political one - the strategies of social reproduction - and the symbolic one - the identity indigenous theories. I will put into dialogue too the idea of an "imaginated" maxakali school that is producing either by educational and indigenist institutions or by Tikmũ'ũm-Maxakali themself.

The aim of this paper is to show how different epistemologies and cosmologies can or not discuss each other and to illustrate how the process of construction and development of an indigenous school is a very political dangerous process for the tikmũ'ũm-maxakali people that face it with own shamanism categories. Like a shaman trip the "educational" and "formative" trip is a possibility to meet "otherness". The question is: what kind of journey return?