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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research in Brazilian universities, this paper examines the gap between inclusion policies and Indigenous students’ lived experiences, showing how academic decoloniality is enacted through struggle, affective knowledge, and epistemic resistance.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted with Indigenous students and academics in Brazilian universities to examine the tension between policies of inclusion and practices of resistance that shape Indigenous presence in higher education. While affirmative action and access policies have expanded Indigenous enrolment, academic spaces remain structured by the coloniality of knowledge, producing everyday forms of silencing, epistemic asymmetry, and conditional recognition.

Focusing on Indigenous students’ lived experiences, the paper shows how inclusion often operates through expectations of conformity to dominant academic norms. Indigenous knowledges are frequently accepted only as illustrative examples or cultural references, while Indigenous authorship and epistemic validity are marginalised. As Indigenous intellectuals such as Gersom Baniwa have argued, this dynamic allows Indigenous presence while limiting their authority as knowledge producers.

Against this backdrop, the paper argues that academic decoloniality is enacted less through institutional discourse than through resistance: luta, re-existência, and processes of territorialisation carried out by Indigenous students and scholars. These practices assert affective, spiritual, and embodied epistemologies, challenge epistemicide, and reconfigure academic spaces through collective and relational forms of presence.

By centring Indigenous experiences in Brazil, this paper contributes to debates on academic decoloniality by foregrounding resistance as a constitutive dimension of inclusion. It highlights the limits of inclusion when decoloniality is not grounded in lived experience and shows how Indigenous actors actively contest academic hierarchies while opening possibilities for pluri-epistemic futures within universities.