Presentation short abstract

The presentation outlines the methodology and results of an action research project that used school meals to recover the traditional diet of the Ugoro’gmo-Arara, a predominantly hunter-gatherer Amazonian indigenous group contacted in the 1980s.

Presentation long abstract

The Ugoro’gmo-Arara people are an Amazonian indigenous group speaking a Karib group language. Before contact with non-indigenous society, which occurred in the 1980s, the Arara lived predominantly by hunting and gathering, moving along the interfluve between the Xingu and Tapajós rivers. After contact, the Brazilian National Indigenous People Foundation (FUNAI) settled the Arara on the banks of the Iriri River and used agriculture as a sedentarization technique, which became the people's main form of subsistence from then on. Access to social policies and measures to combat hunger, such as Bolsa Família (a Brazilian social welfare program), retirement benefits for the elderly, and the school feeding program, allowed the group greater access to foods from the urban markets. These changes in diet had a negative impact on the health of the Arara and led to the erosion of knowledge about the foods they consumed before contact. This presentation outlines the results of an action research project that used the food served in Arara village schools as a tool to recover and encourage the consumption of the people's traditional foods. The research results revealed a wide variety of forest foods whose knowledge was not being passed down from the generation of elders who lived before contact to the new generations. Furthermore, the data allowed for reflection on food sovereignty strategies of hunter-gatherer groups in the Amazon and are being used to adjust the regulations of some Brazilian government public policies so that they also take on this role of decolonizing eating habits.