"Convém aproveitar e educar pelos métodos próprios" : a política educacional do SPI e a educação formal entre os indígenas Potiguara na Paraíba (1932-1967)

Abstract

This research aimed to discuss the indigenous policy and action, in the educational field, of the Indian Protection Service (SPI) among the Potiguara, inhabitants of the northern coast of Paraíba. The analysis took place from the performance of the Indigenous Post Nísia Brasileira, between the years 1932 to 1967. Through bibliographical and documentary research, we discussed the educational policy proposed by the tutelary body and how its implementation and operation occurred. Starting from the republican indigenist thought that founded the SPILTN, we emphasize how the pedagogical character assumed by the organ directed its schooling action to the formation of the indigenous as a citizen and national worker. We highlight how this ideology was based on the positivist conception that being indigenous consisted of a transitory condition, leaving the State to operate the civilizing work in leading these populations to a superior evolutionary state. The official documentation of the São Francisco/Nísia Brasileira Indigenous Post, Regional Inspectorate 4, Indian Protection Service and Nacional Workers Locations legislation and the body's internal bulletins contributed as main sources. We approached daily life from the relations between the different subjects involved in the scope of the school space, emphasizing the extent to which the pedagogical practices were constituted for the disciplining of the indigenous and their conformation to the capitalist logic of training for work. The proposed debate is based on the concept of internal colonialism, systematized by the Mexican sociologist Pablo González Casanova, and docile bodies, elaborated by the Frenchman Michel Foucault. The theoretical construction starts from the reflection on how, even after processes of political independence, nation-states perpetuate colonial practices of domination and internal exploitation, configured within the relationships between elites (economic, political, intellectual and bureaucratic) and subaltern groups. The SPI presented itself, in this sense, as an institution of the state structure reproducing such practices. In the educational sphere, the tutelary agency's schools for indigenous people were configured as disciplinary institutions aimed at the exercise of power through subtle coercion. Among the Potiguara, educational training not only highlights the agency's indigenist action aimed at building the indigenous person as a rural worker, but, above all, as a national citizen. On the other hand, it was possible to observe strategies of resistance, based on this education process, developed by the indigenous people in the face of the attempted homogenization intended by the tutelary body.