JOVENS TAPUIOS DO CARRETÃO: PROCESSOS EDUCATIVOS DE RECONSTRUÇÃO DE IDENTIDADE INDÍGENA.

Abstract

This study proposes to investigate the reality of the Young members of the Tapuia Indian tribe who live in Carretão, at a time whey are going through a process of reconstruction of their indigenous identity. The study specifically examines the feeling of belonging to the ethnic group, Tapuia Indians of Carretão, on the part of these young people, thereby seeking to understand what it means to be young, to be a Tapuia Indian, the relationship with those who are older, with the traditions, with the family and the formative agencies, the relationship with the territory or the land where they live, the educational process and how they see their present and their future. The study seeks to know the young Tapuia Indians of Carretão, who they are and how they live, how they perceive their existence as heirs of an indigenous identity and a piece of land, and how they became interested in their heritage. It investigates the consistency or lack thereof of their conviction of belonging to an ethnic group which is in an accelerated process of losing cultural values, keeping in mind the fact that they participate, as do all young people of their time, in school education, recreation, religion, existential conflicts, to sum it up, in the social and cultural universe of youth who live in a rural area with probable pretensions to conquer space in a world that is becoming over more urbanized. The study considers the young person as a subject of his social world, immersed in the history of his country and his ethnic group, who bears the marks of this history an as subject who is capable to reflect on his acts and to position himself as far as his life is concerned. The phenomenological method has been used to enable penetration of the world of concepts of the subjects and ask who are these young people. The instrument used in this study is the specialized interview. To discover their sense of belonging, an attempt was made to investigate the process of education that the youth of Carretão go through, trying to give due dimensions to their participation in school education, the process of the loss of cultural values and the influence they absorb from organizations of civilian society (the Diocese of Rubiataba, the National Indian Foundation Funai, the Missionary Council for the Indigenous Cimi, the Institute for Pre-history an Anthropology of Goiás IGPA and the Catholic University of Goiás), who with the proposal to help the group in a process of revival influence the way these young people understand their past, their present and their future. The young Tapuia Indians of Carretão are in a process of identifying themselves as descendants of Amerindians. They are conscious of the fat that are Amerindians, the result of a long process of miscegenation and, they are building their identity on the conviction that they are not pure Amerindians and also that they are not white descendants of the colonizers. They consider themselves Tapuia, a World that identifies the indigenous descendants of Carretão since the beginning of 20th century.