The Moxihatëtë Thëpë and Mathematics Education?

Abstract

The Amazon forest is a space disputed by different actors, who have different ways of understanding and relationships with the forest. These differences are tensioned because of the one hand, the land and its natural beings are understood as 'resources' that can be exploited according to a private logic, on the other hand, for the Moxihatëtë thëpë people of the Amazon - Yanomami people-, human beings are cohabitants of the forest-land, understood as a living being composed of countless living beings. The human beings do not have ontological privileges in relation to other beings. Thus, from the emergency and humanitarian measure decreed to safeguard the Yanomami people, due to the effects of illegal mining exploitation, aggravated during the last four years by the contempt of the public power. The purpose of this writing is to 'denounce' colonialist discourses that permeate Mathematics Education as a research field in order to 'announce', in the Freirian sense (1997), decolonial ways of practicing mathematics research and teaching that promote social justice and other relations with Mother Earth. This interest comes from our place as Latin American women, as mathematics educators and teacher in the Intercultural Education for Indigenous Educators (UFMG), Education of the Field (UFMG), Degree in Pedagogy (UFMG/FEUSP), Integrated in Science, Mathematics and Languages (UFPA) and Degree in Mathematics (UFMG/FEUSP). We put the Yanomami health and humanitarian crisis in the focus of Mathematics Education, because we understand the importance of the field to choose life, the struggle, and the resistance of the forest people that suffer until today with the pattern of power instituted by modernity/coloniality. We problematize the invisibilization of native peoples' knowledge about the forest in the curriculum of Mathematics - schools and universities - since this invisibilization contributes to the maintenance of capitalist economic policies that are based on the dichotomy between humans and other beings of nature. We elect the Bem Viver -Good Living- of the forest indigenous people as a different ontological, economic, social, and educational policy that promotes the decolonization of the imperialist ways of occupying Mother Earth and of producing knowledge.