Indigenous students in higher education: presenting academic trajectories that contribute to ethnic affirmation

Abstract

Based on the authors experiences with indigenous peoples in higher education, the article seeks to present the university trajectories that contribute to the ethnic affirmation of indigenous students who attend or have attended undergraduate courses at the Catholic University Dom Bosco/UCDB, Mato Grosso do Sul/Brazil. As a result of reflections from research in progress at the Intercultural Education and Traditional Peoples Research Group/CNPq, the text is supported by studies that are marked by the thinking of intellectuals who are guided by the cosmovision of traditional populations and who transit through different educational spaces and a qualitative methodology, which uses observation and interviews with indigenous students as a methodological procedure for data production. The article seeks to contribute to the exchange of university experiences and to contribute to the destructuring of a subordination aimed at these peoples, encouraging indigenous protagonism in terms of social, political and academic/scientific representation, and emphasizing the indigenous presence in the university as a source for the construction of decolonized knowledge and the possibility of creating an intercultural education.