INDIGENOUS STUDENTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE IMPASSES OF AN AFFIRMATIVE CITIZENSHIP

Abstract

The scene is repeated several times: a young indigenous mother is prohibited from using the official vehicle of the university for being accompanied by her little daughter. The routine of public policy follows an institutional standard of individualistic cut, applied universally to all students, indiscriminately, based on a contractual basis - only people with an institutional link can access transportation due to restrictions resulting from insurance policies life and / or impositions of control organs external to the university. A new generation of indigenous university students lives in Brazil the contradictions in the execution of public policies that, at the origin, recognize human rights of ethnic character and its interfaces with actions that aim at social equity and justice. Although the country's democratic legal system established by the Federal Constitution in 1988 foresees such rights, in the administrative routines of national universities there are practices that reiterate the integration and reduction of indigenous alterities to generic and hegemonic patterns present in the surrounding society. In 2006, Japanese jurist Kenji Yoshino rescues the notion of covering, originally coined by Erving Goffman in his notes on stigma and identity, to reflect on the processes of "concealment" of emerging alterities versus stereotyped structures . In the present study we seek to look at the phenomenon of reiteration of the colonial practices of integration of indigenous people into the Brazilian national society, focusing on an analysis of recurrent coverage cases in the daily life of universities.