“Times of History”: temporality, myth and history in school books by indigenous authors

Abstract

During the last decades, many indigenous groups have increased their relations with various sectors of national society. Within this context of more intense contact and negotiation with non-indigenous society, school experiences, especially those developed according to a “specific and differentiated” model of schooling, are an important place of discursive production, which this article intends to focus upon. It is within these schooling experiences that many indigenous groups are producing new knowledge concerning their own knowledge and historical experiences. In these processes of knowledge building, the school materials such as, text books, are the most significant products. Emphasizing these processes, the present article aims to analyse the conceptions of time and the different ways of organizing it in ten differents school text books, that have the underlying proposal of writing narratives concerning reflections and historical experiences of indigenous groups. The article seeks to analyse the relations among knowledge and indigenous narratives and western conceptions of knowledge and transmission of historical experience.