INDIGENOUS GEOGRAPHIES AND ANCESTRAL TERRITORIES

Abstract

Indigenous geographies have very deep relations: even if sometimes colonial and Eurocentric, the research and study of the links between indigenous peoples and/or traditional societies and nature is, in fact, one of the oldest and most founding roots of Geography. However, especially in Brazil, the lack of studies and the lack of prestige that this focus has sometimes been considered, has made this linkage suffer within the discipline. Contemporary indigenous geographies have emerged in the last fifteen or twenty years as an attempt to revitalize that heritage on new bases, although, in a way, this academic and indigenous movement can only be seen as a relatively recent phenomenon. Its challenges are multiple, among which the following stand out: i) elaborate an understanding of the relationship of indigenous peoples with the environment and/or nature, through their cosmologies, cosmovisions and cosmopolitics ; ii) promote dialogues of knowledge between scientific knowledge and ancestral/peoples' knowledge, through the re-actualization/reinvention of concepts, not fitted, but open to otherness, in becoming, taking care not to slip exclusively into empiricism or field of practices; ii) build a greater approximation of Geography with the field of Anthropology; iv) value, through the decolonial and intercultural debate, the dialogue between indigenous geographies and Latin American critical social thought; v) stimulate and create conditions for a greater participation of young indigenous students in undergraduate and graduate Geography. Finally, it is necessary to understand indigenous geographies rather as a perspective, in which indigenous people are protagonists of the spatial dimension.