Introduction

The challenge I propose here is to imagine cartographies, layers of worlds, in which the narratives are so plural that we do not need to enter into a conflict by evoking different stories of foundation (^{Krenak, 2022, p. 32}).

Philosophy and Education have a deep relationship. Disaccommodating readings, reflections, ideas, ways of seeing and thinking Education are necessary postures for the critical exercise of Philosophy. For this, it is necessary to build a philosophical-educational project that is not indifferent to inequalities, or to social, racial, sexual, and gender discriminations, but that leads us to more dignified and fair relations in this historical moment in Brazil. As ^{Krenak (2022)} tells us in the epigraph, Indigenous peoples contribute significantly to the (re)construction of worlds and education, understood not only as the school but also as a path of this reconstruction.

Indigenous peoples have understood throughout the history of violence they suffered (and still suffer),¹ that school education is a necessary fighting tool. The defense of a specific, differentiated, and intercultural school education present in the Brazilian Constitution (1988), as well as affirmative policies in universities, are important steps for the affirmation of those who have been excluded from educational spaces to be respected in their own ways of thinking and existing. In Brazil, we have Law 11.645/08 that instituted the obligation of Indigenous knowledge in schools showing the need and urgency to transform the school, an institution still colonized and colonizing. Indigenous schools (recognized as intercultural by legislation)² have historically served as spaces for the erasure of original languages and their knowledge so that they become spaces of assimilation and integration into the culture of the Whites. With the strategy of building bilingual schools, knowledge considered the most important for human formation was introduced, profoundly transforming the knowledge in orality, in the knowledge of spiritual leaders, of the elders, of the community; its strength. ^{D’Angelis (2012)} identifies this movement as transitional bilingualism that used “the Indigenous language only as a passage, bridge or ladder to reach, as soon as possible, the exclusive use of the majority language” (p. 33), that is, the language of the colonizer.

Within this context, what is the commitment of Philosophy in fulfilling the right to knowledge about Indigenous history and knowledge? How do Indigenous philosophies teach us other ways of learning, of building knowledge, of researching, but fundamentally, of understanding the world?

We want to show that Indigenous philosophies emerge as philosophical horizons that enable new reflections on the very meaning of philosophy and education, but also on the way we produce knowledge. Indigenous people, thus, cease to be just “objects” of research, to become subjects of knowledge. However, is it possible to talk about Indigenous philosophies? Would not philosophy already be a word marked by Greek history? Western philosophy, bearer of a project of the universality of knowledge, has often denied (and sought to erase) the possibility of philosophical experience in other cultures and peoples that were “outside” the Western axis. Considering the Brazilian reality, looking at the curricula of the Philosophy Courses, for example, is enough to perceive a profound silencing regarding African, Amerindian, and Oriental philosophies.³

The recognition that Amerindian cosmologies can be called philosophies has sparked numerous debates. We will not be able to bring all the complexity that has given meaning to this discussion, but we want to discuss some points that we consider central to think about how much Indigenous philosophies bring questions to philosophy itself and to all humanity. Therefore, reflecting on how we think, how we research, how we produce knowledge, and what methodological paths and tools we have to dialogue with different knowledge, cultures, and peoples. Indigenous philosophies are not just content to be reflected on, but ways of thinking/feeling the world in other ways.

Modernity-Coloniality and the Processes of Re-Existence

Modernity, a landmark of colonization, imposed a civilizing model on all humanity in which education was a central element. Modernity, a movement of westernization of the world, carries in itself an economic, social, political, aesthetic, and epistemological project anchored in the so-called “new” perception of humanity. However, the “moderns” should explain how can a project that had at its core the defense of “equality, freedom, and fraternity” colonize, decimate and enslave Blacks and Indigenous peoples, and annul cultures and lives by imposing a false integration, or death! Aníbal Quijano (2005) comments that the idea of race was essential in this explanation since it created the necessary conditions to justify the exploitation and denial of part of humanity. Racism was a powerful instrument of population control. Colonization led to the imprinting of classifications of humanity, based on the discourse of science and philosophy itself. As Quijano (2005, p. 117) comments, “the codification of the differences between the conquerors and the conquered in the idea of ‘race,’ a supposedly different biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority to others.” Latin America seen as the “non-being,” an expression coined by Roque ^{Zimmerman (1987)}, carries the hard task of affirming its humanity. Blacks and Indigenous peoples, since the process of racist colonization, are not seen as human, because “humanity,” a modern category, has universalized this view. The European (male, White, Christian, heterosexual) becomes the human par excellence, and all those who were not within this vision were excluded from the condition of humans. Likewise, Leopoldo ^{Zea (2005, p. 358)} tells us that Latin American Philosophy “begins like this, with a polemic about the essence of the human being and the relationship that this essence could have with the rare inhabitants of the continent discovered, conquered, colonized.” While philosophy for the Greeks begins with the capacity for admiration, for us Latin Americans, philosophy begins in the defense of our humanity and all of nature.

Coloniality is, therefore, a process of colonization that still exists today, which assumes different dimensions and finds in Philosophy and Education a strategic terrain for its continuity. Coloniality brings in itself constitutive elements of an order, since, when classifying, it seeks the control and exploitation of racial, ethnic, gender, sex, work, nature, and subjectivity relations. The University and the school, mechanisms necessary to realize modernity/coloniality,⁴ managed to bring together in themselves three dimensions of Coloniality: power, knowledge, and being. In this sense, ^{Maldonado-Torres (2007, p. 144-145)} comments,

From “I think, therefore I am” we are led to the more complex and both philosophically and historically accurate expression: “I think (others do not think, or do not think properly), therefore I am (others are-not, lack being, should not exist or are dispensable).” […] In the context of a paradigm that privileges knowledge, the epistemic disqualification is converted into a privileged tool of ontological negation or of subalternization.

However, the denied subjects have been resisting for centuries and producing counter-colonialist movements, as the quilombola intellectual, Antônio Bispo dos Santos (2023, p. 59), tells us, “We have created an antidote: we are taking the poison of colonialism to transform it into an antidote against itself.” Modernity-coloniality is also re-existence, reforestation, that is, affirmation of the very existences that were sought to suffocate. The symbology of Pachakuti, present in Andean philosophies, represents chaos and, at the same time, the resurgence of life, not as opposing camps, but as forces that complement each other and are capable of fueling resistance. Indigenous peoples with their knowledge and practices have produced fissures in history. With collective memories, they make circular time (ancestry is not only past, but present and future) a force of struggle, showing that there is not only one Modernity but many times/spaces, and many philosophies!

The Indigenous alterity can be seen as a new universality, which opposes itself to the chaos and the colonial destruction of the world and of life. From ancient times to the present, the weavers and the poet-astrologers of the communities and villages are the ones who reveal to us this alternative and subversive web of knowledges and practices capable of restoring the world and bringing it back to its channel. (^{Cusicanqui, 2015, p. 185})

The poet-astrologer who appears in the drawings of Guamán Poma de Ayala, commented by Cusicanqui (2015), shows an Indigenous intellectual who looks at the stars and the earth, seeking to restore the world that he understands, from colonization, as a world “in reverse.”

Indigenous philosophies are exercises in the restoration of worlds, proposing a reforestation of the monoculture of Western thought, responsible for the idea of a universal subject. Indigenous thought in its corazonar (^{Guerrero Arias, 2010}) presents us with an intense and deep relationship with beings in their different forms. Corazonar and reforest our ways of thinking/feeling; are ethical-political responses to the hegemony of Western rationality, to the universality, which despises affectivity as a constitutive element of reason and humanity. But how to reforest a thinking that is so violently monocultural?

Intercultural and Collaborative Methodologies: Reforestation of Research

Inspired by the understanding of the Guarani intellectual, Geni ^{Núñez (2021)}, reforestation means existing from the pluralities of bodies, rationalities, times, spaces, and individual and collective subjectivities. It is urgent to reforest the University and the school; to reforest epistemologies taught in these spaces, and to reforest our ability to imagine worlds that do not destroy each other, but that are capable of learning from each other. ^{As Geni Núñez (2021)} tells us,

When I comment on colonial ideology, I am talking about what I have called the monoculture system, organized in some axes such as the monoculture of faith (in Christian monotheism), the monoculture of affections (in monogamy), the monoculture of sexuality (in mono-sexism) and the monoculture of the land, whose imposition of the One antagonizes with the principle of the forest, necessarily multiple. (^{p. 2})

We do not, therefore, want to deconstruct the canon of the philosophical tradition and put another in its place. However, by bringing the image of the forest, we recover its teaching, as a living being that has language and expression, teaching us that the greatest richness of a forest is its diversity. Indigenous philosophies become paths of reforestation and therefore contribute significantly to relearning how to think, educate, and live without destroying ourselves and the planet.

It appals us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own nations. (^{Smith, 2018, p. 11})

The quote from Linda ^{Smith (2018)}, an Indigenous researcher belonging to the Māori people, is inspiring for us to take on the difficult task of rethinking how we produce our knowledge. Interculturality, in its deep relationship with Indigenous peoples, is the land that makes reforestation possible.

When we think about academic research, the production of a whole literature that deals with interculturality, we also have to reflect on how problematic it is to talk about this topic if not in an intercultural way. That is, we know that interculturality “is recognized more and more as a need, if we want to face the challenges of our times,” as ^{Panikkar (2006, p. 23)} says. However, talking about interculturality requires us to review our positionality and the way we speak; the meaning of the word, to whom it is addressed, and how it is pronounced. Interculturality is, above all, an experience, and any writing must make its deepest meaning resonate. Interculturality is fundamentally a dialogical exercise. When we talk about Indigenous peoples and their philosophies as a way to live the interculturality, we take on the challenge of re-thinking the same thought (pun to say that Western thought is always the same, it feeds itself back!).

Thus, research with (and not on) Indigenous people requires looking at native peoples not as mere objects of research but as subjects of knowledge that have their own ways of producing it. When we reflect on indigenous philosophies together with Indigenous peoples, it is essential to establish paths of intercultural dialogues, in which those who research are involved in these dialogues. To research together with Indigenous people is to make exercises of decolonization of our gaze (of the whole colonized body), of the way we translate the speeches and silences of the Other. In fact, speaking Other again presupposes someone who looks and has the power to say “Other.”

The other has been sufficiently butchered. Ignored. Muted. Assimilated. Industrialized. Globalized. Cybernetized. Protected. Wrapped. Excluded. Expelled. Included. Integrated. And again murdered. Ravished. Obscured. Bleached. Abnormalized. Overly normalized. And he/she went back to being outside and being inside. To live in a revolving door. The other has already been observed and named enough that we can get away with mentioning him/her and watching him/her again. The other has already been measured too much for us to recalibrate him/her in a dispassionate, sepulchral laboratory. […] What if the other was not there? (^{Skliar, 2003, p. 29})

The encounter becomes, therefore, an invention of ourselves. In the same way that Europe did not “dis-cover” America, but invented itself from America, we researchers invented ourselves from the Other. The colonizing invention of ourselves made us forget that without the other, we would not be what we are!

Reflecting Indigenous philosophies cannot mean, therefore, only a research theme, a content that we dis-cover and systematize from the non-indigenous place. Researching is a political-pedagogical commitment to the struggles of the original peoples. The struggle for differentiated, specific, and intercultural education is an important banner for all of us.

At this time when we are increasingly following the presence of Indigenous people in the University,⁵ in Graduate Programs, the question about how and what it means to research takes on new directions. The Indigenous people bring into the University their philosophies, their own ways of constructing knowledge, languages, their oralities, and the community sense of the word. Indigenous people are researchers, and, in this way, they measure the understanding of the research.

We bring two perspectives that can contribute to the way we do research: the Intercultural and Collaborative dimension, which cannot be thought of separately but as dimensions that complement each other.

Interculturality is a theme that has appeared more and more in the contemporary world. We want to think here of interculturality as a methodology, that is, as a path and not only as a place of arrival. And Indigenous peoples have much to teach us about this topic since interculturality should be an exercise in encounter and not domination. It is prudent to place under suspicion many discourses that claim to be intercultural but end up reproducing modes of domination.

Dorvalino ^{Cardoso Kefej (2017, p. 7)}, an important leader of the Kanhgág people, gave the following definition of philosophy, “Jykre há s ĩgvĩ, this is the way I found to translate the word philosophy for my Kanhgág language. It means ‘thought’ as something good and beautiful, capable of welcoming and sharing. It is the whole Kanhgág world.”

Dorvalino defines philosophy as “the thought that is capable of welcoming.” We could say that his definition of Philosophy, from the Kanhgág perspective, brings a deep openness to think about interculturality. The paths that Indigenous peoples have traveled and continue to travel are made of encounters and mismatches, but the trajectory of these peoples also (and fundamentally) allows us to look at the path itself in other ways, remaking cartographies, transforming ourselves, and interculturally transforming the world to make it more welcoming.

Interculturality is thus an experiential attitude that is not projected as a mission of transmission to the other of what is proper but as a permanent dismissal of the cultural rights that we have as proper so that by this contraction of the volume of what we are we can emerge in our own contexts of welcoming, unoccupied free spaces, in which the encounter with the other is already, from the beginning, experience of coexistence in its strong sense. (^{Fornet-Betancourt, 2007, p. 50})

As a “free space,” interculturality would already place us in the impossibility of its definition. ^{Fornet-Betancourt (2004)}, philosopher of interculturality, explains that in defining the intercultural we are faced with a dilemma since the definition is how the Eurocentric Western logic operates. The act of defining implies fragmenting, parceling, and delimiting; the definitions reduce the intercultural to an “object” of study (objectified), separating subject and object, which moves by categories. But Indigenous thought is symbolic, made up of rituals, of thinking that springs from the communitarian relationship with humans and non-humans and, therefore, is deeply linked to daily life.

We highlight the nature of interculturality as a project, which is made from the cultural, political, and methodological dimensions. A project that allows “studying, describing, and analyzing the dynamics of interaction” and that assumes an ethical position “in favor of coexistence with differences” (^{Fornet-Betancourt, 2004, p. 13}). It is a perspective that puts into practice processes of reciprocal recognition and, thus, reorganizes the current relations, bringing implications for what we understand as political.

To speak of interculturality is, therefore, to speak of culture (in the singular) and of cultures (in the plural); that is, culture as “unity of analysis” and cultures as diversity and richness of the world. Thus, culture can be understood as “the encompassing myth of a collectivity in a certain moment of time and space: that which makes plausible, that is, credible, the world in which we live or are” (^{Panikkar, 1996, p. 133}). As an encompassing myth, each culture has a specific vision of the world, which includes what it considers its “criteria of truth, goodness, and beauty of all human actions” (^{Panikkar, 1996, p. 134}). It turns out that in the history of humanity, some cultures and their myths have “acquired” greater universality than others. Acquiring is in quotation marks since certain worldviews have been imposed on others, becoming hegemonic, as the only references from which to judge the world.

The perspective of Collaborative Research is the effective exercise of interculturality. The researcher does not follow a solitary path, as academic research often does. In the interrelation, all the subjects involved in the research process are authors and their knowledge is fundamental epistemological dimensions for intercultural experience. The dialogues that pretend to be intercultural (otherwise they are not dialogues but monologues) pose us the challenge of constituting collaborative relationships. ^{Rapport and Ramos Pacho (2005)} talk about Intercultural Collaborative Research, distancing themselves from the idea of Ethnography, in which a researcher elaborates readings about certain realities from pre-established rules. On the contrary, in Collaborative Research the subjects involved move within inter-ethnic territories, in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous seek to constitute a common space for dialogue and inter-learning.

For the experience of the Intercultural Collaborative research, we propose some paths that can serve as inspiration.

The Forest as an Intercultural Experience

When we seek the need for reforesting Philosophy and Education from the Indigenous philosophies, following a path that is sedimented, made of concrete with monocultural material, is impossible. The image of the forest as the space-time of indigenous cosmologies becomes the symbol for thinking about collaborative-intercultural research.

Some elements of the forest, such as the importance of pollination and seeds, are existences that converge and help us to think about the methodological paths of interculturality.

Indigenous students, for example, when entering universities, enable pollination processes, since they cross worlds, making intercultural bridges. As Albert tells us in dialogue with David Kopenawa,

If indigenous political discourse is limited to the mere reproduction of White categories, it will be reduced to hollow rhetoric; if, on the other hand, it remains within the exclusive realm of cosmology, it will not escape cultural solipsism. In both cases, the lack of articulation of these two registers leads to political failure. Rather, it is the ability to execute such articulation that makes great interethnic leaders. (^{Albert, 1995, p. 4})

Pollinating knowledge enables monoculture, so ingrained in our institutions, to become a fertile land rich in diversity. The forest teaches us what interculturality means, in which plants, animals, living beings, and spiritual beings coexist and interrelate. Inter-nature teaches us to inter-culturalize, for nature and culture are not polarities, but complementarities. Viveiros de Castro (2011, p. 351) tells us that for Amerindian thought the binomial nature-culture is something inconceivable, since “animals are people, or see themselves as people.”

Likewise, instead of using the term “methodological tools” we bring the image of seeds as those that enable germination, flowering, towards life. It is interesting to reflect on how much the exchanges of seeds between Indigenous peoples are part of their customs and represent “the exchange of cultures and rescue of rituals” (^{Soares, 2016, para. 1}).

To this end, we bring three important seeds for the experience of collaborative intercultural research: dialogical dialogues, community translation, and listening.

Dialogical dialogues is an expression coined by the philosopher of interculturality, Raimon ^{Panikkar (2006)}. For him, dialogue is the proper method of intercultural philosophy, in which the rules of dialogue are not defined in advance, unilaterally, but established in the dialogue itself. Panikkar, thus, says that the dialogue speaks of a human dimension that cannot be reduced to a logical understanding. The dialogical dialogue does not aim to convince the other and requires mutual trust and openness of subjects who live the profound experience of encounter. It seeks to overcome the “epistemology of the hunter” in which the activity is directed to the hunt for information (the so-called “data collection”). There is, however, the need for agreement, which, in the course of dialogue, is re-established at all times, since the most important thing is the process lived in the very act of dialogue. Whether the dialogues will be recorded, annotated, or recorded in any way must be agreed upon by all the subjects involved.

Community translation. According to ^{Rapport and Ramos Pacho (2005)}, the translation cannot be an isolated exercise, of the researcher who transcribes what he hears and then makes the “data analyses,” from a personal process of interpretation. Interpretation is a communal exercise and means an intercultural space of exchanges. Translation, therefore, does not occur by the exercise of bringing the language of the other into the language of the researcher (the language of the colonizer) as if this language, its words, and concepts, were capable of encompassing all the meanings of the other’s lived word. Therefore, the word is constituted in a continuous process of negotiation of meanings, of possible bridges between subjects who live the word differently. Theorizing is “clearly intercultural since it incorporates theoretical devices that arise from Indigenous cultures, as well as from external discourses that often come from academia […] it is actually a co-theorization” (^{Rapport & Ramos Pacho, 2005, p. 29}).

Listening. Listening is a fundamental seed since it is the openness and the very possibility of constituting dialogues and translations. Listening is an ethical-political-pedagogical exercise of deep respect for the word of the other. We do not listen to confirm or test positions, we listen to learn. Listening is a condition of orality, a vital element for indigenous peoples, since from orality these peoples strengthen their knowledge and historically re-exist the process of extermination of their lives and cultures.

Conclusion

Indigenous philosophies are knowledge that brings important aspects to all humanity. The care for the earth, and the planet, the sense of community, their own ways of living and learning, and their cosmologies that have good living as a central principle represent fundamental teachings in the face of so many humanitarian and environmental crises that we live in.

At a time when there is so much talk about interculturality, weaving paths from Indigenous voices so that we have an intercultural education is fundamental. We know that both the school and the University are not part of the culture of the Amerindian peoples. However, they have taught us that the school institution can be different. The experience of intercultural education is much deeper than a multicultural education based on tolerance of the other. More than tolerating we have to learn from each other and by bringing Indigenous philosophies we hope to provoke the need to build bridges of dialogue between traditions. Reforesting philosophy and education is not a utopia, a still non-existent non-place, but it is the horizon that mobilizes us not to stop moving in this direction. Indigenous philosophies are there, they have survived genocides, and they teach us that in order to live fully, we need to live together.

Indigenous philosophies and the reforestation of our thinking/feeling are profoundly relevant to both the Philosophy and the Education fields. From the philosophical perspective, highlighting denied wisdom as philosophy can break with the single and hegemonic vision that belittles and inferiorizes millenary knowledge, which teaches us other ways of thinking and feeling the world. Faced with a history that has produced epistemological geopolitics, making territories and cultures invisible, the act of affirming Indigenous philosophies also contributes to reforesting Philosophy and its curricula. This movement is slowly beginning since the last meeting of the Association of Graduate Studies in Philosophy (ANPOF, 2021) brought in its closing conference the intellectual Ailton Krenak. This already shows a necessary and fundamental movement of reparation of the history of the indigenous peoples, described as savages by many Western philosophers throughout history.

From the perspective of Education, this reflection contributes to the implementation of Law 11.645/08. Production of Indigenous philosophies is still small, showing that the debate has become even more necessary. Another aspect is the reflection on Intercultural Education present in the laws, but still very far from the practices and daily lives of schools. Bringing the look of interculturality from the experiences of indigenous peoples allows a deeper reading about their meanings and paths that we do in our research. Having a theory about interculturality is not enough if we do not have intercultural practices that promote processes of decolonization and reforestation of Philosophy and Education.