The Impact of Bilingual Education on Indigenous Language and ...

(4) School is important for us because we are surrounded by non-indigenous people.
So, the school is beneficial for us: it teaches writing and reading, and documents
our language by keeping a written record <strong>of</strong> it. Before the school, we didn’t keep
a record <strong>of</strong> the Tapirape language. We kept it only in our minds, in our memories.
Nowadays, we are producing materials in our language. Also, school helps us
dialogue with non-indigenous people. We need to understand them just as we
need to write documents in Portuguese. (Ieremy’i Tapirape, 08.23.06, male
Tapirape language teacher)
Excerpts 2, 3 and 4 illustrate that knowledge about the non-indigenous culture
and language is considered crucial in the fight for indigenous rights. Being surrounded by
non-indigenous people was a determining factor in founding the school. In addition, as the
interviewees argue, school created a new tool for Tapirape people – a way to record the
language for future generations, as pointed out in (4). On one hand, the interviewee claims
that indigenous people have their own ways to save and protect their languages. <strong>The</strong>y do
not need school to do it. On the other hand, the non-indigenous presence forces indigenous
people to search for extra ways to protect themselves. In this case, the extra way is the
school which provides an additional mechanism to store the language and culture. Clearly
the school is not an indigenous artifact. It was imposed by the violence <strong>of</strong> the contact with
non-indigenous people and it has been appropriated by the Tapirape people. This
appropriation within the Tapirape community entails giving meaning to and creating
functions for that ‘foreign artifact’.
<strong>The</strong> process <strong>of</strong> appropriation <strong>of</strong> the school is related to indigenous autonomy as
well. As excerpt 5 below expresses, another goal <strong>of</strong> the school is to improve and promote
indigenous autonomy relative to non-indigenous people:
(5) <strong>The</strong> young people are being prepared by the school. In the future, we will not
need non-indigenous advisors anymore. We are improving our autonomy. In this
way school is a kind <strong>of</strong> tool. (Inamoreo Tapirape, 08.23.06, male geography
teacher)
Autonomy - the right <strong>of</strong> a community to govern itself and to organize its own
activities - can be fostered by the school, although the process may be a long one. But
because the school is a non-indigenous invention, it must be shaped and directed by the
indigenous people in order to ensure that it does indeed promote their autonomy. <strong>The</strong>
Tapirape people have been shaping their school from the beginning; however, full
autonomy requires the training <strong>of</strong> young indigenous people to manage their school.
3.2 Negative Aspects <strong>of</strong> the Tapirape <strong>Bilingual</strong> School
Although Tapirape interviewees point out positive aspects <strong>of</strong> their school, most
also recognize that the school has introduced pr<strong>of</strong>ound changes to their lives, <strong>of</strong> which
some are unanticipated and unwelcome. Some interviewees evaluate these changes as
negative aspects <strong>of</strong> the school. One example is the amount <strong>of</strong> time that the school occupies
in the students’ daily lives, as described in excerpts 6 and 7:
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Texas Linguistic Forum 52: 59-69
Proceedings <strong>of</strong> the Sixteenth Annual Symposium About Language and Society – Austin
April 11-13, 2008
© Gorete Neto 2008
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