Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
While most of the Xavante mastered the sign operations used in the calculations,
the structuring resources the people resorted to in order to solve the problems they
were faced with in a market situation transcended the purely economic nature of the
transactions. School-taught arithmetic was but one of the resources that informed
their reasoning, and conflicts and tensions arose between merchants, Funai
employees, and the Xavante. As discussed in Chapter 1, each party established
different relations among arithmetic elements and other kinds of social, political,
and economic concerns. Arithmetical problems involving monetary transactions
constituted one of the greatest concerns of the Xavante people in the 1970s
and 1980s on what was then called the Kuluene Indigenous Reservation (later
renamed as Parabubure Indigenous Land). I found the same situation to be true in
every Indigenous land or school I worked at since then, as discussed throughout
this topic.
Today the 15,000 members of the Xavante nation inhabit 165 villages spread
around on 9 distinct Indigenous lands in the State of Mato Grosso. Parabubure is the
most populous land with 4,500 persons living in 60 villages (2006).
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Figure 5.3. The author (center with headband) and a group of Xavante students at the
Ri'tubre Village, Kuluene Indigenous Reservation, in 1978.
According to chief Thomas, the headman of the Ri'tubre village in Kuluene, I
had been hired “to crack the Indians' heads wide open so that the white men's
mathematics can make its way into our minds.” I was invited to teach “white men's
knowledge” (
conhecimento do branco
) to a group of 75 boys, girls, and male
adults who had spent years unsuccessfully trying to “get to know their numbers” in
missionary schools either on or around Xavante land. Chief Thomas warned me in
Portuguese, however, that I faced a difficult task, since the “Xavante mind is too stiff
for numbers” (
cabeça Xavante é muito dura para números
). The same opinion was
