“Who never originated never comes back”: the right of self-declaration and its impasses in accessing places for indigenous people in higher education

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to reflect on self-declaration as a criterion for the occupation of vacancies by indigenous peoples in public higher education and the debates that such criterion generates about indianness. The self-declaration criterion, present in Quota Law 12.711 / 2012, has produced a debate about indianness for university institutions that face the imperative of having to deal with indianity in their bureaucracies, thus producing an inflation of indigenous identity without regard to the native criteria of community membership. The context of the reflection is the process of building commissions to guarantee vacancies for indigenous people at the Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA) under pressure from indigenous leaders, especially the Tenetehara / Guajajara people. In this clash, between the tenetehara and the state bureaucracy, the language of war reappears reflecting the resistance of the amerindians to the state's constant attempt to “desindianização”.