Entre os Guajajara: caminhos para compreender modos de vida originários na terra indígena Araribóia.

Abstract

This work comes from an epistemological rupture: instead of analyzing the ways of living of Indigenous peoples through western lenses, it proposes direct listening. More than an object of study, the Tenetehara people are here recognized as subjects of knowledge, with their own sciences, ancestral practices, and ways of inhabiting the world that challenge the modern paradigms of development, planning, and urbanization. The research is structured through an immersion in the Araribóia Indigenous Land, in Maranhão, where the researcher experienced, through direct coexistence, aspects of the daily life, construction methods, ways of dwelling, and social and spiritual dynamics of the villages visited. From this contact emerge reflections that do not seek to interpret or diagnose, but rather to record and expose voices that have historically been silenced by the many forms of coloniality that developed after the colonization of the Americas. By presenting the Guajajara ways of life, their collective kitchens, houses built with earth, wood and straw, their bathing in streams, their rituals and celebrations, the work reveals the existence of another temporality, another logic of coexistence with the territory, based on reciprocity, collectivity, and a deep spiritual bond with the land. This is a work that does not aim to speak about the Guajajara, but with them. It’s ethical gesture is that of listening; its political proposal, that of giving back. By doing so, it contributes to expanding the horizons of critical thinking in the field of architecture, offering clues for a more sensitive, plural practice, committed to territorial justice and historical reparation.