Chapter 6: From the Village to a University: A Native in a Context and Brazilian Indigenous Postgraduate Education

The reflections given here constitute an attempt to address the relations between Indigenous and Western knowledge in current Brazilian postgraduate education. It is based on the perspective of an Indigenous person who left his village to pursue a Ph.D. in Anthropology, an experiment that I call “a native in context.”¹ Such an experience allowed me to move transversally through many locations, where I took on the roles of Indigenous person as object of research, Indigenous civil servant (at federal and state level), Indigenous researcher/consultant and more recently, as Indigenous anthropologist. These empirical experiences during my personal, professional and academic paths provided enough information to analyze the issue of Indigenous postgraduate education in Brazil.