Juliana Salles Machado

As a Brazilian women historian/archaeologist/anthropologist, who has struggled for the last years to make brazilian archaeology and history a more gender, social and race inclusive, and working hard to create a non-discriminating academic environment. Through my community engagement in research, my focus in indigenous archaeology/history, as well as a considerable experience with inclusive outreach approaches, I have made a professional commitment to racial, social and gender diversity inclusion in academy and a personal effort for a respectful and inclusive teaching and mentoring practices.

During my professional experience as a teacher and advisor in the Federal University of Santa Catarina, I have integrated the Intercultural Indigenous Bachelor Course, teaching for indigenous students in a cultural specific pedagogy. Our indigenous students are teachers in their own indigenous land, and search for an intercultural experience to strengthen and develop their cultural diverse schools. Thus we offer the classes part of the time in the university and part of the time in the indigenous land. Our courses, forms of teaching and even the language were extremely flexible and were previously discussed by an intercultural committee formed by teachers, students and indigenous leaderships.

I also integrate a consultant committee for indigenous schools’ pedagogy, where through various encounters and debates, including community members from all the indigenous villages involved, we established guidelines for governmental policies for indigenous public schools. I also advise Indigenous Academics on their undergraduate Monographs at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. Currently, I advise one indigenous graduate student (MA) focusing on archaeological site location within her indigenous land and traditional knowledge and meaning on memorial places.

 

Within the non-indigenous academics, I have also organized and designed activities for the promotion of equity through activities such as open round-tables about indigenous cultures in urban and academic environments, exhibits in public museums, support for indigenous students in the university environment in our Laboratory space, open-days visits in our Archeology Labs, where we welcomed indigenous community to visit, addressed, debated and proposed new ideas about heritage studies, exhibits, conservation and associated narratives.

 

The challenge of an inclusive diversity is imposing new questions about how to make science and, more specifically, about our fragmented practice of how to look over the past among an Indigenous Archaeology, History and Anthropology. The inclusion of new actors into the scientific production brings with it a new resizing of our practices that ranges from an offset of our own ways of teaching and mentoring and formulating research questions, the time and form of its execution, even though our proper research objectives and forms of analysis, and the dissemination of the results. Such offsets imprint big challenges to the teacher and researcher who must reconcile cultural diverse times/spaces with major academic structures, the latter governed largely by deadlines and institutional boundaries and funding agencies, not to mention even less flexible private consultants. However, this same challenge has the potential to expand our theoretical and methodological questions, extrapolating our perspectives and models of research, teaching, engaging with communities and thinking. My experience among the Laklãnõ Xokleng indigenous peoples, in and outside the academic environment, allowed me to reflect on and experience collective productions, co-productions and collaborations about different perspectives of the past.  More than participants of research, these new actors/collaborators have been interested in the co-production of knowledge about their present/past from different thinking venues and forms of dialogue.  I believe that the flexibility provided by models for collaborative and inclusive research and teaching can be understood in a deeper way. Going beyond the re-ordering of our timeline or the decision of what and how to research, or, within the field of archaeology, where to dig or do, or not, any intervention, this means that as a women professor, researcher and mentor, I am fully commited to making the practice of knowledge production in the scientific métier more inclusive, allowing it to be permeated by different world perspectives, one which can re-structure our own pre-established associations and so, in a way, transform our own categories of analysis and practice.