Ações de educação ambiental pela comunidade indígena Tape Jere Guarani, município de Santa Helena, oeste do Paraná

Abstract

Caring for the environment is a hotly debated topic in sectors that involve the economic, social, cultural, educational, environmental context, as the production and consumption of industrialized products occur more rapidly by humanity, causing the accumulation of waste, besides the great constructions taking the place of forests, animals and even people. Alongside progress, environmental, cultural, social and economic problems affect societies in different ways. The Tape Jere Guarani community is one of the communities affected by the flooding after the construction of the Itaipu hydroelectric plant in Foz do Iguaçu/Paraná, which promised great economic advances with an increase in energy generation. This event caused many families to lose their homes, animals and everything they had conquered, including in this contingent many indigenous people who were left homeless, having their houses burned, losing their land, houses and goods they owned, whose compensation has not yet occurred. The Tape Jere Guarani community is located in Curva do Ogregon, municipality of Santa Helena, west of Paraná, in the middle of a reserve forest owned by Itaipu Binacional. They have lived in this place for four years, where the chief recounts the difficulties experienced in the construction of their houses (made of canvas and boards) and the trajectory of his family's arrival. They live on resources from city hall and government agencies, which provide basic food baskets for the community, which is basically made up of non-perishable foods, such as rice, beans, sugar, pasta, soy oil and milk, all of industrialized origin. With this, the production of garbage in the community became even greater, whose residues were burned. We aim to analyze the conception of Environmental Education presented by the Tape Jere Guarani community. The aim is to find out which factors interfere in the construction of these concepts, identifying agreements and disagreements between the concepts formed by the community and by the non-indigenous authors. For this, we used the methodological strategy called action research, with 13 training meetings, with themes on the environment and Environmental Education, data collection on the community and finally on the issue of garbage, which was one of the aspects that emerged in the formative meetings. The technique used is focus group. At the end of the training meetings, it was possible to understand the concept of Environment and also Environmental Education (EE) highlighted by the community, where they conceptualize that EE is the study of the environment, being the "environment everything", that is plants, animals, the stars, encompassing their homes and themselves. It is concluded that they understand the environment and EE governed by the principle of interdependence, in which all members are interconnected in a vast and intricate web of relationships, "the web of life". Regarding the disposal of waste, everyone continued to carry out the work that had been started, showing the decrease in solid waste dumped on the community's soil, and in the number of bonfires.