ABSTRACT:
The objective of this article is to investigate the social and legal paths of the Brazilian federal laws nº 10.639/03 and nº 11.645/08 - which made mandatory the teaching of content related to Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous Brazilian History and Culture in all basic education - based on the premise that policies of this nature are aligned with a process of decolonization of the educational system. To this end, we comparatively reviewed the discourses and actions of black and indigenous militancy in the field of education in order to understand the motivations and events that preceded the enactment of both laws. Our conclusions point out that, despite the particularities of the demands of each militancy - as seen in the efforts of the indigenous movement to disentangle itself from the education offered by the official school system, while the black population, on the contrary, fought to have equal access to this same system - both measures result, to a greater or lesser extent, from denunciations and questionings about the colonial matrix and/or legacy that historically marks Brazilian curricula and schools.
Keywords:
Law 10.639/03; Law 11.645/08; Black Movement; Indigenous Movement; Multiculturalism