Interpreters, Caregivers, and Warriors. Indigenous Female Visual Representations in the Conquest of America Within the School Text of History, Geography and Social Sciences of the 8th grade (2023)

Abstract

The colonization of the American world is a historical period where concepts such as civilization, barbarism and modernity coexist. The above has built a colonial and patriarchal imaginary, which has been installed through written content and visual representations in museums, newspapers, films and the media. Five years after the demonstrations and student mobilizations of the Feminist May (2018) in Chile, it becomes necessary to question, from a decolonial and gender perspective, the visual knowledge reproduced in the secondary school stage, which is characterized by the centrality of the male point of view, that is, from a prevailing androcentric bias. For the purposes of this paper, we will analyze the school text of History, Geography and Social Sciences of the 8th grade of the year 2023, with the aim of identifying how the colonized indigenous female bodies are exhibited in the visual representations created during the process of colonization in America. For this task, we have considered working with the images (engravings and illustrations) of the units related to that historical period.