a) Alcantara Space Center and Quilombola Territory

Alcantara is a small Brazilian municipality of around 22,000 inhabitants, relatively close to São Luís, capital city of the State of Maranhão. It houses hundreds of quilombola communities forming the Alcantara Quilombola Territory (AQT), the Santa Tereza Territory (STT) and the Cajual Island Territory (CIT). It is, therefore, one of the most significant municipalities in terms of the African and African-Brazilian Traditions in Brazil. Since 1983, the AQT and the Alcantara Space Center (ASC) have been involved in one of the most difficult ethnic-racial conflicts between traditional communities and physical and space sciences in Brazil, founded on the development project of Modern and Contemporary Science (Serejo ^{Lopes, 2020}).

Beyond the visible agenda of science and technology, there are economic and military interests involved in this conflict. Recently, the Revista Fapesp (2021, n. 307),⁴ one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the country, reported that two public calls for non-military use of the ASC were in effect, and the first had selected four specialized companies which would draw upon the resources of the center. The companies selected were the Canadian C6 Launch and the North American Virgin Orbit, Orion AST, and Hyperion Rocket Systems.

The Alcantara Space Center is located next to the Earth’s Equator, which makes it economically very advantageous for the Brazilian State due to the launching of Brazilian satellites in the orbit and the elaboration of bilateral agreements with countries in the Global North.⁵ From the QTA’s viewpoint, it was an inappropriate invasion of its territory and degradation of its cultural practices and values as is typical of Brazilian racism that for centuries has been subjugating Black communities, mainly the quilombola (^{Nascimento, 2008}).

In a 2004 article, only one year after the approval of the Law 10,639/2003 and eight years before the approval of the DCNEEQ/2012, the Revista Fapesp (2004, n. 96)⁶ highlighted that

The municipality of Alcantara, in the State of Maranhão, have a technological (housing a Space Center) and touristic (preserving its colonial architecture) vocation, although most of its inhabitants live in African conditions of poverty: 73% of the population of 21,000 live in the rural area, the monthly income of 59% of families being under R$ 100.00. A partnership between the Brazilian Space Agency and the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) will attempt to improve the human development indexes of the region. The idea is teaching the small entrepreneurs strategies to increase their productivity. They currently use 300-year-old techniques based on the hoe and the matchet, being unable to cultivate territories of more than one acre and, therefore, of creating wealth. They plant manioc, beans, corn, and rice. When the soil becomes wasted, they abandon it, deforest nearby areas and return there a long time after (Revista Fapesp, 2004, n. 96).

In the same article, it is read that, according to Zeke Beze, consultant of the United Nations Development Program at the time, “the obstacle, in Alcantara, is technological.”

The same journal published an article in 2019, that is, seven years after the promulgation of the DCNEEQ, in which the Minister of Science and Technology at the time, Sérgio Rezende, one of the (inter)nationally most respected and best-known physicists, criticized the intransigence of the social movements associated to the quilombos, which, according to the article, refused to discuss the sharing of territories that belonged to the remaining community.⁷ These facts clearly materialize the ethnic-racial conflicts (Tradition vs Modernity). Once more we call upon the readers to focus on the asymmetric power relationships between the Union and the AQT within the context of Coloniality, Capitalism, and Patriarchy, which have, in racism, its most expressive social technology (^{Mignolo, 2000}; ^{Quijano, 2010}; ^{Santos, 2015}; ^{Maldonado-Torres, 2018}). We understand power relationships here the ways in which the Imperial Systems (Colonialism, Capitalism, and Patriarchy) have articulated the concept of humanity in order to classify people. In this sense, modern and contemporary science, acting alongside the imperial powers, fostered unequal power relationships between these and the traditional communities. Serejo ^{Lopes (2020}) deeply presents the main questions involved in the quilombola territorialization in Brazil. The process of acknowledgment of quilombola territories is an interesting example of how these power relations operate. Even if quilombola communities exist in Brazil since the 16^th century, in June 2022, only 144 titled⁸ communities are still in existence (of the more than 6,000 existing ones).

b) Belo Monte - Xingu River

One of the most prominent cases of ethnic-racial conflicts involving the physical sciences and geography is located in Pará, Northern Brazil, in the region known as Altamira and the basin of the river Xingu—one of the biologically richest environments of the Amazônia.⁹ The issue of the hydroelectric company of the Xingu river, which began to be built in 2010, became famous worldwide in late years due to the building of the Belo Monte hydroelectric company (then known as Usina Kararaô).

As historicized in ^{Fleury and Almeida (2013}), the building project of the Belo Monte Dam started in 1975, from the Studies of the Hydroelectric Inventory of the Hydrographic Basin of the Xingu River. This would become the largest national project of the end of the 20^th century and beginning of the 21^st century. The ethnic-racial conflicts that ensued pervaded a series of interpretations of the idea of local and national development or, alternatively, of how destructive that project could become. The idea of development was implied in the notion that the Hydroelectric Dam of Belo Monte was aimed to be one of the largest in the world, generating more than 1,100 MW/hour. On one side of the conflict, stood the Norte Energia and the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), both in defense of a national project of development; on the other side, the indigenous peoples of Xingu, living in perfect harmony with Nature, standing as the voices of the Forest and against the death of fish, the water and the woods, against the disarticulation of communitarian life and its means of life and subsistence (^{Kopenawa e Bruce, 2015}; ^{Krenak, 2019}). The building of the Belo Monte Dam crossed distinct phases of national politics and, despite the conflicts still in existence, was always a governmental priority in the eyes of the great contractor companies fueled by capitalist interests, who see themselves as above the interests of the local population.

Once more we can conclude that there are contrasting interpretations of the concept of development and that the narrative struggle in the ethnic-racial conflicts involving territorial politics is based on the disarticulation of ancestral (spiritual) values of the indigenous peoples and the peoples of the Earth and the Forest instead of a developmental agenda self-proclaimed Universal, articulated to the Capital.

c) Mauna Kea Observatories - The Kānaka Maoli People

The Mauna Kea, an extinguished volcano in Hawaii has been historically one of the most celebrated places for astronomic observation in the United States of America, for centuries leading many of the most robust projects in world astrophysics. In Mauna Kea, the Keck Telescope (10m-diameter) is located, one of the most powerful nowadays on earth. Since the 20^th century, the indigenous peoples living in the Island of Hawaii have been negotiating the transactions around the installation of many astrophysical development projects.

However, in later years, the Mauna Kea has staged one of the most controversial ethnic-racial conflicts. On one side, astrophysicists, engineers, and governments wanting to install at the Mauna Kea Observatories (more precisely on the summit of the Mauna Kea Volcano), the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT); on the other side, the Kānaka Maoli, the native population of the region.

Within the intricate power relationships of the Modernity project discussed here, the TMT, a 30-meter telescope, belonging to the new class of extremely large telescopes, will cause a revolution in Astronomy for the next decades, since, alongside other similarly sized telescopes (25-45 meters), the TMT will allow deeper and more sensitive access to celestial objects. With this new class of telescopes, Astro(physics) is expected to solve some of the enigmas that have sought for answers throughout the last centuries: the origin of the first galaxies, the large-scale description of the structure of the Universe, the composition of the intergalactic environment, the physics of the fist instants of the Universe, the nature of the dark matter, the definition, and the role of dark holes, among other mysteries. The building of telescopes, observatories and the installation of many instruments stand for the development of Modern and Contemporary Astrophysics. It is worth highlighting that, even if hosted and coordinated by the USA, the TMT project involves other heavy-weight partners in the international scenery such as, for instance, the governments of Japan, China, India, and Canada.

For the Kānaka Maoli Tradition, the Mauna Kea is its very body-territory, where its memories and alterities are located (^{Salazar, 2014}). Its existence makes sense only from the Mauna Kea found in the narratives about the origin of the world and the people. In its cosmology, the Mauna Kea binds heaven and earth and originates the water, the fundamental element for the rituals and the lives of the Kānaka Maoli (Salazar, 2014). In the tradition, there is, therefore, a conception of the sacred that conflicts with the modern project of science, and this is the main source of the conflict occurring in Mauna Kea.

d) Mount Graham International Observatory - Apache San Carlos Indigenous Community

Another case of ethnic-racial conflict in the physical sciences that should be highlighted involved the installation of the observational site of the Mount Graham International Observatory (MGIO), near the peak of Mount Graham, Pinaleño Mountains, southeastern Arizona, USA. The MGIO is associated to the Department of Astronomy of the University of Arizona, which, operated by the Steward Observatory, is composed of three main units: (i) Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT), mirror of 1.8m-opening; (ii) Heinrich Hertz Submillimeter Telescope, which operates in the frequency of the radio with a disk-shaped antenna of 10m-opening; and the (iii) Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), composed of two mirrors of 8.4m-opening each.

In the viewpoint of modern development, the Steward Observatory soon noticed the astrophysical potential that the 3,268-meter-high peak had to the installation of several telescopes. In addition, Mount Graham presents extraordinary conditions for observation: excellent seeing,¹⁰ scarce light pollution and a predominance of limpid nights. In addition, it is strategically located at 240km of the city of Tucson.

Of native origin, Pinaleño means “deer.” The Pinaleño Mountains are part of the Coronado National Forest. As in other cases reported here, the native groups in Arizona stood up for their traditions and their cosmological relationships with the mountain and its environment, which were being threatened by the process of astronomic installation then occurring (^{Bezerra, 2020}). The ethnic-racial-environmental conflict of Mount Graham had its apex in the years 1980 (Bezerra, 2020).

Just as in other cases, the peak of Mount Graham is shrouded in cultural and spiritual meaning (Tradition) for the Apache San Carlos Indigenous Community, whose reservation is found on the bottom of the MGIO. For generations, these original peoples have sown and reaped their medicinal herbs and have related based on another logic with the mountain.

In 2002, the first light took place at the Large Binocular Telescope (^{Bezerra, 2020}), signaling once more the dominance of scientific (universal) interests over the social and cultural (local) interests of the native peoples of Arizona around the MGIO.

AXIS 1: ALTERITIES AND THE CONCEPT OF DE-VELOPMENT

At the roots of the ethnic-racial conflicts addressed here—which embody political-territorial conflicts—the modern construction of the concept of race stands out. The idea of race is directly linked with the meaning and concept of alterity (Black, quilombola, indigenous) from the process of colonization. De-colonial studies place alterity and the idea of race at the center of the debate (Quijano, 2005; ^{Maldonado-Torres, 2018}; Rosa; ^{Alves-Brito; Pinheiro, 2020}; Alves-Brito, 2021a;b). The development project of Modern Science operates the idea of “I” (European/colonizer) against the “other” (non-European/colonized/enslaved). In the history of Brazil, exterminational and integrational policies have destroyed indigenous peoples, spirituality (in the Christian tradition) justifying the Eurocentric ideology that these peoples, not possessing the written word, soulless, and lawless, should be civilized to enter the world of “development,” anchored in the Portuguese colonial project (^{Munduruku, 2012}).

There is, therefore, at the core of the conflicts addressed here an implicit question of deterritorialization of the “other.” The colonized other has their (im)material and symbolic territory expropriated so that environmental racism (Rocha and Santana Filho, 2008) should be broadly discussed in education in sciences committed to the antiracist struggle.

Aimed primarily at scientific enquiry, either pure or applied, we see that the great astrophysical development projects are inserted within strategic places: next to the Equator of the Earth, in the case of Alcantara, or in distant sites, usually in arid regions of high altitudes as deserts or mountain peaks, in the case of Mauna Kea and Arizona. These regions are sought to minimize problems caused by the gases of the earthly atmosphere in astronomic observations, since part of the electromagnetic radiation (ultraviolet and infrared) is retained by the Earth’s atmosphere. The robust projects of the physical sciences aim to escape from great urban centers. There is no way of building a great hydroelectric company if not near water basins, which are in isolated, rural places, removed from urban centers.

In the Southern hemisphere, with its desert (Atacama) and its mountain ridge (Andes), Chile is the country with the greatest number of observatories and instruments of astronomic observation, many of them kept and financed mainly by European countries and the United States of America, world leaders in the field. It is worth highlighting that other countries in the region, such as Brazil, also establish projects of scientific collaboration with programs developed in Chilean soil. The choice for Chile, years ago, was not neutral or based solely on its natural potential. There were also political and economic issues related to this choice. The small country, exporter of wine and minerals, located between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Ridges, has been for many years a neoliberal laboratory (new rationality) in the world. Even if the country has undergone a twist in its recent social structure (^{Collaço, 2021}), these movements do not reach the astronomic facilities found there,¹¹ leading us into referring once more to the (neo)colonial relationships imposed by coloniality. Within the next years, an estimated 70% of the world astronomic potential will be in full development in Chile—a case of development coupled with the “rent of the sky.” In this sense, in terms of ethnic-racial relations, we can ask ourselves where are the alterities of the original peoples of Chile (Mapuches, Aymaras, Colla, Quechua, Rapa Nui, Yagán, Pehuenches, Huichilles, Kawashkar and Alacalufes) within these “astronomic” developments, where are their cosmological narratives and semiotics in the schools and cultural spaces?

The logic of occupation of large or small areas for modern development projects in science and technology is based on the idea that there is no inhabitable life in these territories and, even if there is, they are not human, which justifies the physical and psychic violence in these territories lurking behind the neo(colonial) subordination, marking these alterities as synonymous with backwardness. Once the sites are selected, as we see in the cases above, the communities are not invited to participate in the process of discussion of the benefits and the ills of the projects, masked by the banner of development. Nor are these communities asked about their interest in such projects. No safeguard plans are developed with the participation of the local population, not even in projecting how the changes may be organized and executed with less impacts on existence (of the living and the non-living) which constitute their communities.

As summarized by ^{López (2018}), the strategies of domination of the collective social imagination involve a rhetoric of subalternization historically referred by the construction of hierarchic relations of power that conflict Tradition and Modernity:

It is commonly found in many contexts of colonial relations and implies conceiving of oneself as forerunners of civilization and development, whose mission is to guide other human being into “modernity,” “reason” and “maturity.” In addition, they view the local populations as “uncivilized savages.” Their social worldview is implicitly or explicitly that of 19^th century unilinear evolutionism, which deems local populations as anterior stages of human development. Thus, they are associated to other groups as “necessity of tutelage,” as children and women. The behaviors of all these groups are classed as “irrational,” “mystic” and “emotional” (^{López, 2018}, p. 444).

In recent times, the Project of education and scientific promotion aligned with the Hegemonic Modernity articulates development from the 17 Objectives for Sustainable Development (OSD), the ground of the world agenda within the ambit of the United Nations Organization (UNO; Figure 1; see discussion in ^{Alves-Britto, 2021a}). This agenda has been the basis of the global commitments for development and the design of ways of being and relating in societies and scientific organizations worldwide. In this sense, the physical and space sciences play a fundamental role in the implementation of what is foreseen in the Agenda UNO 2030, mainly within the Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIR), which is excludingly in course.

Figure 1 Objectives of Sustainable Development (OSD), UNO 2030 Agenda 

Once more, we need to think about what development means in physics and astronomy and how we can build projects of education (in sciences) that are differentiated, directed to Black, quilombola, and indigenous territories within the context of the FIR (^{Alves-Brito, 2021a}). The ethnic-racial conflicts discussed here are actually related to the notion of development operationalized in different projects, particularly those whose banner are the ODS of the Agenda UNO 2030.

As one of the premises of antiracist education is the decolonization of thought, the ideas of the quilombola thinker Antônio Nêgo Bispo dos ^{Santos (Santos, 2015}) are crucial to help us reflecting about the ethnic-racial conflicts addressed here. This author presents an authentic perspective of development of the ERE in Brazil. For him, the Modern and Contemporary project of science, with its colonial pedagogy in dealing with original and traditional communities, particularly the quilombola communities, is focused on a discourse of exterminating the “other,” the one who is different from the “I” (white/European/colonizer). Such a project is grounded in extermination and de-velopment practices. In this sense, the relationship between science and the people is based on the break of affective bonds and involvement (thus, de-velopment) of different natures—material, symbolic, aesthetic, and affective. Here we interpret this de-velopment as actually a strategy of, within the ethnic-racial relationships, reaffirming the ongoing process of dehumanization of Black bodies and original peoples (racism), excluding them from power discussions and decision-making spaces and the autonomous and powerful knowledge production.

There is, then, in the historical processes of education in the sciences, a breaking of bonds, an affirmation of de-velopment proposed by Nêgo Bispo. And these logics of de-velopment (environmental racism) will mark and justify, in articulation with scientific racism (^{Rosa; Aves-Brito; Pinheiro, 2020}; ^{Alves-Brito, 2021b}), much of the ethnic-racial conflicts presented in this article.

AXIS 2: ALTERITIES AND COSMOPOLITICS

The traditional communities in Alcantara, Xingu, Mauna Kea, and Arizona, as many others around the world, evidently regard the areas in which they live and cohabit as territories, not merely as land; these territories are part of their bodies, powerful spaces strongly linked to their relationship with the non-human world, mainly the non-visible beings. For them, these territories are fundamental parts of their cosmological conceptions, emotions, sensations, and social-anthropologic bonds (^{Kopenawa e Bruce, 2015}; ^{Santos, 2015}; ^{Krenak, 2019}; Serejo ^{Lopes, 2020}).

From the cosmological viewpoint (^{Stengers, 2014}; ^{Alves-Brito, 2021b};c), there is a sense of collectiveness that pervades these different experiences, which, in the educational context, strengthens the understanding that race, by definition, only makes sense in its relationship with the other. There is, in Stengers’s cosmopolitics, a sense of sharing the world of the people excluded from Modernity. And, therefore, in this racial literacy, in Brazil or in the United States, being Black/indigenous/quilombola has its peculiarities. The cosmopolitical perception reaffirms the concept of race as dynamic and bound in space and time. However, it universalizes the experience of racism, as structure, uniting the histories of Brazil and the USA to other Black, quilombola, and indigenous histories worldwide. The concept of race is understood as political, and cosmopolitics as the politics of Modernity in crisis (^{Stengers, 2014}).

Cosmopolitics pervades culture and, in this sense, Muniz Sodré, one of the foremost Black intellectuals, teaches us that Black culture (the same is valid for the cultures of indigenous peoples worldwide) is not based on the idea of linearity of exchanges. They were always symbolic (^{Sodré, 2005}). This is exactly why racialized cosmologies (^{Alves-Brito, 2021b};c), outside the western context, neither operate nor communicate from a cosmophobic reference point. The racialized cosmologies include not only human beings (alive and dead), but also animals, plants, and minerals. As long as this feature is treated from the values of modern science as animism, it can be (and is) the very logic of organization of other cultures (^{Sodré, 2005}) and, therefore, scientists/engineers/politicians need to be prepared to foster and respect diverse alterities in the physical sciences or in racialized cosmological relations. This is an educational process, not a biological datum.

As discussed in ^{Alves-Brito (2021a}), values, beliefs, and attitudes arising from African, African-Brazilian, and indigenous matrices are built by other marks that are not always understandable (and even less tangible) for the constructs of modern science, this being the main point of the discussion around ethnic-racial relations in physical sciences, which ignore the ancestral sciences based on other references of reason (emotions, for instance). This is actually the basilary question when we think about the ethical sense of education in sciences for ethnic-racial relationships, which can be successful only insofar as they happen within relationships (modern science in a dialog with ancestral sciences). Without that, it will be impossible to mediate the ethnic-racial conflicts in scientific practices, be it in whatever context they are.

As discussed throughout the text, the communities involved in ethnic-racial conflicts in Brazil and the USA tackled here are those that are historically dehumanized by the Modern and Contemporary Project of Science. Aníbal Quijano, one of the great Latin intellectuals, reminds us that the idea of race/ethnicity (Black, quilombola, indigenous) is laced with the standard idea of power in a mental construction offered by the experience of colonial domination, structured by Eurocentrism (^{Quijano, 2010}). There is no way of moving if we do not radically restructure our curricula and our practices in all the areas of Brazilian education.

However, the Curricular Refences articulate (yet) silencing, erasure, and extermination of ethnic-racial conflicts and the voices of original peoples and those of African and African-Brazilian matrices within the context of Teaching in Sciences in basic education and the Institutions of Higher Learning. In general, when these ways of existing appear in these narratives, they are represented in a passive and apathetic light. But it is symptomatic, through the conflicts highlighted here, to perceive that these communities keep on resisting and, therefore, they are not motionless in time nor are passive or indifferent to the crossings of presence in their lives.

In this sense, it is urgent that the knowledge and practices (ancestral sciences) of different peoples here discussed be encompassed in schools, universities, and spaces of scientific promotion, but not in a folklorized context, static in time. The recuperation of the historical struggles of these peoples contribute to frame other identities and alterities, more autonomous and empowered within the context of physical sciences, whose very books often fail to depict the ethnic-racial diversity of the country (^{Rosa e da Silva, 2015}).

AXIS 3: ALTERITIES AND CRITICAL RACE THEORY

We argue, moreover, that Critical Race Theory (CRT; ^{Bell, 1992}; ^{Delgado and Stefancic, 2021}) has a key role in education in sciences, in Brazil and the USA, to help us build Black, indigenous and quilombola alterities that are resilient, empowered and politically aware of their historic struggle. The methodological and epistemological pathways embraced by CRT, updated in the views of Milner and Howard (2013) and ^{Delgado and Stefancic (2021)} are expressed in five tenets: (i) intercentricity of race and racism (and their intersectionalities); (ii) challenging the dominant ideology (in relation to the dismantling of the ideas of neutrality, objectivity and meritocracy); (iii) commitment to social justice (breaking all the racialized privileges, mainly the academic-scientific access); (iv) interdisciplinary perspective (dialogs between areas of knowledge, competences and practices); and (v) centrality of experiential knowledge (the escrevivência - narratives of life) which, in our opinion, may be partially illustrated by the concept of escrevivência of the writer and thinker Conceição Evaristo:

an act of writing of Black women, as an action that seeks to blur, unmake an image of the past, in which the body-voice of enslaved Black women had their potency of emission also under the control of slavers, men, women, and even children (^{Evaristo, 2020}, p. 30).

The CRT, linked to the ERE, is proposed here as an interesting key for thought to help us problematize, interpret, and even solve each of the ethnic-racial conflicts revisited in Brazil and the USA. The difference of CRT is that it is not only theoretical, but actually articulated by social transformation. Not only thinking and discussing, but also acting is needed to transform. The QTA exists for decades. In Mauna Kea, Xingu, and Arizona, the same dynamics of struggle and resistance can be seen. This is the groundwork of CRT: the struggle for social transformation in collectivity. And this is the other fundamental aspect that deserves to be highlighted from the cases here discussed: the potency of social movements to participate in the public debate of education and promotion of sciences (^{Munduruku, 2012}; ^{Gomes, 2017}).

Ethnic-racial conflicts as these in Brazil and the USA, reported and interpreted in this text, are frequently led by the elderly (the masters of knowledge) of the communities involved, mainly women. There are, therefore, in these movements, theoretical, methodological, and epistemological constructs that pervade the being (experiencing) in the world anchored in ancestry and orality in a perspective of femininity. The social movements offer, thus, in their transformative dynamics, other ways of dealing with the other, incorporating other epistemologies which are not treated in the formal circuits of education and promotion of sciences, mainly in physical sciences.

Nilma Lino Gomes, Daniel Munduruku and Daniel Serejo Lopes, educators, researchers, and intellectual activists, have broadly discussed these gains for the case of historical, didactic-pedagogical, and onto-epistemological processes involving Black (^{Gomes, 2017}), quilombola (Serejo ^{Lopes, 2020}) and indigenous (^{Munduruku, 2012}) questions explaining the movements of resistance and traditional potency in Alcantara, Xingu, Mauna Kea, and Arizona.

In addition, teachers, educators, and politicians, articulators of Quilombola/Indigenous School Education with differentiated projects of education and even of public school regarded today as a Black territory from the viewpoint of the physical presence of Black students (^{Alves-Brito, 2021a}), need to feel as part of the construction of these agendas of development in another logic of sustainability. It is necessary to strengthen and reaffirm the identity of the Black/quilombola/indigenous political being that needs to be in the world without being exterminated by the ethos of the Modern and Contemporary Project of Science.

The ethnic-racial conflicts discussed in the text offer, thus, challenges and opportunities to denaturalize questions that are part of the social, economic, and political decisions that dehumanize the Black, quilombola, and indigenous bodies-territories. The political question is, therefore, given. We know that, unlike other contents of the physical sciences, the historical questions and of nature in science are a challenge for teachers of science in all the levels. Not only that: Philosophers, epistemologists, and sociologists of sciences addressed in the different didactic-pedagogical and cultural interventions have excessively euro-centered biases (^{Ferreira, Custódio, 2021}), which again affirms epistemic racism (^{Carneiro, 2005}) and the subalternization of alterities outside the “white-western” context. The CRT offers capillarity for the critical, scientific, and political debate that is sociologically transformative.

Moreover, the CRT offers a contribution to understanding the ways in which the juridical culture in Brazil and the USA deepens ethnic-racial inequalities and conflicts, be it in the specific question of the territories, be it in the application of educational policies such as the Laws 10,639/2003, 11,645/2008 and/or legal marks that orient indigenous and quilombola schooling. Tribunals, in general, maintain discriminatory systems against persons placed in subalternized groups (^{Moreira, 2020}). In the context of the struggles discussed here, the CRT explains not only how the counter-narratives to the discourse of universalism of the rights are justified epistemologically, but also how the negation of the systemic nature of racism (Rosa; ^{Alves-Brito; Pinheiro, 2020}; ^{Alves-Brito, 2021b};^c) is materialized in the schools, universities, and other institutions that represent the State of Law. That is, in each of the political territorial conflicts discussed here, we cannot ignore the role of race in the process of juridical arguments (^{Moreira, 2020}; ^{Delgado and Stefancic, 2021}). Even if our focus is the educational question, we cannot but stress that the origin of CRT in the juridical sciences has a significant contribution to reading the episodes cited here, since these struggles of land/territories involve primarily juridical aspects, which are often used as a justification to promote the epistemic and environmental racism “according to the law.” The legislations are used and articulated, in the face of the public and institutional debate, within the ambit of the canonical idea of development, which obviously does not take into consideration the ancestral sciences and existences.

AXIS 4: NEW ALTERITIES ON SCHOOL, SCIENTIFIC MUSEUM, OBSERVATORY, AND PLANETARIUM

Finally, it is worth questioning, after all that has been discussed throughout this essay, where are the Black, quilombola, and indigenous thoughts on the grounds of schools, scientific museums, observatories, and planetariums? How could Black and indigenous students feel as part of the process of construction of the sciences if their knowledge and practices (ancestral sciences) are progressively denied in formal (and non-formal) processes of scientific education and culture? It is important to advance for the ethnic-racial conflicts addressed here to yield diverse opportunities of interpellations of themes and questions related to astronomy, physics, geography, technology, and development.

If well-articulated in the classroom, the conflicts addressed may, for instance, work as excellent laboratories of active methodology in argumentation and exercise of critical thinking without necessarily disregarding the contents of physics, astronomy, and/or geography.

Among the many questions that could direct the work in the classroom and spaces of scientific outreach, we highlight:

Beyond the questions above, the ethnic-racial conflicts in Alcantara, Xingu, Mauna Kea and Arizona allow us to deepen Felwine Saar’s ideas about what development means, which is ultimately the essence of the Tradition-Modernity relationship that we tried to problematize:

Development is, then, an attempt to universalize an endeavor that had in the West its origin and its highest degree of realization. It is above all the expression of a thought that rationalized the world before having the means of transforming it. This evolutionist and rationalizing view of social dynamics was successful to the point of being adopted by almost the totality of the recently decolonized nations. Their deed was to stipulate western societies as reference and deprecate all other paths and ways of social organization. Thus, in a way of retroactive teleology, all the societies different from Euro-American societies became underdeveloped. The conversion of most nations to the passion for development in its western version was a successful work of denial of difference (^{Saar, 2021}, p. 23).