ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses points arising from that controversy and explores ways of teaching this content in future. An approach to teaching sensitive and controversial issues that has been identified as promising is the use of effective and compelling historical and sociological sources, in relation to which audience's and students' preconceived ideas will no longer work. The controversy over teaching African history and African-Brazilian and indigenous history and culture should also be understood in Brazilian context. In parallel, it focuses on parts of the permanent exhibition of the National Historical Museum located in Rio de Janeiro, as a way to throw light on the treatment of sensitive issues in museums and heritage institutions, in the Brazilian context. In the National Historical Museum exhibition, we saw how the African was subsumed within Brazilian identity, whereas indigenous cultures were recognised in their diversity. Brazil's national identity narrative, consolidated since the 1930s particularly, boasts of a mixed society, a mixture of the three races.
