The subject that the bibliographic review article addresses is conventional literacy for native peoples in a postcolonial context. The objective is to investigate the implications of the articulation between ancestral knowledge and the knowledge of the school education system, for indigenous communities in the first cycle of Basic Education. The search yielded 417 articles of scientific literature in the Scopus database, from 2016 to June 2020). The articles were subjected to inclusion and exclusion criteria, for which a corpus of 40 articles, a review and a column was formed regarding the literacy implemented in indigenous peoples of the West in the first school cycle. The corpus was analyzed using the documentary-descriptive method and the PRISMA-Scr scope systematic review list. The findings show that the articulation of indigenous ancestral knowledge with the knowledge of the school educational system in the teaching of conventional literacy, promote educational achievements of students of indigenous descent in the mother tongue and also in the language imposed in the school educational system.