Afterword: no matter who won, indigenous
resistance will always continue

Taily Terena, João Tikuna and Gabriel Soares

Brazil has gone through social transformations that have not only affected its day-to-day politics; we will continue to feel their impact for a long while. While our discussion here is focused on the period from 2010 to the present day, we find it important to state that from an indigenous perspective there is far less rupture between the present and the past than many would care to admit. While it may be tempting to isolate Brazil’s tumultuous past decade, we, like other authors in this book, believe it to be blurred with prior events. Our problems began to accumulate not with elections or impeachment, but with the European invasion of our territories in April 1500.

Colony, monarchy, dictatorship, democracy: for the peoples in the margin the process of genocide may wear new clothes, but it has not stopped for five hundred years. Indeed, given the government’s response to the recent pandemic, the state seems to have found a renewed enthusiasm and even joy in its ability to promote and observe mass death and suffering of indigenous people. But even before these recent events we have, in truth, become invisible in our own land, being as we are continuously deterritorialised. The current agency in charge of indigenous affairs, FUNAI (Fundação Nacional do Índio or National Foundation of the Indian) was originally called SPILTN (Serviço de Proteção dos Índios e Localização de Trabalhadores Nacionais or Service for the Protection of Indians and Localisation of National Labourers). Like the missions of centuries past, it seeks to control and transform indigenous communities into fonts of labour. In some ways the cycle has already come back around: following the Guarani war and the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1759, Brazil’s state gradually secularised its mechanisms for control of indigenous populations (Cunha, 1992). Now it increasingly puts these populations at the mercy of religious organisations by, for example, hiring evangelical NGOs such as Caiuá as healthcare providers for indigenous populations.

The most recent dictatorship, when it came, was explicit in its ‘integrationist’ goals: in the words of General Ismarth de Araújo, head of FUNAI, ‘an integrated Indian is the one that converts himself into labour’, and while this project failed, it was also never abandoned.1 This period also provides a clear example of a poisonous long-running characteristic of Brazil’s indigenous policy: at least 8,300 indigenous people were murdered and at least two concentration camps were created, while several indigenous territories were recognised (Comissão Nacional da Verdade, 2014).2 Violence masquerading as false protectionism is a staple of Brazil’s indigenous policy. For us this is nothing new, having occurred since the colonial period.

The transition to democracy, inaugurated by the ratification of a new constitution in 1988, was considered an important marker for the rights of indigenous peoples: for the first time we were seen as rights-bearing persons by the state, which once again sought to transform us, now into ‘citizens’. The relationship with the State has changed since then: indigenous persons, now recognised as autonomous subjects, have opened a new period in Brazil’s history, fighting for their rights to be respected. Hundreds of new demarcation processes were initiated thanks to the internal organisation of indigenous communities, but the majority of these are paralysed due to adversarial interests within the state, which is guided by opposing political forces. But the massacres have never stopped: even as the process of demarcation of Yanomami territory was ongoing, roughly 20 per cent of the Yanomami were killed by gold prospectors.3 And the tendency has been not to combat illicit mining, but to legalise and condone it while refusing to recognise the wishes of indigenous communities over their own lands. And so now 40 per cent of the Yanomami live in the proximity of illicit gold mines, suffering from contaminated water and air. Their territory has been invaded by an estimated twenty thousand miners (Castro, 2021). A year does not go by when Brazil does not witness organised mass violence against indigenous communities.

Bolsonaro, in his 2019 speech to the UN, as well as in numerous statements before and after, has made clear that his interest is not in forests or indigenous peoples but in the minerals and natural resources of the Amazon (Betim and Marreiro, 2019). The uncomfortable question is this: how does this differ from previous governments? In an interview with the BBC, cacique Raoni of the Kayapó said that his fight against Bolsonaro is the same as it was against Lula and Dilma (Fellet, 2019). During Dilma’s government, while there were social programmes that were beneficial to indigenous populations, the Belo Monte Dam was built on the Xingu river despite the condemnation and active resistance of traditional communities, social movements and academics against the initiative.

During his election campaign, Bolsonaro made many anti-indigenous declarations to signal his government’s plans, should he be elected: ‘Minorities must either bow or disappear’; ‘It’s a pity Brazil’s cavalry was not as efficient as America’s, which exterminated the Indians’; ‘There will not be a centimetre demarcated for indigenous reservations or for quilombola territory.’4 The current president has gone to great lengths to put his words into practice, be it directly (illegally attempting to transfer the responsibility for demarcation to the Ministry of Agriculture, and attempting to legalise mining in indigenous territories) or indirectly, incentivising violence against traditional populations and invasions of their territories. This was exemplified dramatically when the world witnessed what had been one of the largest acts of criminal arson in human history, the fires in the Amazon during the summer of 2019 and Pantanal in 2020. The municipality with the second-largest number of arsons (1,630) and the most deforestation (297.3 km²) was Altamira, where Belo Monte Dam was built (Globo, 2019).

Despite the government’s genocidal actions, it has not completely abandoned Brazil’s traditional farcical strategy of keeping up appearances. Indigenous persons associated with evangelical churches and/or fascist militarism (fellow travellers in Brazil as elsewhere) have been placed in strategic positions within the government. Therefore the government cynically argues that it does indeed maintain good relations with indigenous people and defends the rights of indigenous persons to not be cavemen. In the hallucinations of the current government, demarcated lands are equivalent to zoos dominated by NGOs and foreign governments. Simply put, the ideology of the regime is that the only indigenous persons who can exist are those who wish to be white, both in terms of identity and by integrating into market economies as cheap labour, embracing capitalism, denying their roots, practices, beliefs, livelihoods, and – even worse – putting into practice the ideal of a ‘capitão do mato’.5 The ones who bow.

The perspective of economic interest renders indigenous communities invisible. When they do appear, it is as an inconvenience or barrier to the necessary economic development of this perpetually underdeveloped country. Indigenous activity is worthless because it does not generate profit for capital, their produce is not available in supermarkets and their rituals are not on a streaming service. Whenever culture is mentioned, indigenous people disappear, because ‘real’ culture is imported from faraway shores. Whenever rights are mentioned, indigenous people disappear, because their rights are an inconvenience to the full expression of the rights of the ‘real’ citizens, born entitled to all and everything.

With this in mind, we have opted to focus on a few themes in this afterword: territory, education and healthcare. They are pertinent issues that are considered the basis for a decent life by indigenous communities and necessary for continued resilience post-contact.

Territory

In order to speak about territory we must first attempt to understand what land means to indigenous people. It cannot be reduced to something material or physical; the experience of living with and in relation to land is cosmological, spiritual and ancestral. Territory for us is understood as an integral part of our being, our body, because we are in constant coexistence and communication. Put another way: Western medicine has slowly come to recognise that bodies are composed of different micro-organisms which are simultaneously vital and distinct. In much the same way we compose, and are composed by, land. As indigenous persons have long explained, and numerous ethnographies have already discussed, understanding this relation is fundamental to understanding why territorial conflict, the fight for healthy (and not just extant) land, is the mother of all fights. It is starting from territory that we can guarantee the decent livelihood of our peoples and that we may speak of healthcare, education, culture and autonomy. Given the vast body of anthropological literature on this issue, and the countless discourses from indigenous persons, this should hopefully come as no surprise. There can be no understanding of indigenous political involvement divorced from the relationship with land.6

Article 231 of Brazil’s constitution states that the social organisation, customs, languages, beliefs and traditions, as well as originary7 rights over traditionally occupied lands of indigenous peoples, are recognised. It is the state’s task to demarcate, protect and enforce all these rights. This is a fairly broad and sweeping provision, and it has been continuously undermined by a series of interpretative tricks. First, the order was inverted: instead of a broad recognition of rights in situ, territorial recognition was made conditional upon demarcation. Then demarcation was turned into a bureaucratic process which has continuously grown in complexity, bloated by the inclusion of over a dozen intermediary steps, taking teams of researchers years to complete. Then funding and resources for demarcation were continuously slashed, making it virtually impossible to comply with all demands. Lastly the process was increasingly judicialised, with hostile parties able to ‘contest’ ongoing processes and concluded demarcations overturned in courts. Slowly then, the state’s role mutated from recognition to definition, from protection to arbiter. And all of this was accomplished without any legislation, just cowardice and reinterpretation.

Demarcation of our territories is also the work of recognising our lands under our own conceptions: what we understand as limits, which are not measured physically, but in all our specificities that each of us, originating groups, define as such. Regardless, though it may be the most important ongoing fight today, demarcation should also be seen in other perspectives, since demarcating also signifies limiting our modes of existence to within a territory that is often small, and this does not adequately address how population growth impacts the modes of living of these peoples. For example, many once-nomadic peoples, with no experience of territorial limits in a life of constant flux, comprehend land as a whole. Aside from them, there are also people who were forcibly relocated from their traditional territories to demarcated areas, as is the case of some of the people who inhabit Xingu Indigenous Park and lands that were demarcated in much-reduced size, such as TI Taunay Ipegue-MS, TI Jaraguá-SP and TI Coroa Vermelha-BA.8

Another reservation is the legal ownership of indigenous land. By law, demarcated lands are the patrimony of the Union (a term which roughly denotes the federal government) for material and immaterial reproduction, which is to say that while indigenous persons live in and utilise their land, they are not the legal owners. The state always mediates and restricts autonomy. Whether it is well intentioned or not, the protectionist legal approach shows itself as another form of tutelage. Brazil’s government has always maintained a tutelary attitude towards indigenous populations, which is complemented by incentivising dependence. SPILTN explicitly positioned itself as the parent of the Indians and while FUNAI was created at least in part to alter these parameters, it has not been able to do so. An agency that seeks to ‘defend and protect’ a people will always attempt to control and restrict their autonomy. Many of these initiatives, such as cash transfer or housing programmes, are very helpful to many indigenous persons, but they also create and increase dependence.

Education

Through education we obtain access to all kinds of information relating to the outside world, and without it our knowledge of what is being done to us and others like us would be severely lacking, not to mention that we would be even more dependent on non-indigenous persons to speak and represent us in decision-making spaces. Learning new knowledges allows us to participate in and occupy different political, social and economic roles, and it is important to recognise that often the majority of our fighting is not in the forest with bows and spears, as ancient leaders did, but through dialogue, documents and the utilisation of information systems to our advantage. We are striving to handle these new tools, integrating and moulding them on our terms so that we may speak and fight for ourselves.

We recognise the importance of these tools since they have entered our daily life, be it with children in indigenous schools strengthening our traditional knowledge or through allowing access to universities. In this territorialisation of knowledge, globalisation has even reached the villages. But indigenous scholastic education – indigenous persons teaching indigenous persons within the school system – remains rare, due to the low priority afforded to it within the educational system.

In the last six years, initiatives aiming towards maintaining indigenous persons within universities have been fundamental, as has expanded access. Given pre-existing problems due to the low number of scholarships offered, lack of diversity in available courses and few universities with affirmative action or differentiated entry processes, it is unsurprising that indigenous education worsened in 2020. Cuts in education spending have hit indigenous schools hard because of their low priority status, leading to a lack of teachers as well as funds to maintain students in cities.

Despite Law 11.645/2008, which mandates the teaching of ‘Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous history and culture’ in schools, few have included this topic or attempted to work in any differentiating way with their students. Indigenous education needs to have a dual character, where not only do indigenous persons have to adapt and learn Western disciplines, but education itself needs to be thought of from their perspective, as well as non-indigenous schools also recognising indigenous knowledge beyond history classes. Be it in sciences, mathematics, geography or any other discipline, it is important to consider what our contributions are.

But no discussion of indigenous education can occur without discussing language. In 1500 it is estimated that there were roughly 600 languages spoken in what is today Brazil. Currently the estimate is that there are between 150 and 180 languages, many of which are endangered or no longer primarily used in their own communities. On average, an indigenous language in Brazil has between 250 and 270 speakers, which is tenuous at best. Of these 21 per cent are considered in immediate danger because of a low number of speakers and low rate of transmission.

Indigenous education overcomes barriers. Intercultural and transdisciplinary, it is a tool that can increase awareness of others and deepen their understanding of our cosmologies. It is by our occupying scholastic and academic spaces that we not only acquire knowledge, but also share.

Healthcare

If we return to the history of Brazil’s colonisation, the pathologies originating in Europe that have been so devastating were unknown to most of the indigenous population. Smallpox, measles, influenza and the common cold were only a few of the illnesses responsible for the extermination of entire peoples and much of the indigenous population of the Americas during the period of colonisation. And as disease was carried by multiple vectors, contact with illness significantly pre-dated contact with humans.

For centuries it was thought that natives themselves were to blame for these diseases, but in truth they were a weapon used to decimate entire ethnicities. Contaminated clothes and blankets were given with the deliberate intent to infect, and even unintentional contact transmitted these diseases, forcing native populations to develop new measures to control and treat these new infirmities.

As time passed and the government transformed at the national level, the forms of healthcare available to communities and the necessity to end some of these diseases eventually culminated with the creation of the first governmental agency devoted specifically to indigenous healthcare in 2010, SESAI, attached to the larger Ministry of Healthcare. However, this deliberately differentiated healthcare system has encountered difficulties from the outset in its implementation, and has in just ten years of existence been systematically weakened. In particular, as was mentioned above, many of SESAI’s services have been contracted to private providers, many of whom are directly tied to evangelical organisations.

In 2018–19, indigenous healthcare suffered the loss of the Mais Médicos (More Doctors) programme, a partnership between Brazil and Cuba that brought healthcare professionals to remote areas of the country that still have large vacancies at the moment of writing, vacancies that can frequently lead to entire communities not having any access to treatment. Truth be told, the regime did not much bother to justify this action or remedy its effects: it was simply an opportunity to attack a perceived political enemy (Cuba) and perform cruelty to indigenous and poor communities. And fascists relish such opportunities. More subtly, one of the principal planks of the government’s anti-indigenous strategy has been the ‘municipalisation’ of indigenous healthcare, devolving responsibility to the local level, increasing the precarity of services, excluding the specialised department that was specifically created for this purpose and has a duty to provide for indigenous communities. Despite not achieving its goal to formally dissolve SESAI’s administrative functions, the current government and SESAI itself have taken steps to weaken the healthcare available to communities, cutting funding for procuring medicines, limiting access to vehicles and transportation and directly threatening and politically persecuting healthcare professionals that do not subscribe to the government’s initiatives – firing older, experienced civil servants who have developed a long-running commitment to indigenous communities and suspending contracts won by bidders deemed undesirable. Missão Evangélica Caiuá (Evangelical Mission Caiuá), the largest of these religious NGOs, received R$2 billion in state funds between 2012 and 2017, despite a raft of denunciations and irregularities (Angelo, 2017).

All of this was thrown into sharp relief when Brazil became the epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic (Neiva et al., 2020). Not only did SESAI collapse, but the healthcare system of entire regions collapsed under the strain of what initially seemed to be monstruous incompetence. Here the termination of the ‘More Doctors’ programme is illuminating, insofar as it illustrates that the priority of healthcare policy was not actually improving or protecting people’s health, but rather simply another ‘front’, another opportunity for conflict. Thus Brazil’s healthcare system became the stage for a morbid parade as images of mass graves and daily death tolls became the scenery on which Bolsonaro would perform his defiance of his academic and scientific enemies, denouncing masks, vaccines, lockdowns, social distancing and even that the pandemic was being reported at all (Valfré and Behnke, 2021).

It is important that we defend a differentiated healthcare system, just as it is important to consider medicine from different perspectives, traditional and Western, as well as in combination. We have already mentioned that Western medicine is important to handle these other, once unknown, infirmities. It is also important to have access to quality treatment within hospitals and other medicinal centres. In regard to traditional medicine, it not only cares for the health of our bodies but also for our spirit through prayer, shamanism and medicine. The relation between these two forms of healthcare has been rife with conflict and the perception that they could not coexist. This non-relation of competition led to a distancing of traditional medicine and the persecution of shamans in many communities. This has of course often occurred due to the presence of missionaries, but also due to the prejudices of healthcare and state workers regardless of religious affiliation. Beyond this, the lack of dialogue between both traditions led many indigenous persons to become dependent on Western medicine and unable to provide basic treatments.

This has contributed to a numbness in all manner of social practices including those relating to bodily care – the use of teas, baths and other sacred medicines, for example (though the pandemic has lead to many of these customs being put into practice again, as a way to heal the invisible). Today much of the work being done goes beyond simply valuing such knowledge and also attempts to recover and reformulate such practices, including all manners of persons such as midwifes, healers and shamans.

Conclusion

If there has been a theme to this afterword, it has been the defence of that which is imperfect in the face of what promises to be much worse. Since 1988, the staple of Brazilian politics has been to ask indigenous people ‘What are you willing to lose?’, ‘What concessions are you willing to make?’, without ever entertaining the notion of a positive, amplifying message. And while it is distressing to have a president who openly fantasises about genocide, as many of the chapters of this book have attempted to show, this is far closer to the norm of Brazilian politics than most would like to acknowledge.

It is quite possible that readers may feel confused or even frustrated by an afterword that has a section on healthcare and yet only briefly mentions the Covid-19 pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of persons in Brazil. If something positive can be said of the past year’s events, it is that they have democratised the feeling of horror and vulnerability common to indigenous populations. Now all can witness the genocidal spectacle of state power delighting in its callousness, and suffer the consequences. And what joy these fascists feel, when answering questions about (at the time) 160,000 deaths, with ‘This has to stop being a country of wusses’ (Gomes, 2020). If Bolsonaro is the culmination of a long-running trend in Brazil’s history, he also represents an important change: from the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of bodies in the service of the pleasures of a small autocratic minority, to a delight in the sacrifice itself. As always with fascism, the means have become the end.

And so the pandemic can be seen as a conflict between meaning and pleasure. On one side autocracy, unwilling to sacrifice any personal delight while delighting in cruelty. On the other side the indigenous refusal of a naturalism that seeks to reduce humanity to meaningless gratification, while maintaining community, relations and reciprocity. No matter who won, indigenous resistance will always continue, because it is a resistance of meaning itself.

References

Angelo, M. (2017) ‘Caiuá, a ONG de R$2 Bilhões que se tornou dona da saúde indígena no Brasil’, The Intercept, 30 September, <https://theintercept.com/2017/09/30/caiua-a-ong-de-r-2-bilhoes-que-se-tornou-dona-da-saude-indigena-no-brasil/> (accessed 30 March 2021).

Betim, F. and F. Marreiro (2019) ‘O discurso de Bolsonaro na ONU, analisado e confrontado com dados’, El País, 25 September, <https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2019/09/24/politica/1569340250_255091.html> (accessed 30 March 2021).

Castro, M. (2021) ‘Terra Yanomani: “Família inteiras com Covid onde o garimpo está fora de controle”’, Brasil de fato, 11 February, <https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2021/02/11/terra-yanomami-familias-inteiras-com-covid-onde-o-garimpo-esta-fora-de-controle> (accessed 30 March 2021).

Comissão Nacional da Verdade (2014) Relatório, vol. 1 (Brasília: CNV).

Cunha, M.C. da, ed. (1992) História dos índios no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, Secretaria Municipal de Cultura, FAPESP).

Fellet, J. (2019) ‘“Nossa luta contra Bolsonaro é a mesma que fizemos contra Lula e Dilma”, diz cacique Raoni’, BBC News, 13 October, <https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-50022818> (accessed 30 March 2021).

Fonseca Iubel, A. and N. Soares Pinto, eds (2017) ‘Dossiê antropologias das T/terras’, RAU: Revista de @ntropologia da UFSCar 9(1).

Globo (2019) ‘Municípios com maior número de queimadas tiveram as maiores taxas de desmatamento em 2019, diz Ipam’, G1, 22 August, <https://g1.globo.com/natureza/noticia/2019/08/22/municipios-com-maior-numero-de-queimadas-tiveram-as-maiores-taxas-de-desmatamento-em-2019-diz-ipam.ghtml> (accessed 30 March 2021).

Gomes, P.H. (2020) ‘Brasil tem que deixar de ser “país de maricas” e enfrentar pandemia “de peito aberto”, diz Bolsonaro’, G1, 10 November, <https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2020/11/10/bolsonaro-diz-que-brasil-tem-de-deixar-de-ser-pais-de-maricas-e-enfrentar-pandemia-de-peito-aberto.ghtml> (accessed 30 March 2021).

Neiva, M.B. et al. (2020) ‘Brazil: the emerging epicenter of COVID-19 pandemic’, Revista da Sociedade Brasileira de Medicina Tropical 53(1).

Valfré, V. and E. Behnke (2021) ‘Bolsonaro reclama de “efeitos colaterais” de máscaras contra a covid-19’, Estado de São Paulo, 25 February, <https://saude.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,bolsonaro-reclama-de-efeitos-colaterais-de-mascaras-contra-a-covid-19,70003628619> (accessed 30 March 2021).