Discovering Brazil: The Brazilian indigenous people of the twentieth-first century.
By Giovani José da Silva, PHD The Federal University of Goiás – Brazil
Translated by Tyr Peret

Little is written about Brazil’s indigenous people but they do exist. These people have increased demographically over the last fifty years and so have pushed back their threat of extinction. Brazilian indigenous people is a general name given to more than 200 different group of people who live in twentieth-first century Brazil and contribute to this multicultural country with rich socio-cultural diversity. Nowadays, more than 170 indigenous languages are spoken in Brazil beyond Portuguese, Arabic, Italian, Japanese and others. So, why do so many people insist on believing that indigenous people are at risk of extinction or worse, have already died out?

If we ask young people, children, adults and elderly people of both sexes from all over Brazil about the Brazilian indigenous people, the answers are same. To the majority of the non-indigenous population the images about indigenous people are based on those they learned from their school books. They were taught that these people sleep in hammocks, worship the sun and the moon and survive by fishing and hunting.

In other words, all of them, indistinctively, used to do the same things. It is important to notice that the verbs related to them are always in the past. They are ordinary people without identity.

It is generally believed that indigenous Brazilian are either naked or perhaps wear a loincloth. They would live in huts, use bows and arrows, wear ‘cocares’ (feather ornaments) and feather necklaces. These images are often portrayed in Brazilian carnival. Indigenous people live in tribes and would have a chief ‘Cacique’, ‘Morubixabas’ or ‘Pajés’ (Shaman).

When they are away from these values and standards, which are the stereotypes that have been built up around them, they lose their indigenous roots because they are without their culture and tribes. So what does it mean to be an indigenous person in Brazil today?

More than two hundreds ethnic groups (not tribes) help shape the whole of Brazilian indigenous population today, at the beginning of the twentieth-first century, and yet they still need to be acknowledged by the non-indigenous people.

We need to discover Brazil, as the poet said! This rich multiculturalism is manifested in music, visual arts, dance and traditions and is still waiting to be presented as one Brazilian and Human legacy. Very little is said about indigenous people in the media and when it does happen the reports normally refer to land problems, suicides and deaths caused by malnutrition and alcoholism.

The Brazilian indigenous people mix with the non-indigenous society in different ways and in some regions where they live they are actually majority and not the minority. Many face serious problems and are still waiting for the land regulation and some of them are not recognised by the Brazilian Government. It is a complex, heterogeneous and fragmented situation.

What do we actually know or feel about our contemporaries? And why should we concern ourselves with people who are so far removed from our everyday reality?

Each one of these 200 groups of people has developed over their historic path, and has different ways of dealing with life problems, different behavioural and social rules and ways of seeing the world. With the disappearance of these indigenous people we lose their unique understanding of the world we live in and thus a little of the richness of own humanity.
A greater understanding of them might lead us to question our own values, our own way of looking to things, which during a time of globalisation and homogenisation could be very healthy.

Unfortunately, indigenous people tend to be portrayed negatively in schools and the media and what is shown, in the majority of cases, is a stereotypical and warped image of these cultures. Generally, we remember them on 19th of April, when we encourage children to dress in costumes; decorating their heads with chicken’s feathers and light cardboard ‘cocares’ (feather ornaments). In doing this we are encouraging them to feel prejudiced against these indigenous people.

We teach small children that the indigenous people are a part of their past having disappeared leaving small contributions to Brazilian culture such as the hammock, the daily habit of having a bath and some ‘Tupi’ words (one of many Brazilian Indigenous language).

Carnival is another way of remembering the existence of our ‘Aborigine’. During carnival celebrations it is common to evoke images of the warrior indigenous people - feathers are worn on heads and there are half-naked, sexy images of female indigenous people.

The conflict and tensions caused by centuries of incomprehension from the non-indigenous culture to the indigenous ones are swept under the carpet as we continue to live in an eternally racist democracy.

Did we not see this in Rio’s carnival this year? The winner exalted the Jesuit presence in the south of Brazil without making any reference to the destruction of the culture and traditions of the indigenous people in that part of Brazil.

The Brazilian indigenous people ‘Xavantes’, ‘Karajá’, ‘Kadiwéu’, Atikum, Baniwa, Kaingang amongst others tribes are our contemporaries and they live on in the twentieth-first century. They do not live like their ancestors from sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries just as we don’t live like our ancestors anymore. Why do we insist on freezing their image in the past? Why don’t we accept their right to evolve and change? Why do we need them to stay ‘authentic’ after being almost decimated by the colonizers? Why can’t we learn to admire their way of life, beliefs, rituals and myths?

Even we find it difficult to understand, it is important to consider how they have been represented within the media and books and how this may alter our attitude towards them. We have to evaluate their presence within our country’s history. This doesn’t mean making them into victims of the greed of the non-indigenous people. It means recognising their importance as historical subjects who did not react passively to the presence of the ‘Other’ in their territory and in their lives. The Brazilian indigenous people have learned how to survive in the modern world created around them. They have struggled but in the end they have survived.

To establish a dialogue between distinct and close cultures seems to be the challenge put to the new generations of indigenous and non-indigenous people. To come to understand the asymmetric relationship between minorities and society seems to be the first step toward change. Aiming to comprehend and respect these cultures based on oral tradition, repetition, experience and silence (which can be a powerful gesture) is the urgent task for Brazilians in our time at this beginning of the century. Art can help us on this approach and we might be able to see our own image reflecting on the Brazilian indigenous’ mirror.

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