Contemporary Indigenous Literature in Brazil is an aesthetic-political movement led by indigenous identity. The indigenous identity is original, ancestral, and resides in the bodies of our ancestors, our peoples, the first who walked this land, long before the whites existed here, as stated by Chief Raoni Metuktire.
The political colonial and republican scenario, as shown by Maria Santos and Guilherme Felippe, upheld slavery and repression against the original peoples. This systematic physical violence made it impossible for indigenous expression to rise in Brazilian literature, but it did not prevent Brazilian writers from using references to original bodies and traditions through their colonial mirror.
That way, we came into the 21st century with unforgettable characters from Brazilian literature that translate the contempt for indigenous peoples in Brazil: Peri, protagonist of the novel The Guarani (1857), by José de Alencar, is the “good savage”. He offers voluntary servitude and gives in to European beauty, leading the reader to believe there is superior beauty and posture distinguishable only in the European colonizer. However, when we see published works of indigenous authorship, the sense of aesthetics and value judgment are contrary to the prior, century-long ones. Describing the first contact with the white man, Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa says: “I saw in them terrible ugliness and my heart was pounding in my chest. I really wanted to run away, like the big ones, but I didn’t want to call in attention”.
– Oh, such laziness! That is a well-known phrase in Brazilian literature. Pronounced by the anti-hero Macunaíma, protagonist of homonymous book by modernist writer Mário de Andrade. Indolence was widely used as a racist argument to justify the enslavement of indigenous peoples in Jesuit strongholds. However, when we read indigenous authorship works, there is another description, a living-well principle of life even. André Baniwa, in his work Well living and living well: according to the Baniwa people in Brazilian Amazon Northwest, presents the Ideenhikheetti idzekatti iyo (mheeninaatsa, makonatsa phaa, kakona tsakhaa phaa), that is, “Working with art makes you constantly have what it takes, avoiding a negative image and investing in a positive image”; also the Pideenhi pirhiokaro pidzaadawa, “Work to have what is yours”; Walhiotsa pomenaka whaa, “We need to be very willing to work”, among others. Work is an indigenous principle; we note that indolence and laziness attributed to indigenous people in Brazilian literature represents a mirror of the enslavers’ own inability to work and lure to accumulate, along with all dehumanizing practices. What few people know is that the name Macunaíma originates in the Macuxi and other Circum-Roraima region peoples. They are a deity, and communities that inhabit the territory pass their ancestral stories down the generations.
Brazilian literature accompanied the nation-state project that aimed to destroy indigenous peoples in order to take over their lands and rights. Both projects, indianist and modernist, contributed to intensify policies that attacked humanity, identity and the right to indigenous citizenship.
Extinction policies against indigenous peoples were carried out first and foremost in the name of God. Jesuit missionaries and others came with the symbolic mission of saving the indigenous soul, but not only that. Paradoxically, the rhetoric of salvation, says Walter Mignolo, in The idea of Latin America: the colonial wound and the decolonial option, is accompanied by appropriations of large territorial extensions, genocide and enslavement. It was not different here. Later on, there was an attack on indigenous identity through the policy known as “integration”, brought about mainly from 1910 onwards with the creation of the Indian Protection Service and National Workers Localization, a state agency that would be known as SPI, and would later be replaced in 1967 by the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI). Publishing in Brazil followed the political background on which the State operated.
At the end of the 20th century, specifically in 1988 and 1989, indigenous peoples conquered the right to their original and collective identity, putting an end, yet legally, to the Western single-identity tradition. The legal frameworks came into force with the 1988 Federal Constitution and, at the international level, with the 169 ILO Convention.
In this sense, it is important to realize that indigenous peoples have the right to their original identity, prior to the Brazilian nation-state identity. Indigenous persons so vehemently endorse that now, for it could not be affirmed until 33 years ago. It is also important to remember that Brazil still is a nation state hence asserting only one official identity, despite the 305 existing and nationally recognized indigenous (tribes?). Bolivia, as an example, made itself into a plurinational state, recognizing other identities within its territorial extension. Looking the country up on the internet, we find its respective official names: Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia (Spanish); Buliwya Mama Ilaqta (Quechua); Wuliwya Suyu (Aymara); Tetan Volivia (Guarani); Plurinational State of Bolivia.
I will briefly explain the logic of national identity. Whoever is born in the Brazilian state, in order to exist bearing rights as a legal person, must be registered by their legal guardians. This very first document, the birth certificate, assures the being. Later, this individual will be able to have civil registry, natural person registry (CPF), work card, among others; all documents that grant rights, but also impose legal duties in accordance with the legal situation established in the country. Anyone born in Brazilian territory, in any of the 26 states plus the Federal District, automatically holds Brazilian citizenship. Strictly speaking, those who have citizenship also share the Brazilian identity, being on the acknowledged Brazil nation-state territory, where land, nation and identity are proven Brazilian. However, the indigenous peoples were already in this territory before it was called Brazil or had its current arrangements.
Before the 1988 Federal Constitution, the country did not accept the possibility of indigenous identity having legal rights, that being the reason “integration” was the rule. Accusing the natives of primitiveness and savagery, the State enforced native identity extinction. To exist in the country, it was mandatory to master the customs and tools of the white man. In addition, a FUNAI decree put an end to the (few) indigenous rights, which would only be enforced within Brazilian rights, as stated by the Indian Statute (1973). All of that meant the indigenous symbolically ceased to exist for the Brazilian State. The indigenous were seen as people who had evolved from primitive/savage to Brazilian/integrated citizens, and could now work like any other citizen.
The indigenous identity state policy has not changed: only those in the boundaries drawn by the Brazilian State are considered indigenous in the country; outside those protected lands, no differentiated health or education policies are offered, as proclaimed by the Constitution. In this sense, ceasing to have original rights meant – and means – ceasing to be indigenous to the nation state of Brazil. We saw that with the covid-19 pandemic health crisis: only people in State-settled indigenous lands received priority vaccines. Those who were not in or were not recognized as natives had no immunization, despite the death toll.
That is the reason for the lack of an indigenous literary movement, by indigenous writers, before the 1990s. For existing and occupying another craft in the dominant society would have meant the downfall of indigenous identity. Intellectuals, politicians, indigenous activists, as a political movement, had been facing such extinction policies since the 1970s. This resistance became known as the Indigenous Movement, which successfully signed indigenous rights in Federal Constitution Articles 231 and 232.
From the 1990s on, the publishing of indigenous works, that is, by indigenous authors, would confirm the urgency of indigenous identity protagonism. It encloses ancestral memories and histories, highlights territorial conflicts brought about by the dominant society, the historical present of peoples shaded by false premises, the aesthetics present in original cultures and narratives, and the indigenous paradigm based in the forest, which would emphasize the urgency of environmental protection at a global level.
Individual authorship, people’s identity
According to the Bibliography of Indigenous Publications of Brazil, there are 58 indigenous writers listed, classified by their respective identities. This is because to be indigenous is to recognize and be recognized as belonging to an original people, called pre-Columbian, that is, existing before whites ventured on these lands.
When indigenous people find themselves in direct confrontation with the dominant society, a result of the 16th-century-introduced colonial scenario, they search tools to fight for their culture and territories. We witnessed Daniel Munduruku, Kaká Werá and Olívio Jekupé coming into the Brazilian publishing scene in the 1990s. In the following decade, Eliane Potiguara, Tiago Hakiy, Yaguarê Yamã, Roni Wasiry Guará, Graça Graúna, among others. Editorial publication and the first run of cultural segments would reveal an entire “integration” system built to actually deny indigenous identity.
With their identities as original peoples, the indigenous inaugurated another movement in culture, which Daniel Munduruku called “indigenous people in movement”: essential occupations to human rights they were denied by the Brazilian State: with the new legislation, they could be writers, singers, teachers, visual artists, painters, storytellers, that is, performing work in the dominant society without having their indigenous identity legally taken away.
This accomplishment informed a surrounding society of the indigenous existence from a perspective other than integration, but that of belonging and celebrating the identity of many peoples who have always existed here.
The role of indigenous writers cannot be confused with political representation. It is necessary to understand that every indigenous society has its own mechanisms of political representation, and that an indigenous writer who works in the dominant society, writing and publishing books, despite being part of a collective identity, bears a people’s name through their own existence in the world, through their books. However, they do not replace the political leadership of the chief (in some cases, the title is tuxaua), the vice-chief and the secretary who guard territory and communities. I believe that the most appropriate term is representativeness, or the way an indigenous person in the publishing business – in the case of writer Daniel Munduruku, promoting literary competitions aiming to boost indigenous literature in the country –, lifts the indigenous peoples’ self-esteem, especially the young ones who grow up having references, something that my own 1990s generation did not experience.
Planting seeds
I would like to close these reflections on indigenous literature by restating some points I have learned in recent times.
First, that Contemporary Indigenous Literature is a movement that emerged in the 1990s for the dominant society, which has always perceived the indigenous through non-indigenous voice and gaze. Therefore, it is necessary to emphasize that the Contemporary Indigenous Literature is an aesthetic-political movement much older than the western alphabet-based records. It is ancestral and has always been in our peoples’ memory and practices.
Second, it has been present in Abya Yala territory, known and mapped as Central, North and South America. As original peoples, we recognize that national borders were impositions that disregarded our land-linked histories, our ways of life and development in our biomes. They were also fictional creations with territorial and cultural expropriations, which served as base for the conception of an identity, citizenship, humanity-pursuing State, as Walter Mignolo has revealed.
Third, that our literary expression resides not only in writing and published books, but also in orality and in drawing-writing, known as pictoglyphic and hieroglyphic writings.
Fourth, that indigenous poetry is ancestral and praises the earth, the plurality of human and non-human forest beings, the cosmos and the universes. That’s not all, though: they sing, tell, write about the violated sovereignty, denouncing the history of the colonial Empire that deprived us of the right to determine our own destiny. It is therefore ancestral and historical at the same time.
For all of this, we reaffirm the claim for our sovereignty, recognition of our original right to determine our own destiny; that our writing and expressions are recognized as human, in all the complexities thus contained, and that Brazil may ponder on its own history with no prevailing sides. The tonic accent of colonization, that is, of those who want to romanticize or idealize the colonial matrix, is inexorably partial. It always leads the reader or the viewer to a victory-claiming point of view. Under the indigenous gaze, the winner’s side means a destruction and death legacy that was not interrupted with the independence of nations, but was led on, re-elaborated in subtle and naturalized ways within the country system. As writer Daniel Munduruku declares, we are here to stay, in our home, in our land. So I close this essay with a poem of my own authorship:
Resumption
How dare you call us poor today
If you were the one who took our land?
How dare you call us ugly
After having abused our women?
How dare you call us lazy
If you were the one who killed us from working?
We are not poor
We were impoverished
We are not ugly
We were whitened
We are not lazy
We were enslaved, tutelated
So how dare you?
There are moons and moons
Our ancestors wove our story of glory
That’s why we struggle to reclaim:
The land that was stolen from us,
The silenced voice
The hidden body
Our beauties
Our enchanted
Our peoples
Our lives
Then
Don’t you ever dare to belittle us in your mirror again.
Julie Dorrico belongs to the Macuxi people. She holds a doctorate in literature theory (PUCRS) and is the author of Eu sou macuxi e outras histórias (Caos e Letras, 2019), which won the Tamoios/FNLIJ/UKA Competition (2019). She participated in the collections Escritas femininas em primeira pessoa (Oralituras, 2020); De repente adolescente (Seguinte, 2021) and Geração 2010: o sertão é o mundo (Reformatório, 2021). She is the manager of the profile @leiamulheresindigenas and the YouTube channel Literatura Indígena Contemporânea, where she interviews indigenous authors. In 2021, she became the first indigenous person to have a permanent column at ECOA/UOL. With a grant from SESC, she produced the webseries Leia Autoras Indígenas, which features eight indigenous writers and two indigenous speakers in Brazil.
Notes
1 “Nossos antepassados, nosso povo, fomos nós que caminhamos primeiro sobre essa terra, vocês brancos não existiam aqui”. Documentary Falas da Terra. See minutes 33:39-33:41. Available at: https://globoplay.globo.com/v/9449503/programa/. Access on 25 Oct. 2021
2 Maria Cristina dos Santos and Guilherme Galhegos Felippe. Debates sobre a questão indígena: Histórias, contatos e saberes. Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS, 2018.
3 Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert. A queda do céu: palavras de um xamã yanomami. Ed. de Bruce Albert. Translation Beatriz Perrone-Moisés. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2015, p. 243.
4 André Baniwa. Bem viver e viver bem: segundo o povo Baniwa no noroeste amazônico brasileiro. Curitiba: Ed. UFPR, 2019. Pp. 37, 38 and 39, respectively.
5 Walter Mignolo. La idea de América Latina. La herida colonial y la opción decolonial. Barcelona: Gedisa, 2007.
6 Available at: Bibliografia das publicações indígenas do Brasil/Introdução – Wikilivros (wikibooks.org). Access on 25 Oct. 2021.