For the teacher, indigenous people “are considered a threat to the nation, because the developmental way of thinking does not accept difference”
The first text read by professor Alik Wunder, from the Faculty of Education (FE), upon returning from vacation in mid-January, was “The last socialists – Or why persecute indigenous peoples?”, by Daniel Munduruku, a reading that in Your opinion helps to understand why indigenous people are being so attacked by this new government. “Respect for the difference between the more than 300 indigenous peoples who live in Brazil today is very strong within indigenous thought and movement, and this is threatening. This is the threat, which comes from what Daniel Munduruku calls the “last socialists”. In addition to the fact that many indigenous peoples live in lands with mineral wealth and water resources, they are considered a threat to the nation, because the developmental way of thinking does not accept difference. It does not accept other legitimate ways of being in the world, other ways of conceiving what development is. Hence, it is symbolic that the first decree is against the indigenous people.”
Alik Wunder also remembered a text by Ailton Krenak, an important thinker and leader of the indigenous movement in Brazil, about the complex social engineering of these peoples. “Krenak talks about the ability of indigenous peoples to live together without killing each other, respecting each other’s identity and territory. Even in times of struggle, there was respect for the enemy, very different from what is done in the Western world. They are other ways of relating to the natural world, over time, in short, they introduce us to other humanities. These are extremely powerful ways of living, which in some way go against everything that is built within modern Western thought and capitalist logic”.
The FE professor notes that the first decree of the current government was the dismantling of Funai into two ministries, with two ministers, Tereza Cristina (Agriculture) and Damares Alves (Family, Women and Human Rights), who make statements completely contrary to indigenous rights . “The decree clearly aims to integrate indigenous people into society, within the idea that they do not need so much land and that they need to be more productive. This is a thought created during the dictatorship and that is now returning with force. Indigenous people are people who have resisted for 519 years and in multiple ways. In addition to prejudice, there is the fear of this indigenous force to resist. Daniel Munduruku remembers that the main points of resistance to the dictatorship were in the forest, where the military had great difficulty entering.”
Alik Wunder has been working with the Kariri-Xocó people of Alagoas for seven years. There are around 3.000 indigenous people who live in the Kariri-Xocó Indigenous Land in the municipality of Porto Real do Colégio, close to the mouth of the São Francisco River, which was the entry point for the Portuguese. “Unlike the indigenous people of the Xingu, with whom we have had 50 or 60 years of contact, the Kariri-Xocó have lived with non-indigenous people for centuries. The fact that they recognize themselves as indigenous today demonstrates an incredible strength of resistance. Before the Constitution of 88, they hid this identity condition (which was a risk to their lives) and called themselves caboclos, in order to survive. But in recent years, indigenous people from the Northeast are revitalizing their culture and knowledge and demanding the right to land demarcation.”
According to the professor, each indigenous people lives its own reality in relation to the right to land: there are those who live in demarcated and approved territories; others in demarcated areas, but not yet approved, that is, where farmers remain on the land because they have not been compensated (in the case of the Kariri-Xocó, who have a large demarcated area, but do not live in it); and people who are in a moment that they call recovery, occupying their traditional territories. “There is a political maneuver that aims to take away the rights of people who already have their land demarcated, through the so-called 'time frame'. This legal strategy is a shallow and biased reading of the laws that guarantee the right to land for indigenous people in the 88 Constitution.”
Alik Wunder explains that article 231 of the constitution (Chapter VIII – On Indians) says: The Indians are recognized for their social organization, customs, languages, beliefs and traditions, and the original rights over the lands they traditionally occupy, with the Union being responsible for demarcating them, protecting and ensuring respect for all their assets.. Jurists and rural parliamentarians interpret the grammatical tense of the law, arguing that the right to land applies only to indigenous groups that occupied their traditional lands in 1988. In other words, the areas that were later considered traditional territories, through anthropological reports, and demarcated, must be reviewed. “The Kariri-Xocó are an example of this impasse: they were inserted in the city when their traditional land was demarcated and they returned there. If the 'time frame' prevails, the demarcated area will be reviewed. Currently, without approval, the Kariri-Xocó people live in a very small area, with no space for planting. On the other hand, the Kariri-Xocó Indigenous Land, which stretches to the horizon, remains in the hands of large landowners and, on the banks of the São Francisco, where the most fertile areas are, there are several farms belonging to the local elite.”
Tension area
The interior of Alagoas is an area of tension between indigenous people and large cattle ranching landowners, supported by politicians in Congress, who are also farmers, comments the Unicamp professor. “There is great difficulty in continuing the process of ratifying indigenous land due to legal maneuvers by farmers to avoid losing their land in the demarcated areas. It's been like this for twenty years. It is important to say that the area under the control of the Kariri-Xocó is the only one with preserved native vegetation, the caatinga; where there is extensive livestock farming, the vegetation is burned, the land is dry. This is repeated across the country. Unicamp applied its Indigenous Entrance Exam in Dourados (MS), which is a large “sea of soy” with small islands of native forest exactly where there is family farming, in the Guarani, Terena and Kaiowá villages. Where there are indigenous people and other traditional peoples such as quilombolas and caiçaras, somehow there are preserved areas and high biodiversity.”
Alik Wunder considers that this political strategy of taking what little land is left from indigenous peoples is a way of demonstrating the desire for them to be effectively dominated or exterminated. But she remembers that the indigenous movement has great thinkers to be heard, especially in this political moment. And, as a sign of the resistance that the new government will face, the FE teacher ends the interview by reading an excerpt from a narrative by Ailton Krenak, entitled “Eternal return of the encounter” (1999) and published in “The other margin of the West”, book organized by Adauto Novaes, by Companhia das Letras:
The encounter and contact between our cultures and our people has not even started yet and sometimes it seems like it has already ended. When the date 1500 is seen as a landmark, people may feel that they should demarcate that time and celebrate or debate the event of our meetings in a time-bound manner. Our meetings occur every day and will continue to happen, I am sure, until the third millennium, and who knows beyond that horizon. We are having the opportunity to recognize this, to recognize that there is a script for a meeting that always takes place, it always gives us the opportunity to recognize the Other, to recognize in the diversity and richness of the culture of each of our peoples the true heritage that we have, then come the other resources, the territory, the forests, the rivers, the natural riches, our technologies and our ability to articulate development, respect for nature and especially education for freedom.
