Indigenous children taken to Europe in the 19th century – 01/30/2023 – Vera Iaconelli

Micheliny Verunschk portrays, in her award-winning work, the trip of zoologist Johann Baptist von Spix and botanist Carl Friedrich von Martius to Brazil in 1817 for a scientific expedition. On the way back to Bavaria, they took two indigenous children with them. A boy from the Juri people and a girl from the Miranha people. They were taken to be studied, catechized, acculturated and exhibited at fairs, as was done at the time. The children died a few months after arriving in Munich from contact with common white diseases.

“O Som do Rugido da Onça”, winner of the Jabuti 2022, would already be a must-read book for its historic-literary qualities and for its sweeping narrative — leave your handkerchief handy. But it becomes even more essential for helping us to think about the current situation of our children, more than 200 years later.

Verunschk enlivened Martius and Spix, portraying the former as a greedy scientist, greedy for glory and money, and the latter as scrupulous but weak, unable to voice his annoyance at taking the children.

Both wallow in the beliefs of their time, which include the certainty that the “savages” need to be saved by good religion and inserted into European customs, which are indeed worthy of humanity. It doesn’t matter if Europe at that time was already under the effects of the environmental, social and moral devastation resulting from the Industrial Revolution, in which women and children worked tirelessly in unhealthy factories to lead a miserable life.

Nor did it seem to matter that 19th-century religion was a direct heir to the torture and burning of infidels at the stakes of the Inquisition. What mattered was to continue believing in the Enlightenment ideal of rationality, which would save us from being savages and pagans like the Brazilian indigenous people.

It would still take a few decades for Freud to trip the narcissism of Western man by demonstrating that he is not master in his own home, being governed by unconscious determinism. Freud was an illuminist, but he warned humanity of the limits of reason.

Verunschk describes the regret of these two scientists for taking two healthy children away from their families to watch helplessly as they died in their care. The author includes Queen Karoline of Bavaria in the book, who, having lost a child herself, would also have suffered with the death of the two indigenous people. It is clear that if they had survived, the kidnappers would hardly have capitulated.

How could Spix, portrayed as supposedly well-intentioned —according to the values ​​of his time—, collude with such a monstrosity? The answer goes through the intimate and unshakable belief of being worth more than the other. The affection for children barely disguises the arrogance of thinking he is better than them. It also involves agreeing with the values ​​of your time without questioning them.

On the side of Martius, we have this arrogance plus greed and bad faith, a place where human evil makes the party. After 200 years, we are there, in an endless repetition, infinite insistence on repudiating otherness, pretending that there is a way to survive within this logic that makes some worth more than others.

The governor of Roraima, Antônio “Denarium” (born Almeida and renamed himself “Dinheiro”), along with his former president and all those who, by action or omission, promote and prolong national disgrace, are “under the eyes of the jaguar”. Whether she will jump on their necks in time depends on what we, who claim to be well-intentioned, do for our children.

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