Indigenous peoples: IBGE sees explosive increase – 08/12/2023 – Marcelo Leite

In 1991, just three years after this columnist started writing about the Amazon, the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) registered 294,131 indigenous people in Brazil. Now, in the 2022 Census, the count has risen to 1,693,535, up 476%.

In the same interval, the general population went from 147 million to 203 million, an increase of 38%. What would explain such a difference, in view of the national tradition of mistreating indigenous people, not to say exterminating, especially in the four years of Bolsonaro?

Many factors contribute to the good news, not all of which indicate that the causes are an increase in birth rates or a decrease in mortality. Both certainly contribute, but one should not forget that the IBGE count is based on certain criteria, and they have changed over the decades.

Before changes in methodology, it is good to remember an important event a few years before 1991, the new Constitution. Enacted in 1988, it recognized in Article 231 the original right of indigenous peoples to the lands they occupy.

It was as if five centuries of usurpation by the State and individuals had lost the legal basis they once had. Of course, the process of demarcation of indigenous lands (TIs) dragged on for decades, without conclusion until today, but the expectation of rights and the first approvals seem to have reduced the pressure of the agricultural frontier on the ILs.

In 1992, during the Earth Summit in Rio, the Brazilian government approved a total of 96,650 km for the Yanomami^two, an area larger than Portugal. Under domestic and international pressure after massacres, Brasilia endeavored to eradicate gold mining from that territory.

Over time, some health care also came, albeit precarious, and the population of Davi Kopenawa’s relatives began to prosper. This also happened in other parts of the country, especially in the Amazon.

The biggest jump in IBGE records occurred between the 1991 and 2000 censuses. In the year when five centuries of Discovery were celebrated (the more correct would be Colonization), 734,127 indigenous people were counted in national territory —a phenomenal advance of 150%.

There was also a significant increase (88.8%) between 2010 and 2022, when the contingent rose from 896,917 people to the aforementioned 1,693,535. Demographer José Eustáquio Diniz Alves, retired from the IBGE, told Leonardo Vieceli, from Sheetthat the institute improved coverage in indigenous sites and that affirmative action encouraged self-declaration.

Minister Sonia Guajajara (Indigenous Peoples) stated that members of indigenous peoples previously denied this condition to preserve themselves. “You didn’t assume what it was because you were afraid of dying. There were orders to kill an indigenous person,” she said.

“Indigenous peoples, many in northeastern Brazil, denied their identity in order not to die,” declared the minister. Although the North region concentrates almost half of the indigenous people (44.5%), it is in fact in the Northeast that the second largest population is found today, with more than half a million of them (31.2%).

The Northeast is also home to a phenomenon that will have contributed to boost numbers: ethnic reemergence. Populations previously described as caboclas, descendants of Indians reduced to villages, miscegenated, dispossessed and language deprived, begin to revive customs and claim lands of their ancestors.

In 1500 there were between 2 million and 5 million indigenous people in Brazil. With the genocide perpetrated by the colonizers largely over, this population begins to recover. Without us realizing it, not everything is getting worse in this country.

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