The wolf’s excuse – 09/30/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes

Anyone who is indigenous in this country (well, in almost any country) does not have the right to even a week of peace. No sooner had the Federal Supreme Court seemed to have buried the scoundrel thesis of the time frame for the demarcation of lands of original peoples than the excellent Senate of the Republic was ready to resurrect the corpse of the idea.

In the public debate on the topic, few things infuriate me more than the subterranean level of some arguments in favor of the time frame, whether on the floor of Congress or in the comments boxes of this Sheet.

There have been people popping up here and there who say, for example, that there is no reason to restore the lands they lost to the indigenous people because, you see, they would also be “land thieves”.

After all, wouldn’t the ancestors of today’s indigenous people have exterminated or assimilated the African-looking people to whom the famous “Luzia” belonged, who lived in Minas Gerais some 12 thousand years ago? And the groups of the Tupi-Guarani linguistic family, so common on the Brazilian coast at the time of the first contact with Europeans, were they not also anthropophagous invaders from the Amazon, who ate the midden builders and destroyed the Marajoara civilization centuries before Cabral?

I’m going to go into the merits of these statements (spoiler alert: almost all of them are wrong). Even if they were true, however, it is noteworthy that they wanted to transform the saying “a thief who steals a thief has a hundred years of forgiveness”. Or that they were nothing more than a parody of the fable of the wolf and the lamb — the one in which the wolf, unable to prove that the lamb had insulted him, simply shouted “if it wasn’t you, then it was your father or your grandfather” and it advanced towards the puppy’s jugular vein.

But let’s get back to the facts, even if they matter little to the Senate. Firstly, the idea that the people of Luzia are equivalent to a first migration of people related to the current Australian aborigines and Melanesians, later supplanted by the indigenous people, has not been sustained for several years.

The DNA of some of Brazil’s oldest inhabitants indicates that, despite the peculiar shape of their skulls, they basically belong to a branch of the Amerindian ancestors, those who left Siberia perhaps 20,000 years ago and crossed the Bering Strait towards to Alaska. Their relationship with Australo-Melanesians is modest, probably the result of the complex process of dispersal of our species throughout Asia. There was no epic confrontation between “blacks” and “Indians” in the past.

As for the arrival of the Tupi-Guarani linguistic family on our coast and adjacent regions, we are still a long way from understanding the details of what happened. But archaeological and genetic data are far from pointing to a simple replacement of one people by another. Before the Tupi-Guarani advance, sambaqui populations were genetically diverse depending on the coastal region, and their descendants appear to have mixed with the newcomers. As for the island of Marajó, there is still no data to explain why its elaborate ceramics stopped being produced a few centuries before Cabral — and, for now, there is no sign of a violent decline.

Even if this changes in the future, this type of argument needs to be exposed for the absurdity that it is — again, just a version of the fable of the wolf and the lamb. It would be much less ugly if the senators and their financiers in the national “ogribusiness” told the truth: “We want these lands because we want to continue earning money without any limit, well, damn it. If there were a hundred Lands, a hundred Lands wouldn’t be enough to satisfy our gluttony” . Something tells me no one there is macho enough to admit that. And there is only one Earth.

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