Time frame of indigenous lands is ignorant and dishonest – 05/06/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes

Time frame of indigenous lands is ignorant and dishonest – 05/06/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes


The central premises of the bill that establishes the 1988 “time frame” for the demarcation of indigenous lands are already enough to classify it as one of the most shitty things ever produced by the Brazilian Legislature (and look at how fierce the competition is). But, as history and observation of human nature teach, there is nothing bad that cannot be made worse.

The most outrageous detail of the text approved by the Chamber of Deputies is this: the possibility that the federal government may invalidate previously made demarcations “due to changes in the community’s cultural traits or other factors caused by the passage of time”.

The irony of this passage would be hilarious if it weren’t so cruel. After all, the ideology behind this project is exactly the same as that which is said to be in solidarity with indigenous peoples because “NGOs”, “anthropologists”, “leftists” and other bogeymen supposedly want to keep them trapped in “human zoos in the middle of the bush”, without being able to enjoy the benefits of civilization.

But the text of the legislative project that I have just quoted determines that the only valid and legitimate indigenous person is the one who does not undergo “alteration of cultural traits”. Who really wants to create zoos of people in the forest?

The peculiar combination of ignorance and intellectual dishonesty of this reasoning – a combination that, we know, goes a long way in helping the subject to do well in national politics – misses a basic fact. The cultural traits of the indigenous people have undergone countless changes over the approximately 15,000 years that their ancestors have occupied this part of the world.

This may seem surprising to anyone who thinks that the Portuguese invaded territory frozen in time from 1500 onwards. But that is what archaeologists, anthropologists and other researchers are demonstrating with increasing clarity in recent decades.

The hunter-gatherers who were the first human beings to live in Brazilian territory around the end of the Pleistocene (the Ice Age) did not take long to adapt their way of life to the possibilities of the new land. This triggered, in the first place, an “anthropization” of many of the Brazilian forests, whose distribution of plant species, from chestnut trees and açaí trees in the north to araucarias in the south, reveals millenary intervention by human beings.

Relatively few descendants of these early fathers and mothers, however, continued to live exclusively as hunter-gatherers. They learned to cultivate plants that are now of global importance, such as cassava, peanuts, cocoa and maize (an import from Mesoamerica that underwent a crucial round of genetic improvement in the Amazon).

For thousands of years, funerary monuments known as shell mounds stood like sentinels on the coasts of Santa Catarina and Rio de Janeiro. Dams tamed the Marajó floods, roads and fortified villages spread across the Amazon. And even the Tupi spoken on the Northeast coast as far as São Paulo at the time of Cabral was, by all indications, a relatively recent phenomenon, the result of the expansion of warriors of Amazonian origin that we are still beginning to understand.

But all these comings and goings, as DNA analyzes make increasingly clear, are the fruit of the same Ice Age pioneer groups. To rob their descendants of their heritage, by denying them the right to modify their cultures, is tantamount to denying their humanity.


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