What is the Place of Indigenous People?

TRANSLATED FROM PORTUGUESE BY TÚLIO ROSA

In March-April 2022, we published an issue dedicated to the question of landback. Absent from it was the notion of retomada practiced by Indigenous people reclaiming their land from the Brazilian state. We are blessed to publish the words of Glicéria Tupinambá, who describes her commitment to such reclaiming in this piece commissioned and translated by Túlio Rosa.

Notes from the translator ///

1.                “Indigenous territory” is a political term that refers to the rights of Indigenous people over the lands traditionally occupied by them, and guaranteed in the Brazilian Constitution since 1988. Recognition of this right is the result of an intense mobilization by Indigenous populations during the Constitutional Assembly that took place in the years after the fall of the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1985. According to the Constitution, the delimitation and protection of all Indigenous lands had to be implemented by the government in a period of maximum five years. Until this day, only a small percentage of these territories are officially recognized, and the right to the land is still at the center of the Indigenous struggle.

2.                Retomada means to take back, redeem or regain possession of something. It is the word Indigenous people from Brazil use to describe the processes of direct occupation and delimitation of their territories, independent from the support and recognition of the State. Throughout time, it has also become a way of describing the revitalization of their cultures, languages, practices, and religious beliefs.

3.                Made of natural fibers and scarlet ibis feathers, the Tupinambá Mantles are a type of cape used in religious rituals of the Tupinambá community until the 17th century. Many of them were taken from Brazil during the colonial period and the ones that still exist today are held by museum collections in Europe. Since the early 2000s, Glicéria Tupinambá has been working to recover the production of mantles through the knowledge still present in the community. One of her mantles is a part of the National Museum of Brazil’s collection, and her practice has been at the center of the exhibition Kwá yepé turusú yuiri Assojaba Tupinambá (The Great Return of the Tupinambá Mantle) that toured different cities in Brazil in 2021 and 2022.

My name is Glicéria de Jesus da Silva, also known as Glicéria Tupinambá or Célia Tupinambá. I speak from the Tupinambá village of Serra do Padeiro, Indigenous Territory of Olivença, in the northeast state of Bahia in Brazil. (cf. note 1)

I was born and raised in the territory. My parents were born on this land; my grandparents were born on this land; my great-grandparents were born on this land. We have always been here, but the fences have also arrived here. Fences, barbed wire, gates, chains… In order to fight all the violence that the environment and our territory have been subject to, we needed first to understand that we have the right to resist, to resist no matter the cost. This is something we learned from the Elders, sitting in a circle around the fire. One day, they told us that judges have the power of the pen, but we have our own power, and from that moment on we had to prove our courage and we had to resist. And so we did.

To speak of retomada is to make an analysis of a timeline and to observe the extent of indigenous resistance. We Indigenous people have never stopped fighting. Despite the huge number of our people that have been slaughtered, excluded, or pushed to the margins, we continue to fight for our place, and against the erasure of our memory, our identity, and our belonging to the land. (cf. note 2)

The first retomadas began in the 1980s. During that time, the areas that were previously allocated to Indigenous populations by the state were passed onto farmers through land titles, for the expansion of cattle and monoculture. There was a superimposition of territories over Indigenous lands, and Indigenous people started to challenge it by demarcating their territories themselves. They began to map and occupy the lands that belonged to the Federal Union, while organizing themselves in groups and associations that helped to strengthen and sustain their actions. This process then expanded to other states until it created a groundswell of national consciousness and mobilization. Every area that was identified by Indigenous people, where the memory of the territory was kept alive, became an area of retomada.

In 2000, we, Tupinambás of Serra do Padeiro, started to take back our identity and to fight for recognition. Our people have been declared extinct. In the past, because of religious and political persecution, we had to abandon our practices, our medicinal knowledge, our language. It was necessary for us to disappear in order to protect ourselves. In that year, the Tupinambá Mantle came from Denmark to be exhibited in São Paulo. The leaders from the community were invited to see the exhibition and decided to reclaim the Mantle, asking for its repatriation. This was a very important political gesture because it gave us visibility. Immediately after, several researchers and anthropologists came to see us and hear our stories. They made several studies that confirmed the truth of what we were saying. Once we had this recognition, we started to fight for our right to the territory. According to our stories, we had the right to an area of 71,000 hectares. After a long negotiation with governmental institutions, land and business owners, we reached an agreement on an area of 47,000 hectares. But the juridical process is very slow, and despite being granted, the demarcation of the territory was never executed by the federal government as it would come at the expense of many people. (cf. note 3)

From that moment on, we decided to take the territory ourselves, to fight for our land. The land was very hurt due to deforestation and illegal hunting. The rivers were poisoned, the springs were drying, and people were suffering in many different ways. We had only small portions of land (little ranches), but this gave us the advantage of having areas inside the territory that had been traditionally occupied since the arrival of the Portuguese. All these years, we have continued to live in the same place, in the same land. We began by occupying the areas that were most damaged or areas irregularly exploited. Landowners and businessmen use farmers and workers in very precarious conditions to keep possession of the land, but they don’t have a relationship with the territory. The confrontation only happens when the state is involved, through political influence and the juridical processes moved against us by them.

In 2010, while I had a meeting with Lula, the Brazilian President then, to denounce the violation of rights happening within our territory, a warrant for my arrest was issued by a judge. I had recently given birth, with my baby being only two months old; yet, I was taken to a prison in Jequié, Bahia, without having committed any wrongdoing. My only ‘crime’ was fighting for our territory. When I was in jail, I started to think about how many Indigenous women have been taken from their villages, their houses, their families, forced to marry or taken to the city to be a servant. I imagined how many times this has taken place since the year 1500. It was 2010, and despite people saying that they know better, that they have a different perspective, despite all the discussions about decolonization that were taking place by then, I was in jail, with a child that was only two months old. I stayed there for 2 months and 15 days. The judge had to retract his decision because they couldn’t present proof of a crime that didn’t exist.

This was a territorial question—I went to prison because of the retomada. When we fight for our rights and our land, the state apparatus proves to be against us. The police deployed two helicopters, several bullet-proof cars, and 180 men with lethal guns against the community. Maria da Gloria de Jesus, my mother, was shot in her chest. Another Indigenous person had a rubber bullet shot at their nose. Many people were murdered in another retomada made by the Mundukuru people. A policeman shot and killed a Cacique in front of other authorities. If you pay attention, you will see the atrocities committed by the state against Indigenous people. The state has everything in its hand: it has the juridical power, the police force, ammunition… They even created three military bases within the Tupinambá territory, among a community of 220 families and around 900 people, because it was an area of retomada. We ultimately pay for the state to use its force against us, instead of using these ‘public resources’ to recognize and compensate Indigenous people, to give back our land so we can continue our work in sustaining our future generations and revitalizing our culture.

We are treated as enemies, even though we are not the enemy, and have never been the enemy. We are just trying to survive within spaces that are also inhabited by others. It is possible to coexist, but white people don’t think that way. They don’t want to see us occupying the same space. Instead, they need to exclude us in order to impose their way of life.

Indigenous people have always been pushed somewhere else—if not by force, then by an environmental imbalance, which forces people to leave. This is the feeling I get when I visit many places. I was very shocked by a photograph I saw at a museum in Pennsylvania, of a man standing on a huge pile of bison heads. I thought to myself, that scene was the end of something: it was an image of a war against nature itself. In that moment I imagined a pile of Pau-Brasil, many tree trunks piled on top of each other, being taken from the coast of Brazil, resulting in an environmental imbalance, changing animal habitats or causing their disappearance. It has an impact at a scale that is hard to imagine. This destruction is what forces people to move to another place in order to create living conditions. And when I think about this, I think about the richness we have in the territory: the forest, the springs, and the rivers. If we hadn’t made the retomada, we wouldn’t have this anymore. The land was very hurt by deforestation and illegal hunting. We started the direct occupation of the land in 2004 and today we see the animals coming back, the birds and the jaguars. It is very gratifying to see this. It is proof that the territory is healing as a direct result of the retomada. This is also our fight: it is a struggle to guarantee the continuity of life.

We have claimed sovereignty over our territory regardless of the fact that power lies in the judge’s pen and in the written word of another. These words have traveled across the oceans to make treaties and laws ruling the lives of the peoples that exist here. These are the laws of other people, who came to impose their culture on our own, alleging that we were not the legitimate owners of this land and that we didn’t know how to take care of it because we didn’t write in the same way. But we had our own codes, our paintings, our writing in the soil. They never paid attention or tried to learn. It was easier to destroy our ways in order to justify their claim over our lands. I’m very happy to be able now to use these words from the other side of the Ocean, to say that retomada is proof that the words and codes asserting our inferiority are wrong. The process of retomada reaffirms that we are the peoples of this place, and we have the conditions to take care of it because we have memory and our own sense of belonging

I would like to finish with a question. What is the place of Indigenous people? Here, in northeast Brazil, where I live, white people say that the place of Indigenous people is in the Amazon. But when I went to Pará, which is at the doors of the Amazon, they said that the place of Indigenous people is not there; it is instead at the border. I went to a meeting with Indigenous people from the region of Bolivia and they told me that the non-Indigenous people there say the same thing, that their place is somewhere else. Recently, I also went to Pennsylvania, in the United States, and I wanted to know about the situation of Indigenous people there. I learned that, historically, it was always said that Indigenous people were not from there; they were pushed and pushed away. So, I stayed with this question, what is the place of Indigenous people? We are always where we should be, and yet we are always pushed elsewhere. Even when we are doing the retomada, they always find a way to say that that place doesn’t belong to us, independent of our arguments or the proof we may present. So, I have this question for people to respond to: what is the place of Indigenous people? ■