How Indigenous life dissipates in the Amazon
“Stop being Indigenous, start being a worker.”
Sônia Guajajara, photographed by Christian Braga.
The Amazon is a Golden River
In Belém, The Cathedral is white and well maintained, and operates as tradition. Young men wait at the entrance in Franciscan-brown robes and their also-brown hands hold each other humbly. I bet those hands pull the ropes that shake the bells two and a half centuries old. At each end of the Narthex there is a 42-inch screen scrolling the names of members whose birthdays are this month. Next to the one on the right, a young man with a stand tries to sell perfume to raise money for the Church’s solar panels.
Outside, trees have dozens of legs and lean down and forward to tell you a secret. Açai trees are thin, the chunks hang so high I wonder how to get them down. It rains a lot and often, but quickly and gently. You can count on it everyday around the same time, and a serious-gray cloud gives a 10-minute heads up.
The Amazon river is so big it looks like the ocean. It’s hard to tell where it begins and ends; it came from an unspecified point in Peru and crossed the Amazon forest to meet the Atlantic Ocean casting waves. This river is golden because it mirrors the sun, not the sky, which must be why Oxum is yellow and Yemanjá white or blue. When it meets the Ocean, they don’t mix right away, they take turns with the tide. Instead of shells there are seeds, instead of crabs there are frogs — depending on the season.
Humans have inhabited these lands for 12 thousand years. Cave paintings and sambaquis are this underappreciated history. People vandalize caves and landfill sambaquis to build on top. History is downplayed with the invention of development, meanwhile, Native peoples dissipate at an alarming rate.
How Indigenous life dissipates in the Amazon
To dissipate is not to die, it’s a gradual process of population decline through integration into mainstream society. Stories are being lost because of relentless capitalist expansion, so are the last remaining examples of what life can look like without capitalism. With the loss of language comes the loss of anthropomorphic tales, which are an essential part of practicing and preserving animist beliefs. Animist ways of life diverge from the capitalist way in that the human relationship with the environment is mutual or commensal, rather than parasitic (in the symbiotic continuum). Ashley Dawson’s book Extinction: A Radical History shows that the Roman Empire’s justification for their “carnage of wildlife” entailed hollowing polytheist practices, and adopting the Judeo-Christian view that “grants human beings absolute dominion over the world.” Hollowing pre-christian practices can be seen in the Amazon when Indigenous elders end up passing on less of the culture, stories and language to the young, some thinking they will have a better life if they speak Portuguese and start looking for new economic opportunities in the cities. This type of integration into the system, which “cements over” the continuity of peoples who have existed for thousands of years, is instigated by a few factors.
The Economy
Under Bolsonaro, for-profit resource extraction from Indigenous lands is legitimized once again. Farms pollute waters, old growth forests are burnt, and other signs of capitalist expansion put territorial pressure on Native peoples. The land is less abundant, life becomes more difficult, and some people can go hungry trying to live the way they used to. This means these communities start becoming dependent on the government and the capitalist system to some extent. If a dam is built up a river, riverside communities get less water and start relying on government programs to access it. If the river is polluted and the fish become contaminated, they need to start buying food in a nearby town.
The Violence
In order to profit over a land’s resources, the people in those lands must be dealt with violently. Some of the most recent and gruesome cases of enslavement and massacre of Indigenous peoples in the Amazon were committed by rubber tappers in the 1960s (around the beginning of the Brazilian Military/Capitalist Dictatorship). The violence is not only directed at Indigenous peoples but also at anyone who passionately speaks on their behalf. Sister Dorothy, a nun from Ohio, was assassinated at the age of 73 in Anapu (about 700 kilometers from Belém), and this year marks the 15th anniversary of her death. She is not the only one, just in the past 5 years 19 people were assassinated in this town alone (Goeldi Museum Research Center data).
The Stigma
Stigmatizing public discourse helps normalize this violence. Indigenous beliefs are routinely reduced to superstition, their practices are seen as subhuman, and the pressure to change comes from all sides. Missionary groups have made false propaganda to portray Natives as backward and in need of saving. Brazil’s Human Rights Minister is an Evangelical pastor who founded an organization responsible for the fake documentary Hakani, which portrays alleged infanticide in an Amazonian ‘tribe.’ Among Catholics, the issue is divisive. Last year, Pope Francis called for an end to the exploitation of the Amazon and to the “plundering of other [indigenous] persons,” but a majority of Catholics in Brazil still disagree with his progressive views on the humanity of Natives.
An administration with no interest in preserving patrimony will offer Indigenous peoples neither benefits nor sovereignty. There are virtually no educational programs and investments in infrastructure. At the same time, they are not granted authority over their own land. Moreover, there are no incentives to speak or preserve dying languages, to research and document practices, or to simply possess an identity. According to Joshua Birchall, a researcher at the Goeldi museum in Belém, it’s as if they were told to “stop being Indigenous and to start being workers.” In other words, abandon identity and history to start paying to exist like the rest of us.
Indigenous peoples have been negotiating this process of integration for years, each community trying to find their own way of looking forward and preserving their culture. But is this negotiation balanced when coercion and survival virtually eradicates leverage? Everyone, even progressive leftists who love to love Natives, can end up reproducing the behavior they criticize in others — to project and disseminate personal fantasies and expectations of what it means to be Indigenous. Whether it’s the “backward” or the “noble” savage, it’s painting them all with the same broad brush.
In the interview featured below, Christian Braga, a photo-journalist from Manaus and member of the Farpa collective, explains what’s behind the integrity of his work documenting Indigenous peoples — to give them names, and to make them happy. “Speaking of Indigenous peoples, to me, has never been, and never will be, synonymous with talking about the past, but about the future” (@christinaanbraga). Doing what a community sees as good for them and their continuity into the future involves listening to them and developing a relationship based on friendship and trust. Otherwise, we risk exploiting and extracting what we need from them, as has been done for hundreds of years, thus contributing to their dissipation.
There is no going back, but that doesn’t mean we’ll let business go on as usual. We need to create favorable environments for the preservation of Indigenous life, languages and practices in modernity. Christians juxtapose flat screens and restored church murals without having their continued traditions questioned. But when a Native uses a phone or a fridge they have their Indigenous identity belittled. This needs to end, and we need to start supporting each of their trajectories into the future.
We’ve all experienced involuntary contact with Capitalism to some extent, whether when we apply for a job to pay rent, or when we come in contact with a stranger, catch the flu and need medicine from a doctor. Part of opposing the devastating effects of Capitalism means opposing the appalling conditions of poverty. You don’t need to go into the depths a deforested region of the Amazon to find children going hungry or dying, it has been happening here in the cities. We’ve given Natives virtually no choice but to enter a system that doesn’t even work for us, but somehow is presented as civilized development. There is nothing civilized about how developers have interacted with Indigenous peoples. The only choice we have left is to resist, and we need to exist to do that.
MIRNA WABI-SABI
is a writer, political theorist, teacher and translator. She is an editor at Gods&Radicals, founder of the Enemy of the Queen megazine and of the Plataforma 9 media collective. Her work orbits around Capitalism, White Supremacy and Patriarchy, and the proposals involve resistance to Eurocentrism and Western Imperialism.