Decolonizing genocide in Brazil: challenges to defending Indigenous collective life

BY MARIA JUDITE DA SILVA BALLERIO GUAJAJARA FOR DEBATES INDÍGENAS

The plan to exterminate the country’s Indigenous Peoples has been reconfigured time and again to adapt it to the country’s different cultural and political contexts. More recently, the anti-Indigenous policies of Jair Bolsonaro and the Covid-19 pandemic have shone a renewed light on the need to decolonize the crime of genocide. The legal classification of this crime represents a challenge in terms of proving a subjective element of malice, i.e., that there was an intention to destroy, in whole or in part, the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil.

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Fifty years of exile and injustice for the Ãwa people

 BY PATRÍCIA DE MENDONÇA RODRIGUES FOR DEBATES INDÍGENAS

The colonial persecution of the survivors of the Avá-Canoeiro peoples, better known as Âwa, goes on. A new judicial decision has reduced their territory mostly to flooded areas with no access to the Javaés River. Conflicts have increased since Incra created a settlement in the 1990s.

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The Tuxá and the “river sea”: seeking justice among submerged worlds

BY FELIPE TUXÁ FOR DEBATES INDÍGENAS

Until the arrival of colonization and modernity, this Indigenous people of North-eastern Brazil lived around the Operá River. They lived on the islands they considered sacred, they found their recreation among the waterfalls, fished for their daily food and bathed among the rocks as a form of ancestral medicine. They were also expert canoeists and travelled from one area to another along the river’s tributaries. Everything changed with the arrival of the Itaparica hydroelectric plant: they were forcibly displaced to a territory with no river and the promised reparations were never delivered. The author asks what compensation they have had for losing such an important part of their lives and promises that his people will continue to fight so that future generations can enjoy their river.

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The end of the world and the birth of the birds: how the Omerê Kanoé and Akuntsú survived genocide

BY LUCIANA KELLER TAVARES FOR DEBATES INDÍGENAS

The last six members of these indigenous peoples from eastern Brazil have survived the genocide, the advance of the agricultural-livestock frontier, and the ecosystem imbalances generated by the BR-364 highway. In order to resist Western “development”, they had to establish inter-ethnic relations despite having different languages. The Akuntsu contributed their knowledge of wild agriculture and the Kanoé shared their hunting techniques and skills. With almost all their relatives now dead, the Akuntsu women care for their birds as if they were their children, while the Kanoé hunt the cattle left behind by landowners who evacuated lands they had invaded decades before.

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Yanomami: history returns as a tragedy foretold

BY ALCIDA RITA RAMOS FOR DEBATES INDÍGENAS

In recent decades, the people of the Brazilian Amazon have lost the tranquillity that the jungle offered them. Illegal gold mining is the main factor affecting their social life, their culture and their well-being. The garimpeiros plunder their natural resources, pollute their rivers with mercury and transmit diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. With the approval of the Yanomami Indigenous Land in 1992, the territory experienced a peace interlude until Jair Bolsonaro came to power. The new president, Lula da Silva, has promised that illegal mining will no longer exist, but the past keeps repeating itself in the present.

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IWGIA - International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs - is a global human rights organisation dedicated to promoting and defending Indigenous Peoples’ rights. Read more.

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Indigenous World

IWGIA's global report, the Indigenous World, provides an update of the current situation for Indigenous Peoples worldwide. Read The Indigenous World.

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