© Copyright by Sarah Mellman, 2017 All Rights Reserved
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS …………………………………… i
LIST OF FIGURES …………...………………………………. ii
Chapter
INTRODUCTION …………………………………. 1
CHAPTER 1 ……………………………………….... 5
Introduction to the Field
CHAPTER 2 ………………………………………….. 24
Indigenous Brazilians and Human Rights
CHAPTER 3 ………………………………………….. 45
Ka’apor Language Education in the State of Maranhão
CONCLUSION ………………………………………… 63
Bibliography ……………………………………………………. 66
Biography ……………………………………………………… 71
i Acknowledgements
I would like to dedicate this work first and foremost to the Ka’apor community of Xié Pihun and their relatives throughout TI Alto Turiaçu. I’d especially like to acknowledge the lideranças for their tireless advocacy work on behalf of their people and territory.
To my mentors and thesis committee at Tulane University: Jimmy Huck, William Balée, Judith Maxwell, and Christopher Dunn,
To my parents, for their unwavering support of my endeavors, no matter how far from them they may take me,
To Professora Raimunda Benedita Cristina Caldas, who first introduced me to the Ka’apor and to the complexities of indigenous school education in Brazil,
To my friends in Pará and Maranhão who have hosted and encouraged me during my fieldwork: Breno, Janey, Benedita, Liliam, Rayssa, and Eduardo Barros; Maria de Fátima de Sousa Viana; Judite, Cecília, María de Fátima, Iorlando Rodrigues, and Lourdes Nascimento Ferreira; Sandreson Marcelo Pereira da Silva; Mauricio Ribeiro and Raquel Gomes; Ester Paixão Corrêa; Estelita Barros and Claudemir Carvalho; Lorram Tyson dos Santos Araújo; Francisca Galeana Salgado; Cristabell López; Billy Anderson Pinheiro; Carlos Aldik Rodrigues de Oliveira; and Carlos Ricardo de Jesús Rodrigues Oliveira.
And, finally, to my colleagues at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies and the Tulane University Linguistics program who read my drafts and encouraged me throughout the thesis writing process: Rebecca Moore, Fabiola Ramirez, Holly Devon, Vanessa Castañeda, Taylor McMahon, Ana María López, and Alejandra Marks.
ii
Figures
1.1 Google Satellite Image 1 6
1.2 Google Satellite Image 2 6
1.3 Xié Pihun School 2013 11
1.4 Xié Pihun School 2017 12
1.5 Greenpeace Map 20
2.1 FUNAI Demarcation Sign 30
2.2 Eusébio Ka’apor 31
3.1 School Plaque 2017 47
3.2 School Welcome Banners 50
3.3 School Classroom 2017 50
4.1 Ka’apor Gathering 2016 65
iii 1
INTRODUCTION
Indigenous societies in the Americas are geographically, politically, socially, and economically marginalized as a consequence of Western colonialism and capitalism.
They are ‘subaltern’ or ‘fourth world’ peoples, terms that describe populations living outside the power structure dominated by nation-states (Guha and Spivak 1988; Polsuns and Manuel 1974).
In this vulnerable position of marginalization within dominant societies, indigenous peoples employ strategies of cultural resistance in order to maintain agency over their linguistic and cultural identities. Indigenous education, or the transmission of indigenous knowledge from generation to generation, can help native languages and livelihoods withstand external pressures to assimilate into national cultures. This thesis explores how members of the Ka’apor indigenous community in the village of Xié Pihun,
Maranhão, Brazil think of formal, bilingual language education as a strategy of resistance against the cultural influences of dominant Brazilian society. I hypothesize that they envision language education, both in their native Ka’apor and in Portuguese, as a strategic tool to achieve their community’s goals of maintaining their cultural and linguistic integrity and of advocating for their constitutionally guaranteed indigenous rights. Through analysis of original ethnographic research including semi-structured interviews, informal interviews, and participant observation, this case study examines how, despite financial and logistical challenges, Ka’apor village members in Xié Pihun 2 imagine bilingual language education as an act of cultural resistance with practical implications for the enjoyment of their rights.
Formal education in the Ka’apor language serves two purposes. First, I claim that the Ka’apor aspire to maintain their use of the community’s native language as a means of preserving cultural identity. Secondly, Ka’apor leaders know that their nonindigenous advocates, such as environmental and human rights NGOs, value the Ka’apor language as what Bourdieu termed “symbolic capital” (Bourdieu 1977 [1972], cited in Graham 2002).
As they navigate between indigenous and nonindigenous languages and cultures, the
Ka’apor know that native language fluency differentiates them as an indigenous people.
Their symbolic capital serves as leverage, reinforcing outsiders’ recognition of their indigenous identity and, consequently, the legitimacy of the group’s claims to collective indigenous rights – most importantly, the right to the exclusive use of their land – assured by the 1988 Federal Brazilian Constitution.
I also hypothesize that the Ka’apor see Portuguese language education as an additional strategy to defend their land and rights. Through use of the dominant culture’s knowledge, they aspire to advocate for the necessary financial resources to secure their legally guaranteed indigenous freedoms. They do not reject the Portuguese language in order to maintain their use of Ka’apor, nor do they embrace Portuguese at the expense of their native language. Rather, they aim to strategically incorporate Portuguese in their struggle for indigenous rights while maintaining their native language use in community life. To achieve this bilingualism in Ka’apor and Portuguese, the Ka’apor know that they need formal, bilingual education that prioritizes their language, values, and knowledge while also preparing them to interact with nonindigenous society in advantageous ways. 3
Maintaining their language and desired cultural expressions would be easier in
isolation, removed from Lusophone Brazilian society’s cultural influence. The Ka’apor
have traditionally hunted, foraged, and farmed for the natural resources they need to
thrive independently in their forest territory of TI (Terra Indígena) Alto Turiaçu. The
federal Brazilian government officially demarcated the 5,301 square kilometer Ka’apor territory in northwestern Maranhão in 1978, legally guaranteeing the group the exclusive use of the land to maintain their traditional livelihoods. Nonetheless, commercial interests in logging, ranching, and monoculture farming have illegally deforested up to a third of
Ka’apor land (Balée 1998). The group’s leaders recognize that the Ka’apor community’s delicate, differentiated existence within the modern Brazilian nation-state demands that
they defend their territory and people from exploitation by investing in transportation to patrol their land, healthcare to tend to the community’s most vulnerable, and educational infrastructure to improve literacy in Ka’apor and Portuguese.
Their forest-based livelihoods, while fundamental to their physical and cultural
survival, do not provide financial resources capable of addressing these demands. The
Ka’apor can only finance their community’s practical needs with the support of powerful
social actors such as government agencies and, when its allocated subsidies are
insufficient, nongovernmental organizations. As a result, Ka’apor leaders, called
lideranças, are in constant negotiation with powerful nonindigenous sources of fiscal
support in order to reconcile their necessity of legally mandated financial assistance with
the group’s desire for sociopolitical autonomy. Negotiating the complex “middle 4
ground1” between indigenous and nonindigenous interests, languages, and cultures demands a bilingual, bicultural perspective.
The following thesis chapters demonstrate how Ka’apor in the village of Xié
Pihun, Maranhão, Brazil envision language education as a strategy to help achieve their community’s desired balance of autonomy and social integration. Chapter 1 describes my positionality as the researcher, the ethnographic fieldwork methodology employed, information about the Ka’apor people’s political organization, and the importance of bilingualism in leaders’ interactions with state and nongovernmental actors. Chapter 2 situates the Ka’apor struggle for recognition of their rights, including their right to language education, within the context of Brazilian and human rights history. Finally,
Chapter 3 explores the current state of indigenous language education in Maranhão,
Brazil and the specific challenges cited by the Ka’apor in Xié Pihun regarding access to knowledge that will help them achieve their community’s goals.
1 The “middle ground” is a concept first proposed by Richard White (1991) and later applied by Beth Conklin and Laura Graham (1995) to describe the ever-changing, abstract space of confrontation and negotiation between Amazonian indigenous groups and nonindigenous society (Ball 2012; Conklin and Graham 1995; White 1991).
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CHAPTER 1: Introduction to the Field
This thesis focuses on opinions of indigenous education cited by leaders, teachers,
and parents in the village of Xié Pihun, a Ka’apor community of 100-1152 near the western border of TI Alto Turiaçu, in December 2016 and January 2017. Over the course
of eight days, I recorded five semi-structured, formal interviews with village members:
the 33-year-old cacique, or elected village leader; the 32-year-old segundo liderança, son
of the local intermediary between village members and nonindigenous society; the 23-
year-old professor indígena, or village teacher; the 55-year-old respected elder and wife
of the pajé, or healer; and a 20-year-old father whose wife is also a local Ka’apor teacher.
Fieldwork Phase I: Access
Accessing the village from the United States has required expensive international
air travel to the nearest state capital of Belém, domestic land travel from there to the
nearest nonindigenous city of Paragominas, and communication and coordination with
my contact, Wilson3- the village’s liderança, or intermediary with nonindigenous society-
who had invited me to travel with him to Xié Pihun in Ka’apor territory. On December
30, 2016, we departed from Paragominas over rough, dirt roads flanked by cattle ranches
and soy farms.
2 Population estimate provided by local leaders.
3 Names of all contacts and interviewees have been changed per IRB recommendations of informant anonymity. Most Ka’apor have first names in their native language and in Portuguese, and their last name is “Ka’apor.” 6
Figure 1.1 Google Maps satellite image of the states of Pará and Maranhão, Brazil. I circled TI Alto Turiaçu, bordered to the west by the Gurupi River that marks the state line between Pará and Maranhão.
Figure 1.2 Google Maps satellite image, more proximate than the first. I circled Belém, Paragominas, and outlined the limits of TI Alto Turiaçu. The line from Belém to Paragominas shows the route between the two cities on highways BR 316 and BR 010. The line from Paragominas to TI Alto Turiaçu represents the dirt road from Paragominas to Xié Pihun, located on the western limit of TI Alto Turiaçu. Ka’apor leaders want to build a road that encircles their territory as the white line does on this map. As of 2017, no such road exists. 7
I was able to spend 8 days in Xié Pihun, which, while fewer than I would have
liked, were nonetheless instrumental for me to communicate with village leaders and members to whom I would not have otherwise had access. The village is off-grid; it does not have access to Internet or phone signals. The only people outside the village with whom community leaders can communicate while in Xié Pihun are those at the SESAI
(Special Secretariat of Indigenous Health) post in Paragominas, linked to the village’s
smaller health post via radio transmitter. During my time there, I collected data by
recording interviews on my Sony digital voice recorder and by writing field notes in a small notebook.
In all Ka’apor communities, Ka’apor, of the Tupi-Guarani language family, is the primary language spoken. As is the case in most Amerindian cultures, Ka’apor is a traditionally oral language; its first written orthography was developed in the 1980s by
Summer Institute of Linguistics4 linguists James and Kay Kakumasu (Balée 1994; 88).
Literacy in the Ka’apor language is low due to the relatively recent development of the
language’s writing conventions. Portuguese is used only when communicating with
nonindigenous visitors such as healthcare workers, teachers, and traders or when the
Ka’apor travel outside their territory to run errands or visit an indigenous health post or hospital. According to the Brazilian NGO Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), 40% of the
Ka’apor population speaks some form of Portuguese, ranging from pidgin Portuguese used for rudimentary communication to regional Portuguese spoken by Ka’apor lideranças, who frequently leave the territory to advocate for Ka’apor interests in indigenous conferences, protests, and in meetings with nonindigenous government
4 “SIL”, now called “SIL International” 8
officials (Balée 1998). Most of the Ka’apor population, especially community elders and
small children, does not speak Portuguese at all. Ka’apor and Portuguese language
literacy is very limited, but I have not found quantitative estimates of the community’s
literacy rate.
While I was able to conduct all of my interviews and conversations in Portuguese,
a language in which I am comfortably fluent, it was apparent that my interviewees, to
varying extents, felt restricted in their communication by the use of their nondominant
language. I greatly enjoyed learning and practicing the Ka’apor language with
community members and interviewees, which served as a wonderful rapport-building
exercise, but I do not yet know enough of the language to conduct interviews in Ka’apor.
The cacique, in addition to interpreting for me at an initial village meeting, also
interpreted during my interview with the elderly woman who is the wife of the pajé.
Many responses included vague or unspecific answers, and asking clarifying questions
tended to yield repetition instead of more specific responses. Therefore, in most cases, I
chose to accept my interviewees’ answers as they offered them. For example, the cacique
told me that the population of Xié Pihun was 100-115. As a village baby had been born
earlier in the month and another was expected a month later, I interpreted his lack of
certainty as potentially indicative of an ever-increasing village population. Long-term
fieldwork is necessary to conduct a census of the village population and its rate of
population increase.
I had visited Xié Pihun once before, as described in the following section, and had completed a feasibility study with Ka’apor lideranças at the SESAI health post in the
nonindigenous city of Zé Doca in June and July 2016. During this visit, I worked with 9
them to develop a collaborative research framework that we hope will result in mutually
beneficial experiences and outcomes. While I had initially hoped for an invitation to Xié
Pihun in June 2016, the community leaders with whom I had spent time explained that they would only invite me into their territory if I were to return for a research trip at a later date. I interpreted this qualification as a test of my commitment to their community,
and I welcomed the chance to prove myself. Long-term, reciprocal relationship building
is a fundamental component of working ethically with indigenous groups, and I have
strived to conduct my work as respectfully and transparently as possible. My ultimate goal in studying the community’s relationship with formal bilingual education is to see how my academic perspective can contribute to the educational experiences and outcomes of indigenous language learners. When I returned to Ka’apor territory in
December 2016, the last thing I wanted was for a faux pas during my first research visit to become the community’s most prominent memory of my short time with them. I was consequently very careful to avoid cultural and linguistic taboos that might have resulted in distrust or disapproval. During my next visit, I hope to spend at least one year learning the Ka’apor language while conducting doctoral dissertation research through informal interviews and participant observation. The research conducted thus far is instrumental in constructing mutual trust with Ka’apor collaborators and in guaranteeing the success of future fieldwork with this vulnerable community.
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Fieldwork Phase II: Return to Xié Pihun
The cacique called a community meeting the morning following my arrival at Xié
Pihun on December 31, 2016. Twenty adults gathered in the school building that they call the colégio, where they sat in a wide circle in blue and white plastic school chairs with desks attached. Mothers nursed their toddlers while 8-10 small children ran around the room. Seated at the head of the circle between the cacique, who translated my Portuguese
to Ka’apor for the group to understand and the group’s Ka’apor into Portuguese for my benefit, and the pajé, or community healer, whose leadership role in the meeting appeared more symbolic, I explained that I had visited Xié Pihun before in 2013 with a Brazilian linguist that they know as Cristina. Awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship grant for Brazil in 2013, I had undertaken a teaching position at a small, satellite campus of the Federal University of Pará (UFPA) in the coastal Amazonian town of Bragança,
Pará. There, I became acquainted with affiliated linguist Dr. Raimunda Benedita Cristina
Caldas, who had researched the Ka’apor language for her graduate work in linguistics at the University of Brasília. Upon receiving her assignment as a department chair at UFPA in Bragança, she established a research group, Vozes do Caeté (Voices of the Caeté
[River]) in order to support the Ka’apor people’s efforts to establish their own orthography and bilingual, intercultural education center within their demarcated territory in nearby Maranhão state (Caldas 2013).
In September 2013, I had joined Professor Caldas and her research team on a week-long visit to Xié Pihun. We had met with leaders and other village members to discuss the creation of a bilingual school curriculum emphasizing both Ka’apor 11 knowledge and the preparation required to apply for admission to nonindigenous public university.
In June 2016, I returned to Maranhão, Brazil to spend time with Ka’apor leaders at a SESAI indigenous health post in the nonindigenous town of Zé Doca. I was only able to return to the Ka’apor village of Xié Pihun in an offical research capacity in December
2016, and I was thrilled to be meeting with community members in the school building that had been the site of the bilingual, intercultural education center envisioned in the
2013 meetings.
Figure 1.3 Xié Pihun’s school building as seen through the goal posts of the community soccer field. I took this photograph in September 2013. The region’s dry season is from July-December.
12
Figure 1.4 The same school building from a different angle in January 2017. The region’s rainy season is from January-June.
Through the cacique acting as an interpreter, the assembled village members asked me questions about what my proposed research would entail of them. I explained that I hoped to record interviews about formal language education with whomever was willing to participate. The cacique asked for volunteers to speak on behalf of the community, and I wrote a list of the five individuals who said that they were willing to be recorded at a time and place of their choice.
Sometimes, data that the interviewees provided contradicted existing data available to me through official government sources. In instances of conflicting data, I have chosen to use information cited by Ka’apor informants, as I am more interested in their worldview and interpretations of their lived reality. For example, in my ethnographic interviews, Ka’apor leaders claimed that there are as many as 3,800
Ka’apor in 18 aldeias, or villages, in TI (Terra Indígena) Alto Turiaçu. The cacique told
me that his estimate came from a National Indian Foundation (Fundação Nacional do
Índio, or FUNAI) worker who had told him the latest census data in August 2016. 13
Available census data online, however, state that the Ka’apor have an estimated population of approximately 2,000 (Siasi/Sesai 2014). I asked Xié Pihun leaders about this discrepancy, and they claim that SESAI’s figure is outdated and underestimated. Xié
Pihun leaders’ belief that the government’s indigenous health organization is underreporting their population, resulting in fewer resources allocated to the group, is, in my opinion, more interesting than the actual head count of the Ka’apor population. In further fieldwork and dissertation research, I hope to tease out these contradictions between information provided by Ka’apor sources and by SESAI. In the meantime, I am using this exploratory work and MA thesis to interpret information that I received first- hand in the field.
My primary contact in Xié Pihun, the liderança named Wilson, drove me to the village on December 30 but returned to the health post in Paragominas with his sick wife the same day. Our only substantial interaction during my stay occurred on that 5-hour journey to the village, where we were able to speak informally about the issues affecting the village. The local cacique corroborated the concerns Wilson cited in the community meeting the following morning. Both leaders listed the same three community necessities, in their order of importance, for which they hold the government accountable.
The most important issue they cited is the necessary improvement of roads both within and around their territory for them to better patrol their border for illegal logging activity, improve accessibility between villages, and transport healthcare patients to nearby hospitals in nonindigenous territory. Secondly, they say that Xié Pihun needs improved and increased investment in SESAI-sponsored healthcare activities at both the village health post and at the larger health post in the nonindigenous city of Paragominas. 14
Finally, they cited the need for increased government investment in bilingual Ka’apor
education, including the provisions for adequate institutional infrastructure, the
maintenance of the Ka’apor language as the primary language of literacy education, the
continued involvement of nonindigenous Portuguese language teachers, and training
courses for Ka’apor teachers to eventually replace nonindigenous teachers in all school
subjects. This thesis concerns one of the most important issues that Xié Pihun community
members have cited in our meetings; in future fieldwork, I hope to more deeply examine
Ka’apor concerns that they say have more immediate effects on their well-being.
Ka’apor and the State
Overall, Xié Pihun’s leaders evaluate the state government’s support of their
community’s infrastructure, healthcare, and education as poor and lacking. Education is
the one constitutionally-guaranteed right that, though provided by the government, would
theoretically enable the Ka’apor to become less dependent on the Brazilian state in the
long-term. “The government wants to do away with indigenous people, that is why it
doesn’t want to give us resources,” said the cacique in the community meeting. “It wants
to get rid of us so it can get rid of our forest. If we do not have education, the government
will get rid of our forest,5” (author’s translation6). Many Ka’apor see the government as a
saboteur. This impression is based on the history of exploitation at the hands of
5 “O governo quer acabar com o povo indígena, por isso não quer dar recurso. Quer acabar com nossa floresta. Se nós não tiver estudo, o governo acaba com nossa floresta.”
6 All quotations provided by Ka’apor informants are the author’s translations from Portuguese unless stated otherwise. Footnotes following the in-text translations are verbatim transcriptions from recorded interviews in Portuguese. Ka’apor words within Portuguese transcriptions are italicized, and their use of Portuguese is nonstandard.
15
individual corrupt FUNAI officials that, while not the majority in the organization, have
tainted the foundation’s reputation among indigenous communities. Further, FUNAI is severely undermanned and lacking in financial resources, problems that strongly affect how effectively the institution can respond to indigenous communities’ needs and actualize the indigenous rights laws that are on the books (Valenta 2003; 648). The weakening of FUNAI through its underfunding and understaffing is a symptom of the absence of political will to support indigenous causes, “in some cases the lack of desire to expend the necessary political capital and resources to enforce the law, and in others the active desire to prevent its enforcement,” (Hochstetler and Keck 2007; 151). Members of the Ka’apor leadership, while guaranteed the rights to the exclusive use of their land, to
government-sponsored healthcare, and to differentiated education by the national
constitution, have not seen manifestations of these rights in the applications of practical
policy. A Ka’apor teacher put it this way: “In the law it’s written perfectly, but in reality,
they don’t do it, they don’t do it for us. They keep us tied up.7” As a minority group with
limited territorial sovereignty within the much larger Brazilian nation-state, the group
feels persecuted by the very government upon which it relies to provide for its
infrastructure, healthcare, and education needs.
Without clear channels for receiving adequate government support and protection
within their demarcated territory, Ka’apor in Xié Pihun and throughout TI Alto Turiaçu
have reached out to NGOs that attempt to apply pressure on the Brazilian government
through media campaigns and appeals to international human and environmental rights
7 “Na lei é escrito certinho, mas na realidade, eles não faz, não faz para nós. Fica amarrando nós.”
16
laws. Because they feel that the government does not represent or support their
community’s interests, Ka’apor leaders yearn to exert autonomy from the institutions
upon which they depend for the resources that, in their current supply, are inadequate. In
their search for nongovernmental allies, Ka’apor cultural identity and language fluency
have become symbolic capital, while their study of Portuguese serves as a tool with which they can more independently navigate interactions in nonindigenous society. Max, the 20-year-old interviewee, explained: “Wilson [the liderança] likes to say that the white man’s word is a weapon. The white man has this weapon. If the Indian doesn’t have it, too, then he won’t know how to use it. We have to have this weapon, not in our hands but in our heads.8” Max sees the Portuguese language ‘weapon,’ when wielded by the
Ka’apor, as a means of self-expression and self-defense against the powerful Lusophone actors who dominate political discourse. The Ka’apor want to receive support from
nonindigenous allies, but they also do not want to become dependent upon the Brazilian
government that, based on their experiences, they believe to be untrustworthy.
Ka’apor and Nongovernmental Allies
In the 1980s, ethnobiology and cultural ecology research began to reveal the
sophistication of indigenous knowledge systems and Amazonian Indians’ sustainable
forest management practices (Conklin and Graham 1995). Forest inventories of Ka’apor
8 “O Wilson gosta de dizer, né, que a palavra do branco é uma arma. O branco tem uma arma. Se o índio não tiver também, ele não vai saber andar com aquela arma. A pessoa tem que ter a arma, não na mão, tem que ser na cabeça, né.” 17 land conducted during this time period, for example, displayed ethnobotanical evidence of intentional human efforts to increase the diversity of useful species such as palms and fruits (Balée 1994; 135-141). The scientifically legitimized goal of preserving biodiversity became attached to the idea of preserving indigenous knowledge and the holders of this knowledge. Protecting the forest’s peoples became seen as a way for international environmental advocates to protect the rain forest itself.
Fitting this environmental activist narrative of Amazonian indigenous peoples, the Ka’apor, in order to stand in the way of illegal logging activities that had deforested up to a third of TI Alto Turiaçu, founded four new villages in 2001: Xié Pihun, Paraku-y,
Turizinho, and Gurupiuna. Village leaders throughout the territory formed an incorporated nonprofit association, called Associação Ka’apor Ta Hury do Rio Gurupi, or “The United Ka’apor Association of the Gurupi River” to represent their collective interests in nonindigenous society. Loggers had cleared the land where Xié Pihun now stands, and Ka’apor families moved to the location from nearby villages to physically put themselves between the loggers and the rainforest within their demarcated territory. The choice of Xié Pihun’s location is politically strategic to combat illegal logging, but the area around the village lacks a safe, natural water source. Village members now depend on SESAI to provide gasoline and a functioning generator to pump the community’s well for safe drinking, cooking, and bathing water and to take care of all Xié Pihun’s healthcare needs. “SESAI created special healthcare that was just for indigenous people
[in 2012], but we saw that instead of improving, [the situation] got worse for us. And we 18
depend on it… This worries us,9” said the cacique. He had joined a national indigenous
demonstration in Brasília in November 2016, protesting a government proposal to
dissolve SESAI and send indigenous communities to municipal healthcare providers
instead10 (personal communication, 1/2/2017). The precarious state of water and
healthcare access in Xié Pihun demonstrates how Ka’apor community responses to
external threats from the national society, such as illegal logging, render the community
less self-sufficient and more dependent upon fragile national government agencies.
To represent themselves in nonindigenous society, Ka’apor communities
throughout TI Alto Turiaçu have, in the past, united to advocate for collective interests.
In 2003, lideranças representing each village incorporated the Associação Ka’apor Ta
Hury do Rio Gurupi with the express purpose of dealing with external challenges to
Ka’apor interests. Due to recently developed factionalism among Ka’apor villages,
however, Xié Pihun currently acts as a politically autonomous village allied with the
Associação-affiliated Ka’apor villages of Turizinho, Paraku-y, Bacurizeiro, and Axingui
(ibid.). Xié Pihun is run by several leaders: a cacique - the local chief who is chosen by
the village elders - and lideranças, or leaders who live in the village but travel often,
serving as the village’s representatives in meetings with Ka’apor leaders from other
communities and as Ka’apor intermediaries in meetings with nonindigenous people.
These local leaders understand the importance of maintaining Ka’apor culture and
9 “A SESAI criou a portaria de saúde especial que era só para a saúde indígena, esse SESAI, mas só que a gente viu que em vez de melhorar piorava nós. E a gente depende de… isso traz preocupação para a gente, né.”
10 The proposal did not pass, and SESAI remains the provider of indigenous healthcare services. 19 language but also of speaking Portuguese as they communicate and negotiate with nonindigenous foes and advocates.
Portuguese language proficiency helps Ka’apor leaders coordinate with sources of nongovernmental support. In August 2015, for example, the national Brazilian branch of the environmental NGO Greenpeace International allied with the Ka’apor to help defend their territory from illegal loggers. It provided the funding and direction to install electronic tracking devices and motion and temperature sensor cameras throughout TI
Alto Turiaçu to monitor illegal logging activities, threats that government agencies responsible for mitigating, such as the federal police, have failed to effectively address
(Lacorte 2015). NGOs that have also championed Ka’apor causes include Instituto
Socioambiental (ISA) and Conselho Indigenista Missionário (CIMI), as well as Amnesty
International, the UK-based organization Survival International, and Greenpeace Brazil.
The Ka’apor have also sought media support; since 2014, international news sources such as The New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, Guardian, and Reuters11 have quoted or mentioned Ka’apor community leaders in online media denouncing illegal logging activities, violence against indigenous groups, and Brazilian government inaction. Aside from the Greenpeace collaboration, however, the quantitative benefits of this recent attention remain unclear.
11 See bibliography for source information.
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Figure 1.5 Greenpeace Brazil’s map of TI Alto Turiaçu. The NGO highlights the indigenous connection to rain forest preservation by contrasting indigenous lands in green with privately owned, deforested land in red. Maps such as this one illustrate the urgency of commercial threats to Ka’apor territory. The key is in English, which indicates that this image is intended for an international audience.
Communicating in Portuguese enables easier translation and dissemination of the
Ka’apor leadership’s message into global languages such as English that can be understood around the world. Indeed, “when culture brokers become sufficiently proficient to make their public addresses in the dominant language of political discourse, they have… full control over the content that can reach their audience,” (Graham 2002;
201). More immediately, though, Portuguese language fluency enables Ka’apor leaders to communicate with Lusophone allies and to advocate for themselves in encounters with nonindigenous actors closer to TI Alto Turiaçu. Wilson’s 32-year-old son, the segundo liderança who serves as Xié Pihun’s intermediary with nonindigenous society when his 21 father is not at hand, relayed to me the importance of his Portuguese as a second language education:
When I was 10 years old, I didn’t know how to speak Portuguese, but I knew how to speak my language, the Ka’apor language. Then the [nonindigenous Portuguese] teacher came. He taught us, and we learned. I was studying, and he would say, “Look, you have to learn because your father is a liderança. You are going to take his place one day.” He [Wilson] didn’t know how to speak Portuguese then, either. Now he does, and today I am here taking his place. To this day, I am very grateful to that teacher who encouraged me. Now, I am speaking Portuguese well.12
All interviewees in Xié Pihun expressed the importance of learning
Portuguese to communicate with nonindigenous allies and, further, of distinguishing allies from enemies. The cacique, when translating for
Fátima, a respected community elder and wife of the pajé, said:
We want to study so that we can learn for ourselves. We want to teach our relatives and to know how to take our relatives to do many things [beyond the village]. To not depend on the karaí [nonindigenous], because there are karaí who are good, but there are also people who just want to rob us.13
I found this goal of community self-reliance interesting, as Xié Pihun residents would describe the community’s need for increased nonindigenous assistance and express their desire to become independent from karaí influence without seeing any contradiction in
12 “Quando eu era criança… eu tinha 10 anos, e eu não sabia falar português e sabia falar mais minha língua, né, a língua Ka’apor. Aí depois chegou o professor… aí ele que ensinou nós e eu aprendi, fui aprendendo e ele falou, falava para mim, ‘Olha, você tem que aprender, ser aprendido, seu pai é liderança.’ E ele não sabia falar também e agora sabe falar português. ‘Você que vai surgir no lugar dele,’ né, que nem hoje como eu tô, né, eu que estou no lugar dele agora. Até hoje, graças a Deus, eu agradeço muito esse professor que me deu muita força. Agora que eu estou falando português direito.”
13 “Nós queremos estudar para aprender nós mesmos. A gente quer ensinar nossos parentes e saber levar nossos parentes para fazer várias coisas. Não depender do karaí, porque o karaí tem pessoas que é bom mas tem pessoas que só quer rouber o parente.”
22 these aims. Perhaps they acknowledge that, while their current lived experiences demand financial resources from nonindigenous actors, they ultimately aspire to become self- sufficient producers of these resources. Alternatively, their desire for independence may stem from their frustration with the funding sources upon which they currently depend.
Ka’apor group members might be content to receive nonindigenous assistance if they feel that it comes from actors concerned with the community’s interests. For example, when I asked Paulo, a Ka’apor teacher in Xié Pihun, how the group has tried to obtain pedagogical materials for the community school, he said: “This past year, we solicited everything in Zé Doca from SEDUC [Maranhão’s State Secretary of Education], a chalkboard and everything, but it never got here. We ask for it, but they don’t send it.14”
When I asked Paulo who he thought should be responsible for providing these school materials, his answer surprised me: “It can be us. We as teachers can help each other to create books… and we have the [Ka’apor leaders’] Associação… we can depend on it for the money.” I then asked him if he thought that the Associação could negotiate with
SEDUC for state-sponsored school support. He said, “Maybe. We had a meeting to talk about this. It may not happen now, but I guess it could. But this will depend on us. We
14 “Nesse ano que passou, a gente solicitou tudo em Zé Doca, da SEDUC, quadro, tudo, né, só que até agora nunca veio aqui. A gente solicita mas não manda.”
23
have to fight to get it.15” Paulo’s idea of obtaining resources independently appears to be
a consequence of his frustration with the established channels’ dysfunctions. In their
vulnerable position of requesting but not receiving, the Ka’apor know that nonindigenous
sources are legally obligated to protect indigenous interests. Nonetheless, their
community’s experiences with nonindigenous society have taught them that government
support is unreliable and that nongovernmental sources, while well-meaning, are often
inaccessible.
15 “P: Quem você acha que tem a responsabilidade para fornecer esses livros para vocês? R: Para nós? Pode ser nós, né. Nós como os professores se ajudando a fazer esse livro. P: E para tamataré [dinheiro]? Quem é que deve, você acha? R: Porque a gente tem a Associação para isso. A gente depende dela, para a gente ter tamataré. P: Então não é a SEDUC? R: Não. P: Você acha que tem como negociar com eles para conseguir esse apoio? R: Tem, né. A gente estava fazendo uma reunião falando sobre isso. Aí talvez pode… se não existe isso aí ainda podia, né. Isso aí vai depender de nós, né. Nós que tem que correr atrás para poder conseguir isso.”
24
CHAPTER 2: Indigenous Brazilians and Human Rights
Ka’apor demands for nonindigenous recognition of their constitutionally
guaranteed collective rights occur within a national political context that, for much of
Brazilian history, has actively discouraged indigenous peoples from maintaining their
unique community identities. This chapter will not trace the extensive legislative history
in Brazil from sixteenth century European contact with indigenous groups to the present
day. Rather, I will begin by generally summarizing the major legislative changes of the
past century that I believe provide the most relevant historical context to the current state
of Ka’apor rights.
Constitutional Rights
Two 20th-century statutory frameworks that most influenced the Brazilian federal government’s top-down approach to dealing with its indigenous populations were its
Civil Code (1916) and the Statute of the Indian (1973). Reflecting contemporaneous national society’s ethnocentric attitudes of Indians as immature and deficient, Article 6 of the 1916 Civil Code declared Brazilian indigenous peoples to be mentally incapacitated, and, as such, considered them to be wards of the state: “Indians have relative incapacity to practice the acts of civil life under the regime of tutorship.16 The same provisions
forsee that the incapacity shall cease if and when the Indians become integrated into the
civilization,” (Barroso 1995 cited in Valenta 2003; 647). The Brazilian government
16 Also known as “tutela” 25
subordinated indigenous people to the nation-state, imposing upon them the legal status
of children unless they assimilated into national society. Declarations such as Article 6 of the 1916 Civil Code explicitly stated the government’s goal of socially integrating indigenous individuals into national Brazilian society, as only then would they actualize
their personhood and rights as Brazilian citizens.
The first signs of respect for indigenous identities are present in the 1973
Indigenous Statute, which made the instruction of indigenous languages mandatory in
Indian schools. However, the statute’s 49th and 50th articles also made clear that: “The
education of Indians will be oriented towards their integration into the national
community by way of a process of gradual comprehension of the general problems and
values of national society, as well as making the most of their individual
aptitudes,” (Law no. 6.001 1973). Before 1988, national policies used formal language education as a tool to assimilate indigenous individuals into the broader, multiracial
social framework of the nation-state.
National discourse began to favor indigenous rights to territorial, sociocultural,
political, and educational differentiation with the implementation of the 1988 Brazilian
Constitution, corresponding with the country’s redemocratization after the military dictatorship’s dissolution in 1985. This groundbreaking legislation dedicated a chapter,
Chapter VIII: “Of the Indigenous Peoples17,” and five additional constitutional provisions
to indigenous issues. Chapter VIII contains two articles; among other rights, Article 231
guarantees Brazilian indigenous peoples the exclusive ownership and use of their lands
and declares that it is the Brazilian state’s responsibility to respect and protect the social
17 Capítulo VIII: Dos Índios 26
organizations, cultures, languages, beliefs, and traditions of indigenous groups. Article
232 recognizes indigenous communities and organizations as legitimate judicial parties
that can lobby for their own interests (Cordeiro 1999; 68-69). Intended to reduce the
influence of local, landowning interests in legal cases regarding indigenous issues,
indigenous legislation became the exclusive responsibility of the federal government. The post-dictatorship social and political configuration of Brazil in the late 1980s, consolidated in the 1988 Constitution, allowed for the first recognition of indigenous groups’ collective rights to differentiated identities within Brazilian society (Abreu
2015). It marked a significant departure from integrationist Brazilian legislative measures that had oriented Brazil’s indigenous peoples on the transitory path to cultural assimilation within national society.
Why did the Brazilian government change its political and judicial stance towards
indigenous peoples so dramatically in its 1988 constitution? According to Brazilian legal
scholars, the national society’s public opinion had little influence on the expanded
protections for the country’s indigenous populations (Barroso 1995; Valenta 2003).
Instead, external, international human rights pressure, coupled with internal indigenous
activism, impacted the Brazilian government’s newly self-determinative approach to
indigenous rights. Universalist human rights discourse, enshrined in the post-World War
II Charter of the United Nations and its 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
proclaimed all human beings free and equal but failed to recognize minority groups’
collective rights to cultural differences within the nation-state. The rise of human rights
concerns and the international influence of social movements oriented toward these
issues led to a crisis of confidence in Brazil’s key ideas of progress and development in 27 the 1970s and 1980s, especially regarding indigenous peoples and the environment.
International declarations began to discuss ethnodevelopment (UNESCO Declaration of
San José 1981, cited in Carneiro da Cunha 1994) and the value of cultural diversity. This recognition of the right to difference for indigenous peoples spread throughout Latin
America in the late 1980s (Cott 2006, cited in Basso 2015; 115).
Law scholar Lisa Valenta cites a specific human rights catastrophe that pressured the Brazilian government to recognize indigenous and environmental protections. During the 1980s, 45,000 miners had poured into Yanomami territory on the Brazilian-
Venezuelan border, causing an environmental and human health disaster. The Inter-
American Commission on Human Rights, in evaluating the Yanomami case, insisted that international law protect indigenous peoples’ enjoyment of all aspects of their diverse cultural and group identities. International pressure for Brazil to acknowledge the rights of indigenous peoples within its territory influenced the inclusion of indigenous protections in the 1988 constitution (Valenta 2003). This legislation, in assuming its obligations to communities descended from the continent’s original inhabitants, recognized their rights at the constitutional level. It joined the Canadian Constitution of
1982 and the Guatemalan Constitution of 1985 in a hemispheric movement towards multicultural constitutionalism (Farjado 2011, cited in Basso 2015; 113). Colombian,
Venezuelan, Ecuadorian, and Bolivian constitutions ratified in the 1990s and early 2000s followed suit, likewise breaking away from colonialist traditions that had previously favored the integration of indigenous communities into Eurocentric national models
(ibid.). 28
Nonetheless, the continual absence of broad-based social support for indigenous causes in Brazil has resulted in a lack of accountability for governmental follow-through, and the policies put forth in 1988 remain largely aspirational (Conklin and Graham 1995;
Valenta 2003). Often, economically profitable activities in demarcated indigenous lands, such as mining, logging, ranching, and farming are permitted with impunity in rural regions such as Alto Turiaçu. Futhermore, government-sponsored economic development projects have caused massive clear cutting, erosion, and deforestation in the Amazon region (ibid.). With a vast national territory and weakened, centralized organizations such as the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) charged with protecting indigenous rights, the Brazilian federal government does not provide adequate policy enforcement to support the constitutionally guaranteed territorial, cultural, and educational rights claims of its indigenous peoples.
Land Rights
Land possession is essential to the survival of the Ka’apor and other Brazilian indigenous peoples. It is fundamentally connected to native cultural histories, cosmologies, and social, political, and economic activities (Cordeiro 1999; Ribeiro 1982;
Souza Filho 2004). Traditional indigenous livelihoods, such as those of the Ka’apor in
Xié Pihun, TI Alto Turiaçu, rely on forest flora and fauna for foraging and hunting and on nutrient-rich soil for planting. The Ka’apor community’s identity would be severely undermined without its land and access to the natural resources that the land provides.
Max, the 20-year-old interviewee in Xié Pihun, explained that, if a Ka’apor man does not 29
hunt or work in the field, “he loses 50% [of his identity], because he is breaking away
from his Ka’apor tradition and wants to adopt the white man’s culture... we have to live
in the forest... out there it’s no good; we have to live in the village.18” As discussed in the
previous chapter, commerical interests continue to subvert the Ka’apor people’s right to
the exclusive use of their demarcated land. The 1988 Constitution guarantees indigenous
peoples the exclusive rights to the lands they traditionally occupy, defined as lands they
inhabit permanently and use for productive activities that are essential to the preservation
of environmental resources and their physical and cultural well-being (Cordeiro 1999;
93). The Brazilian federal government officially demarcated Ka’apor TI Alto Turiaçu in
1978, a decade before passing the 1988 Constitution, and ratified the Ka’apor
demarcation in 1982 (Balée 1998). The indigenous land demarcation process consists of
four stages: 1) FUNAI identification of a specific group’s proposal to create an
indigenous area based on ethno-historical, demographic, sociological, and cartographic
studies; 2) Physical placement of demarcation signs by FUNAI, the Armed Forces
Mapping Service,19 or a third party and involving the resettlement of nonindigenous land
occupants; 3) Formal, presidential ratification of the indigenous area’s limits; and 4)
Land regularization that compensates nonindigenous parties who have been relocated and
guarantees the non-intrusion of third parties into the demarcated TI, or terra indígena.
The fourth stage of this demarcation process has yet to be completed in TI Alto Turiaçu,
as it includes FUNAI’s permanent vigilance and supervision of the territory to prevent
18 “Aí perde 50% já, né, que já vai quebrando a tradição dele do Ka’apor, quer pegar a cultura do branco. Tem que morar no mato… lá não presta, tem que morar dentro da aldeia.”
19 Serviço de Cartografia do Exército 30 subsequent intrusions (Cordeiro 1999; 95-97). FUNAI’s incapacity to protect the Ka’apor and their territory from the invasions of illegal loggers undercuts the fourth stage of the federal government’s demarcation of Ka’apor territory.
Figure 2.1 An example of a FUNAI sign demarcating indigenous territory, citing Article 231 of the 1988 Federal Constitution. While signs mark TI Alto Turiaçu’s border, illegal loggers and others with commerical interest can easily pass with impunity.
As long as the Ka’apor right to land is not protected and enforced, the group faces constant threats of violence against themselves and their forest. The most recent assassination occurred in April 2015, when liderança Eusébio Ka’apor was shot in the back by hooded men while riding on a motorbike 3 kilometers from the largest Ka’apor village of Ximborendá (Sposati and Locatelli 2015). He and other Ka’apor men had organized a group to track down, disarm, and expel illegal loggers on the ground, and the
Ka’apor community remains certain of the loggers’ involvement in his assassination. The day following the incident, a sawmill owner approached Eusébio’s son in the nonindigenous town of Zé Doca and threatened more murders if the Ka’apor continued to impede loggers’ access to timber in TI Alto Turiaçu (ibid.). Eusébio Ka’apor’s assassination made national and international headlines in 2015. It was featured in the 31
Brazilian publications Repórter Brasil and Carta Capital and condemned by the NGOs
ISA and CIMI, among others; BBC, The Guardian, Survival International, and
Greenpeace reported the story internationally, and numerous blogs denounced the assassination as an abuse of indigenous and environmental rights.20
Figure 2.2 A photo of Eusébio Ka’apor circulated by the Brazilian NGO CIMI (Conselho Indigenista Missionário) after his assassination in April 2015. The sign reads: “LOGGERS OUT NOW/ INDIGENOUS LAND”
Ka’apor leaders know that demanding respect for their legal rights does not guarantee their proper protection and enforcement. As Paulo, the indigenous teacher in
Xié Pihun, had said, “In the law it’s written perfectly, but in reality, they don’t do it, they don’t do it for us.21” In order to encourage public action against their land’s invasions, they must appeal to nonindigenous support. Demonstrating their differentiated indigenous
20 See bibliography for source information.
21 See page 13 of this thesis.
32
identity can be used as a strategy to convince nonindigenous sympathizers to support
their cause for their rights to cultural and territorial difference (Graham 2002). When
asked about the importance of teaching Ka’apor culture to the next generation, Xié
Pihun’s cacique explained:
It is important for us today because this is our identity, for us to have rights, for people out there to recognize our rights. If we do not speak the indigenous language, they will think that we are just anybody. It is the same as identity, right. You have to speak; you have to have the [body] paint, to use the headdress… so you can identify that the person is indigenous.22
Ka’apor cultural manifestations, including the Ka’apor language, are crucial to the
maintenance of the group’s internal identity. Further, their displays are useful as a
strategy to promote indigenous activism agendas. They have become a display of
symbolic capital in negotiations with nonindigenous society, demonstrated to advance
Ka’apor claims to their differentiated indigenous rights. While they lack financial capital,
groups like the Ka’apor occupy a valuable position in the Western social imaginary.
Famed Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Riberio described this romantic attitude toward
indigenous peoples as contrary to, but no truer than, ethnocentric attitudes demanding
indigenous assimilation into national society (Ribeiro 1982; 193-194). Romanticized
Amazonian Indians are exotic, strange, and separate. Ascribers to this view insist on the
artificial preservation of “original” indigenous ways of life as a testament to pre-modern
humanity. Although this insistence on supposed authenticity ascribes ahistoricism to
22 “É importante para nós hoje, porque isso é a nossa identidade hoje, para nós ter direito, as pessoas lá fora reconhecer nosso direito. Se nós não fala o idioma indígena, então ninguém vai identificar que a gente é qualquer pessoa. É igual à identidade, né. É você falar, é você ter a pintura, ter o cocar. Você vai identificar que você é a pessoa indígena.”
33
indigenous peoples whose lives, cultures, and languages have always adapted to the times
in which they have lived, nonindigenous sympathy for indigenous claims to sociopolitical
autonomy can, in practice, provide tangible financial support to culturally distinct peoples
struggling against ethnocentric, assimilationist influences. If they walk like imagined
Indians and talk like imagined Indians, Ka’apor leaders know that they can tap into
nonindigenous society’s romanticized ideals of Amazonian indigenous peoples as forest
protectors, particularly in the age of climate change. Xié Pihun’s cacique, in his
conversations with me, demonstrated how he presents his community’s needs to appeal to
nonindigenous sympathizers like myself:
We want to make a pehu [road] here so that loggers cannot enter the area. To always keep it green. To protect our food: our fish, our game animals, and to protect ourselves. And the karaí [nonindigenous], also, because the carbon air is going from here to there, to the United States, right? That’s right. That’s why, if there are resources, if you could get some resources to mark our territory’s boundary, to make our pehu there as a boundary and also to give us access to healthcare, education, it would make things better.23
With this statement, the cacique connects his community’s goal of building a road to
monitor their territory for illegal loggers to the global issue of increased carbon dioxide
emissions caused by logging and ranching in the Amazon. While local commerical
interests in Maranhão, Brazil may not value the unique Ka’apor community and its
connection to the land, national and international sympathizers, including foreign
intellectuals like me, recognize the Ka’apor as vital for the protection of their forest
23 “A gente quer fazer o pehu aqui para que o madeireiro não entrar na area aí. Para sempre deixar ela verde. Para proteger nosso alimento: nosso peixe, nossa caça, nós próprio mesmo, e o próprio karaí também que o ar carbono está indo daqui para lá né, para os Estados Unidos, né? Pois é. Por isso que se tem um recurso, se conseguisse algum recurso para limpar nosso limite, fazer nosso pehu aí, tanto como limite como para trazer saúde, educação, para melhorar né.” 34
habitat and their contributions to the multiethnic cultural tapestry woven by indigenous
peoples throughout the world. Ka’apor leaders like Xié Pihun’s cacique know that they
can use their language and cultural identity as leverage to encourage international support
for their claims to land and other rights.
While the Ka’apor demonstrate their indigenous cultural identity when advocating
for the enjoyment of their rights to territorial and physical integrity, they must also
exercise their cultural and educational rights in order to protect their culture from
dominant Brazilian social influences. In the next section of this chapter, I explain why the
effective applications of constitutionally guaranteed cultural and educational rights are
necessary to nurture Ka’apor language and culture, instrumental to Ka’apor identity and
to these displays of symbolic capital.
Educational and Cultural Rights
Chapter III of the 1988 Constitution, “Of Education, Culture, and Sport24,”
proclaims indigenous Brazilians’ rights to formal language education using indigenous
pedagogies. Article 210 in the chapter’s first section, “Of Education25,” states that, while
indigenous education must be administered in Portuguese, it must also guarantee
indigenous communities the rights to use their native languages and traditional learning
processes in the context of formal education.26 State-sponsored education institutions had
24 “Da Educação, Da Cultura, e Do Desporto”
25 “Da Educação”
26 ““O ensino fundamental regular será ministrado em língua portuguesa, assegurada às comunidades indígenas também a utilização de suas línguas maternas e processos próprios de aprendizagem.” 35
previously imposed themselves upon indigenous communities, espousing nonindigenous,
colonial worldviews and imposing the Portuguese language as a tool of cultural
assimilation. The 1988 Constitution’s statement broke with that tradition, providing
opportunities for intercultural and indigenous pedagogies to guide indigenous content and
curricula of classrooms serving indigenous students. Meanwhile, article 215 of Chapter
III’s second section, “Of Culture27,” declares that: “The state will protect manifestations
of popular, indigenous, and Afro-Brazilian cultures, along with those of other groups that
have participated in the process of national civilization.28” With these declarations, the
Brazilian federal government officially recognized the cultural differences and
contributions of the country’s underrepresented populations and pledged to ensure the
continuation of indigenous knowledge transmission.
Indigenous education scholars in Brazil are careful to distinguish between the
terms “indigenous education” (educação indígena) and “indigenous school education”
(educação escolar indígena). In order to understand the concept of indigenous school education, one must first understand “nonindigenous education” from the indigenous perspective. This term describes the formal education model that has been imposed in indigenous communities since colonial times with the object of integrating indigenous groups into a Eurocentric national culture (Simas & Pereira 2010). The transmission
processes and values in this context are of the colonizer, and, through their dominant influence, marginalize and oppress indigenous communities’ knowledge and identities.
27 “Da Cultura”
28 “O Estado protegerá as manifestações das culturas populares, indígenas, e afro- brasileiras, e das de outros grupos participantes do processo civilizatório nacional.” 36
This form of education for indigenous peoples was prevalent before the passing of the
1988 Constitution and persists in many indigenous communities today. “Indigenous education,” on the other hand, does not necessitate a formal context for its processes to occur. Rather, it is constructed collectively in daily life through intergenerational interactions that transmit customs and traditions. Such processes reinforce family life as well as economic, religious, and political activities that transfer the community’s ever-
adapting culture from generation to generation (ibid.). Finally, “indigenous school
education”, the subject described in article 210 of the 1988 Constitution:
... deals with the processes of indigenous and nonindigenous knowledge production and transmission through the school, an institution originating from the colonizers. Indigenous school education refers to the school that has been apropriated by indigenous peoples to reinforce their sociocultural projects and open doors to access other necessary and desirable knowledges with the goal of contributing with the capacity to respond to new demands generated by contact with global society29 (Santos 2006; 129, cited in Simas & Pereira 2010; 9).
Indeed, through more than a century of contact and exposure to nonindigenous
society, the Ka’apor have come to see the “white man’s school30” as an
instrumental source of knowledge, especially knowledge about the nonindigenous
world. Both the indigenous teacher and segundo liderança told me that, while
speaking the Ka’apor language occurs in the home and community through what I
would call indigenous education processes, indigenous school education is the
29 “diz respeito aos processos de transmissão e produção de conhecimentos não- indígenas e indígenas por meio da escola, que é uma instituição própria dos povos colonizadores. A educação escolar indígena refere-se à escola apropriada pelos indígenas para reforçar seus projetos socioculturais e abrir caminhos para o acesso a outros conhecimentos universais, necessários e desejáveis, a fim de contribuírem com a capacidade de responder às novas demandas geradas a partir do contato com a sociedade global.”
30 “Escola do branco” 37 means by which they learn to write in Ka’apor, a value transmitted from nonindigenous linguists, and to read and write in Portuguese. The Ka’apor in Xié
Pihun now consider bilingual literacy, a value appropriated from nonindigenous culture, to be a crucial skill in order to both maintain their native language and to deal with nonindigenous society’s linguistic demands. They see the school as a place where they can access nonindigenous language knowledge through a nonindigenous Portuguese teacher and also practice orthography in their native
Ka’apor language.
During my conversations with them, Ka’apor leaders, teachers, and parents explicitly acknowledged the value they see in learning Portuguese, the official language of the Brazilian nation-state. Lideranças described their need to use the Portuguese language when leaving Ka’apor territory to advocate for the community in the big cities of Brasília, São Paulo, Belém, and São Luís. Other community members cited their need to speak Portuguese when they travel to nearby nonindigenous cities to visit health posts and hospitals. They also use
Portuguese in these cities’ stores, where they purchase items that they no longer make themselves such as clothing and cookware, and in banks, where they go to withdraw their government-allotted bolsa família stipends. The National Indian
Foundation (FUNAI) website describes the demand of indigenous peoples for this government subsidy, which is also provided to nonindigenous, low-income
Brazilians:
Increasing consumption power, the program minimizes emergency situations of food insecurity and social vulnerability that affect indigenous peoples, especially those who live in areas close to cities, 38
in situations of land conflict, in areas affected by drought, rain and/or other calamities, as well as those whose territories no longer have enough natural resources to provide for families’ needs through the traditional methods of farming, hunting, gathering and fishing,31 (FUNAI).
My fieldwork results are insufficient for me to make claims about the appropriateness of the bolsa família program for Ka’apor needs or Ka’apor community members’ uses of
government-allotted funds. However, I did observe the difficulties faced by monolingual, nonliterate Ka’apor when attempting to access these resources. When I left Xié Pihun for the nonindigenous city of Paragominas at the end of my stay, the cacique requested that I
accompany three community members to the bank to help them withdraw their FUNAI-
provided allowances. These benefits include monthly bolsa família stipends between r$22 and r$200 (USD$7 – USD$63), retirement benefits for women older than 55 and men over age 60, and a one-time maternity salary for women who have recently given birth
(FUNAI).
In the bank where they each have their own account and corresponding debit card, the Portuguese language ATMs present alternative language options in English and in
Spanish but do not offer indigenous language options for their Ka’apor customers. The monolingual, nonliterate Ka’apor could not read the Portuguese instructions on the screen and therefore had great difficulty operating the machines. They showed the liderança and me their passwords that had been written small pieces of paper and stood patiently as we
31 “Incrementando o poder de consumo, o Programa minimiza, de forma emergencial, situações de insegurança alimentar e vulnerabilidade social que acometem os povos indígenas, principalmente os que vivem em áreas próximas às cidades, em situação de conflito fundiário, atingidos por situações de seca, chuva e/ou outras calamidades, e ainda, aqueles povos cujos territórios não dispõem mais de recursos naturais suficientes para prover as necessidades das famílias segundo os modos tradicionais de roçado, caça, coleta e pesca.” 39 guided them through the withdrawal process. They appeared uncomfortable and avoided interacting with nonindigenous bank customers and workers.
The lack of support for indigenous language speakers at the bank is an example of how unaccommodating institutions demand dominant language literacy for indigenous customers to access their constitutionally guaranteed resources. The cacique described the community’s generational gap in Portuguese language knowledge and explained why he thinks it is important to become literate in the national language:
My dad and my mom do not have knowledge [of Portuguese]. They cannot travel from here to Belém because they will get lost. They don’t know how to catch a bus, how to take out money from the bank, how to take a relative to withdraw a maternity salary. That is why studying [Portuguese] is good for us today. It means that we won’t have to depend on the karaí [nonindigenous] but instead on ourselves to help our relatives.32
Portuguese language education is a guaranteed constitutional right, and the Ka’apor know that they need to learn it in order to advocate for themselves in nonindigenous contexts whenever they leave TI Alto Turiaçu. Even lideranças continue to study Portuguese in the village school with nonindigenous teachers. Wilson’s 32-year-old son, Xié Pihun’s segundo liderança, is in the fifth grade. He explained:
There are many things that I still don’t know. For example, the white teacher comes to us, right. We are… I am continuing; I haven’t finished my studies yet. I still have to learn so many
32 “Meu pai, minha mãe não têm conhecimento. Eles não podem viajar daqui para Belém porque aí eles vão se perder. Eles não vai saber pegar ônibus, não vai saber sacar dinheiro no banco, não vai saber levar o parente para fazer outro negócio de salário maternidade. Por isso que é bom para nós o estudo hoje. E nós não vão depender do karaí, vão depender de nós próprios mesmos e ajudar nossos próprios parentes.”
40
things. We have to know how their rules work, you know. This is also important for me. I don’t know everything.33
Nonetheless, Portuguese-speaking Ka’apor in Xié Pihun unanimously affirmed that formal language education in Ka’apor is even more important to them than the study of Portuguese: “The most important [language] is ours, in the first place, and Portuguese is second,34” explained Wilson’s son. The 1988 Constitution guarantees Ka’apor education in their native language using traditional learning processes. Paulo, the Ka’apor teacher at the village school, teaches Ka’apor orthography to first-graders using a thin book of Ka’apor phonetics, developed in 2015 with support from Federal University of
Pará linguists. This book, he said, was the first Ka’apor language material designed to be used to teach writing in Ka’apor. However, aside from this one book copy, which he safely stores in his home, Paulo noted that other copies and Ka’apor pedagogical materials are difficult to compose and acquire, and that support for their production comes from university researchers and the Ka’apor Associação, not the state.
Laws passed since the 1988 Constitution, such as the 1996 National Education
Law,35 the 1998 National Referential Curriculum for Indigenous Schools (RCNEI), the
2001 National Plan for Education (PNE),36 and Presidential Decree 6.861 (2009) have
33 “Tem mais umas coisas que eu ainda não sei ainda. Por exemplo, o professor branco vem para nós, né. A gente está… eu estou continuando, né, ainda não acabei meu estudo. Aí eu tem que aprender (mucai de?) coisas. A gente tem que saber como é que… como é a regra do que eles falam, né. Isso aí também é importante para mim. Eu não sei tudo, né.”
34 “Mais importante é a nossa, em primeiro lugar, e em segundo é o português.”
35 “Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional”
36 Cited in Bergamaschi and Medeiros 2010
41
consolidated indigenous people’s rights to their own school programs with the intention of respecting their languages, cultures, and ways of learning. These rights were
recognized because “they were enrooted in indigenous territory -Indigenous Lands-, they
worked with indigenous students and also because most of their staff were bilingual and
multilingual indigenous teachers belonging to different Amerindian ethnic groups,”
(Bergamaschi and Medeiros 2010). As legal scholars Paulo Fernando Soares Pereira and
Joaquim Shiraishi Neto correctly affirm in their article “Beyond territories: indigenous
people’s fundamental right to a differentiated education” (2017), “the discussion of
indigenous rights is often restricted to the territorial issue, which, although of
fundamental importance, is insufficient to maintain the cultural survival of indigenous
peoples,37” (616). Regardless of how well the territories are protected, the legal
possession of indigenous land (TI, or terras indígenas such as the Ka’apor territory of
Alto Turiaçu) has served to legitimate calls for legally recognized cultural and
educational rights, which, along with land ownership, are necessary to ensure the
transmission of culture and the use of indigenous knowledge. Indeed, differentiated
education for indigenous peoples entails respect for traditional life systems themselves
(ibid.). By giving indigenous peoples the right to design and execute their own education
systems according to the content they desire, the indigenous school can become, instead
of a tool of assimilation into the national culture, a means of community empowerment
and resistance to dominant efforts intended to dispossess them of their lands and cultures.
37 “…a discussão dos direitos indígenas, não raras vezes, costuma se restringir à questão territorial, que, conquanto de fundamental importância, é insuficiente para manter a sobrevivência cultural dos povos indígenas, sendo de se notar que a mera inserção de marcos nos territórios dos povos indígenas, por si só, não significa respeito aos direitos deles.” 42
The practice of this differentiated education legislation varies greatly among indigenous groups throughout Brazil. Indeed, I maintain that there should not be a standardized indigenous education model, as all 246 Brazilian indigenous peoples are different, with unique languages, cultures, struggles for land, and histories of encounters with nonindigenous society. These differences in lived experiences have lead to different demands from each group depending on their current social organizations, the issues faced, and their goals for the future.
Most recently, the Brazilian state recognized the right to indigenous education with Decree No 6.861 (Brasil 2009). The decree’s first article states that indigenous school education must be organized with the participation of indigenous peoples, respecting their territories and specific needs. The second article presents indigenous school education objectives, including: the valuing of indigenous cultures and the affirmation and maintenance of their ethnic diversity; the strengthening of sociocultural practices and native languages of each indigenous community; the formulation and maintenance of programs for the education of specialized teachers trained to work in indigenous communities; the development of specific curricula and programs with cultural content corresponding to the respective communities; the systematic elaboration and publication of specific and differentiated school materials; and the affirmation of ethnic identities and consideration for the social projects autonomously defined by each indigenous group. The third article of the decree recognizes the condition and programming of indigenous schools with their own standards for intercultural and bilingual education, enjoying special prerogatives for school activity organization and respecting the flux of economic, social, cultural, and religious activities of each 43 community, independently of the Brazilian calendar year (Bergamaschi and Sousa 2015;
Pereira and Neto 2017). The decree organized indigenous school education into so-called
“ethnoeducational territories38” in the following way:
Every ethnoeducational territory will be comprised of, independently of the political-administrative division of the country, indigenous lands… occupied by indigenous peoples that maintain intersocietal relations characterized by social and historical origins, political and economic relations, linguistic affiliations, and shared values and cultural practices39 (Brasil 2009).
This decree is most exciting to me because it officially acknowledges the essential inseparability between the inte grity of indigenous territory and indigenous educational rights to cultural and knowledge transmission. Indeed, “the idea of an ethnoeducational territory signifies a movement of indigenous school education organization in consonance with the territoriality of its peoples, independently of the political division between states and municipalities that compose the Brazilian territory,40”
(Bergamaschi and Sousa 2015; 145). Subsequent policies put in place since 2009, especially the Ministry of Education’s National Program of Ethnoeducational
Territories (PNTEE), implemented in 2013, are intended to allow indigenous
38 “Territórios etnoeducacionais”
39 “Cada território etnoeducacional compreenderá, independentemente da divisão político-administrativa do País, as terras indígenas, mesmo que descontínuas, ocupadas por povos indígenas que mantêm relações intersocietárias caracterizadas por raízes sociais e históricas, relações políticas e econômicas, filiações linguísticas, valores e práticas culturais compartilhados.”
40 “A ideia de território etnoeducacional significa um movimento de organização da educação escolar indígena em consonância com a territorialidade de seus povos, independentemente da divisão política entre estados e municípios que compõem o território brasileiro.” 44 groups the autonomy to organize their own jurisdictions for government-funded indigenous school education. However, when I asked Ka’apor leaders about their opinion of these policies, they claimed to have never heard of them.
45
CHAPTER 3: Ka’apor Language Education in the State of Maranhão
Lack of indigenous awareness of recently passed school education policies is a finding corroborated by Brazilian education scholars Maria Aparecida
Bergamaschi and Fernanda Brabo Sousa in their recent work with indigenous groups in the state of Rio Grande do Sul (2015). As stated in the 1996 Law of
Directives and Bases of National Education, the national coordination of such policies falls to the Ministry of Education (MEC), which delegates these responsibilities to all State Secretariats of Education (SEDUC) from Rio Grande do Sul to Maranhão. Ka’apor leaders and teachers in Xié Pihun, unaware of national policies concerning indigenous school education, hold the Maranhão state and municipal governments responsible for the shortcomings of their village’s school. They cited three areas for improvement in their community’s indigenous school education: infrastructure, indigenous teacher training, and pedagogical materials. In this final chapter, I describe these issues in detail and propose ways in which the Ka’apor might, from the ground up, access knowledge of government programming in order to implement a formal education system that more appropriately serves the Xié Pihun community.
46
Infrastructure
Formal school buildings are not structures native to indigenous cultures. This
institution of formal education originated with the Jesuit missionaries of the Companhia
de Jesus (The Society of Jesus), who were the only formal educators in Brazil for the first
210 years of the territory’s colonization. They engaged in political, missionary, and
educational activities with indigenous groups, erecting school buildings where they built
churches (Simas and Pereira 2010; 4). In 1654, famed Jesuit priest, writer, and
philosopher Padre Antônio Vieira traveled from Maranhão to Lisbon to lobby for new
legislation to establish aldeias for the territory’s indigenous population. The resulting
1655 Portuguese law established Jesuit control over all indigenous villages in the Grão-
Pará region, now Pará and Maranhão states. They would relocate members of different
indigenous groups to these Jesuit-constructed villages with the express purpose of
educating them about the Catholic catechism and the Portuguese language (Cordeiro
1999; 36-37). Thousands of indigenous individuals chose to enter the aldeias as an
alternative to being abducted by violent slavers seeking forced labor for Portuguese
plantations (Azevedo 1901). Padre Antônio Vieira denounced the Portuguese crown’s
enslavement of whom he and his religious order considered to be lost, innocent souls in
desperate need of evangelism. In spite of the Jesuits’ efforts to improve indigenous peoples’ spiritual fates, a common result of their intentionally ethnocidal education practices was the unintentional transmission of fatal European diseases among vulnerable aldeia residents (Langfur 2014).
47
The Ka’apor evaded both Portuguese slavery and Jesuit evangelism during the
16th-18th centuries. In fact, they did not establish peaceful relations with any nonindigenous governing body until 1928, when they agreed to cooperate with the
Brazilian federal government’s Indian Protection Service (Serviço de Proteção aos
Indios, or SPI, reconfigured into FUNAI in 1967) (Balée 1998). As mentioned in the first chapter, the Ka’apor founded the village of Xié Pihun in 2001 to impede illegal logging activities in their surrounding forest. The segundo liderança told me that, per the community’s request, Maranhão’s SEDUC built Xié Pihun’s school in 2009.
Figure 3.1 A plaque in the school building commemorates its 2009 inauguration. Photo taken by author in January 2017.
Like the Companhia de Jesus centuries before it, SEDUC’s well-intentioned efforts to serve an indigenous community were undermined by its misguided policy implementation. The segundo liderança exposed his frustrations with the school construction process by describing how ugly, or feio, the community finds the circular building to be: 48
We wanted [a rectangular structure] from the beginning. Then the engineer, he said that [the blueprint] was already decided... it had to be like this because it is an indigenous school. He said that the school we wanted was a colonial school from the municipality, from the city, and that an indigenous school has to be round... We didn’t want it this way, but they said, ‘No, the government wants the school to be ‘your way.’ It doesn’t want to make you a rectangular, colonial school.’ They didn’t allow it. And so they made the school round.41
Xié Pihun’s cacique and the indigenous teacher corroborated the segundo liderança’s
frustrations about the government’s specifications for their school’s structure. The state
government, in what appears to be an attempt at cultural sensitivity, erected a circular,
concrete school building in what the segundo liderança thinks is an homage to a Ka’apor
oca – a round, ceremonial indigenous construction made of naturally occurring forest
materials. In keeping with colonialist tradition, however, SEDUC imposed this design on
the community without consulting or accepting Ka’apor input. Xié Pihun’s leaders
expressed frustration that the government had expressly disregarded and overruled their
opinions in order to impose something that it defined for them to be “indigenous.”
Governmental impositions regarding the school building’s architecture harken back to the
systematized, asymmetrical power relations of tutorship between indigenous groups and
the Brazilian state pre-1988.
For Ka’apor leaders, a formal school building has never been a traditional
Ka’apor structure and should, therefore, not attempt to look like one. The origins of
formal indigenous education are foreign to them; consequently, they want a rectangular
41 “Porque nós queria isso aí já no início, né. Aí, o ingenheiro, ele falou que já estava na planta já isso aí… Tem que ser assim porque é escola indígena. Aí, essa escola cumprida é escola da colônia, do município, da cidade né, aí escolar indígena é redonda… Alí, eles falaram, ‘Não, o governo quer a escola do jeito de vocês. Não quer escola cumprida, da colônia.’ E aí não deixaram por isso, né. Aí eles fizeram essa escolar redonda.” 49
building modeled after those they have seen outside TI Alto Turiaçu. “It should be
normal, like the white man’s school... the white man wants to dress us up, to make everything ‘Indian.’ But we don’t want it like that anymore,42” said the segundo
liderança. The school structure controversy is symbolic of the issues the occur within the middle ground of indigenous school education itself. The Ka’apor, while desiring a
nonindigenous structure to serve the nontraditional purpose of teaching language and
literacy, also call upon the school administration and curriculum to prioritize their native
language and culture. They want the Brazilian government to dispatch nonindigenous
teachers to teach Portuguese language classes in their community, but they do not want
the Brazilian government to impose stipulations in order for them to receive access to this
knowledge. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Decree 6.861 (2009) legally
guarantees that indigenous school education be “organized with the participation of
indigenous peoples.” As of 2009, Maranhão’s SEDUC is legally obligated to consult with
the Ka’apor in Xié Pihun regarding the construction, maintenance, and administration of
their school.
Construction of the school aside, its maintenance, or lack thereof, is another issue of grave community concern. In the seven years since its inauguration, the structure had
deteriorated dramatically. When I visited in 2016, the school structure was infested with
rats and bats that had blanketed the building’s white, tile floors with unsanitary
droppings. While the state government had funded and built the school, it had not made plans or provisions to maintain or improve the building. Without maintenance or
42 “Pode ser do branco… Nós quer… normal mesmo. Branco… eles pensam que enfeitar nós aqui, né, tudo pelo índio, né. Aí, só que não não quer mais isso.”
50 continuous care, the school structure in Xié Pihun had deteriorated alarmingly over the course of the three years since I had first visited in 2013. Ka’apor leaders and teachers now insist that the state build an entirely new building, per their specifications, and that the state provide funds for them to clean and maintain it over the long-term.
Figure 3.2 Photographs of the school welcome banners in 2013, on the left, and in 2017, on the right. The bilingual banners were made for the 2013 meeting with representatives from the Federal University of Pará. The photo on the right shows that the Portuguese sign has been torn down but the Ka’apor sign remains more than three years later. A broken light fixture hangs from the pole in the center of the building.
Figure 3.3 One of the school’s two classrooms, January 2017. 51
In 2013, this school building in Xié Pihun had been the site of meetings between academic researchers from the Federal University of Pará (UFPA) and Ka’apor leaders as they planned to create a Ka’apor-centered education center in the village. During my
2016-2017 field visit, I learned that many administrative and logistical changes had occurred in the group’s plans since 2013. The Associação had moved the site of their
Centro de Formação Saberes Ka’apor (Ka’apor Knowledges School Center) from Xié
Pihun to the much larger village of Ximborendá on the eastern border of TI Alto Turiaçu.
While they had initially envisioned a robust learning center that would attract students from all 17 Ka’apor villages in their territory, the practical application of such a plan had failed. Ka’apor from Xié Pihun had tried to attend classes and courses in Ximborendá, but they had returned home only to find their village ransacked by their nonindigenous neighbors:
You know how it is; we have to protect the land. We would spend two or three months away from the village, and, when we would return, everything would be a mess. A lot of non-Indians are near us here. So we organized: “No, we have to stay in our village now, because there… there we were 2,000 Indians in one place.” We would spend a month or two months there just studying, doing coursework, singing, doing everything there. And, after, when we would come back to the village, our things would be stolen. So we discussed it: “No, now we have to do it this way. We have to stay in our own villages for this to work.” We stopped because of this,43 (interview with Ka’apor leader, 1/4/2017).
43 “Você sabe como é que é, porque nós temos que proteger a terra, né, e a gente passava 2, 3 meses fora da aldeia, quando a gente chegava estava tudo abagunçado. Muito morador não-índio aqui perto de nós. Aí nós organizemos, ‘Não, nós temos que ficar na nossa aldeia agora, porque lá… nós ficava 2.000 índios. Só num local só aí. Passava um mês, dois meses lá, só estudando, fazendo curso, cantando, tudo lá… Aí depois quando a gente vinha para cá, para aldeia, aí o negócio era roubado. Aí nós conversemos, ‘Não, agora nós vai fazer assim. Tem que parar cada qual na sua aldeia para poder nós trabalhar firme de novo.’ Por isso.” 52
For security reasons, the Ka’apor have determined to not leave their village to study
elsewhere and insist instead that state-sponsored education resources such as
infrastructure, teachers, and pedagogical materials come to them. They hope to
successfully lobby for improvements to the quality of these services in order to better
navigate the current challenges they face both in and beyond their territory.
TI Alto Turiaçu does not yet enjoy the praxis of the autonomous ethnoeducational
territory policy per Decree 6.861 (2009). I suspect that Ka’apor leaders would pursue this sociopolitically autonomous distinction if they were aware of this recently passed, federally sponsored indigenous education policy. Again, when I asked leaders about this opinions of this policy, they said that they had never heard of it.
Instead, indigenous school education management within Ka’apor territory is currently an obligation divided among several nonindigenous municipalities, each responsible for providing formal education to the villages that fall within its geographical
jurisdiction. Ka’apor villages throughout TI Alto Turiaçu, therefore, face different
sociopolitical challenges as they negotiate with their respective nonindigenous municipal
governments for their educational rights. This division of Ka’apor villages dealing with
different nonindigenous municipalities has resulted in the erosion of Ka’apor
sociopolitical unity and factionalism among villages facing distinct challenges in
different parts of the territory (personal communication with Ka’apor leaders, 1/2017).
Centro Novo, the Maranhão municipality within which Xié Pihun is located, is, as
of 2017, tasked with providing the salary and logistical support for a nonindigenous
teacher to serve in the community on a rotating basis. Except during school vacations,
which follow the nonindigenous Brazilian school calendar, the teacher is to spend 15 53
days in Xié Pihun teaching Portuguese language classes, after which time he or she
spends 8 days in Centro Novo with his or her family. Ka’apor leaders and teachers have, however, expressed disappointment that the nonindigenous teacher is not able to be in the village on a more reliable basis. This rotation system, called alternância, is similar for healthcare technicians who serve at the SESAI-sponsored health post in Xié Pihun but
who come instead from the indigeous health post in Paragominas. Meanwhile, the
municipality pays minimum-wage salaries to two Ka’apor teachers in Xié Pihun, a significant sum considering that they depend on government subsidies to buy what they
do not make for themselves and do not otherwise have geographical access to salaried
positions. Ka’apor teachers are tasked with teaching the Ka’apor language, including reading and writing, during both the nonindigenous teacher’s rotation and his or her breaks in Centro Novo.
Indigenous Teacher Training
The hiring of Ka’apor teachers in Xié Pihun is an exciting development about which I only learned during this last field visit. I find it encouraging that the municipal government respects the teaching of the Ka’apor language and knowledge enough to employ indigenous teachers who live in Xié Pihun. The nonindigenous Portuguese language teacher dispatched from Centro Novo, by contrast, must travel by road through
Ka’apor territory in order to reach Xié Pihun. This is yet another reason why Ka’apor leaders insist that the state government improve infrastructure for the roads within TI
Alto Turiaçu. Not only do they need to use these roads to monitor their territory for
illegal commerical activities that degrade their land, but they also demand improved
access for Ka’apor healthcare patients, nonindigenous healthcare workers, and 54
nonindigenous teachers who must travel over these precarious roads to enter and leave
the villages. Many leaders have explained to me that the uneven dirt roads throughout TI
Alto Turiaçu flood dramatically during the rainy season (January-June), oftentimes
cutting villages off from the outside world entirely. Due to terrible road conditions, health
posts and schools shut down, and the Ka’apor territory becomes more vulnerable to
logging activities that can occur without the group’s knowledge.
From a purely educational perspective, a solution to the issue of nonindigenous
teachers’ road access could be to train indigenous teachers living in Xié Pihun to teach all
subjects, including Portuguese, year-round (in accordance with the Ka’apor planting and
harvest calendar). The school would become more self-sufficient and would function
more reliably if it did not depend on nonindigenous teachers making the difficult road journey to and from the village, purportedly every 15 days.
Maranhão’s SEDUC, legally responsible for training Ka’apor teachers and developing Ka’apor pedagogical materials, has only recently begun to develop teacher training programs to produce qualified indigenous instructors for native schools in accordance with the 1988 Constitution. Federal University of Maranhão Professor
Elizabeth Maria Beserra Coelho performed a case study of an indigenous teacher training course that the state implemented from 1998 to 2002. She criticized SEDUC’s “lack the appropriate previous planning, lack of knowledge of the target population, little discussion about the actions’ principles and objectives, and little teacher preparation,”
(Coelho 2007; 108). This program had catered to mostly Tenetehar but also to Ka’apor, 55
Krikati, Pukobiê, Guajajara, and Ramkokamekra44 teachers.
From 1988 to 1998, according to Coelho, there had been a complete lack of transparency on the part of SEDUC, which had not yet conducted a systematic investigation of Maranhão’s indigenous peoples’ needs and goals. Further, the state
government never released data regarding the sociolinguistic situation of the indigenous
villages, the state of village schools, or alternative school models for the indigenous
peoples in Maranhão (ibid.). Instead of education centers catering to the specific needs
and goals of each individual indigenous community, schools for all indigenous groups in
Maranhão retained fixed curricula with traditionally taught Western subjects, contents,
and workloads that privileged nonindigenous knowledge, affirmed as universal. In these
schools, indigenous languages were taught as second languages, in contrast with the
Ka’apor goals of bilingual, intercultural education privileging its local language,
knowledge, and culture (ibid.).
SEDUC, in partnership with the State University of Maranhão (UEMA)’s Social
Sciences Department, launched a new indigenous teacher training program called the
Curso de Licenciatura Intercultural para Educação Básica, or the “Intercultural
Elementary Education Teaching Degree Program45” on July 25, 2016. The 4.5 year
program, which is taught only during academic year vacation periods, welcomed 90
indigenous students- 70 from the Tupi-Guarani language family, to which Ka’apor
belongs, and 20 from the Macro-Gê language family- who had been acting as teachers in
44 Other indigenous groups of the Tupi-Guarani and Macro-Gê language families living in Maranhão 45 I learned of this program through Latin American Studies PhD student Davi Pereira Júnior at the University of Texas at Austin, who is from Alcântara, Maranhão and has taught Anthropology at UEMA. 56 their community schools. The purpose of the degree program is to train informally practicing indigenous teachers to offer higher quality social science, natural science, and language classes in their community schools. Indigenous professor Auzenira Guajajara, of the Guajajara people, is the program’s pedagogical coordinator (UEMA 2016).
Ka’apor teachers at the community school in Xié Pihun did not indicate their awareness of teacher training courses in their interactions with me, and I learned of
UEMA’s program after leaving the field. However, I believe that they might benefit greatly from access to the program. It is currently available at UEMA campuses in the
Maranhão municipalities of Barra do Corda, Imperatriz, and Santa Inês; the latter is a mere 230 km from the town of Centro Novo and fewer than 300 km from Caip, Pará, the nearest nonindigenous town to Xié Pihun itself.
There are currently two Ka’apor teachers in Xié Pihun: a 23-year-old man named
Paulo and a young woman named Vanessa46 who teach the Ka’apor language in the village school. Of his own education, Paulo said, “I studied through sixth grade because, after that, the [nonindigenous] teacher did not come anymore. The town did not provide any more money, and we needed to study. If they had continued until now, we would have learned more47.” At 19-years-old, with a sixth-grade education and no formal teacher training, Paulo had the highest level of formal education in the community. He was chosen by the local leadership to become the indigenous teacher for his school in
2012, a position he has enjoyed for four years. He teaches ten first-grade students from 7-
46 I am not certain of Vanessa’s age, but she was Paulo’s classmate in school and is likely also in her early 20s.
47 “Eu terminei até a sexta série, porque depois esse professor não vem mais, acaba o recurso, e a gente fica sempre a estudar também. Se tivesse continuado até agora, a gente ia aprender mais.” 57
10 AM when the school is in session and uses a thin pedagogical book of Ka’apor
phonology that he helped create in 2015 with Ka’apor teachers, leaders from other
communities, and researchers from the Federal University of Pará.
Paulo, as an indigenous teacher, receives a monthly, minimum-wage salary48 from the Centro Novo municipal government and is clearly respected in the Ka’apor community. He says that he thinks teaching the Ka’apor language is important so that his students “can be like me in the future- so they can also be something... If I hadn’t studied in school, I wouldn’t be here teaching the children. I knew how to speak our language, but I didn’t know how to read or write on the board.49” Xié Pihun’s cacique also greatly
respects Paulo’s position as an indigenous teacher. Of his own formal education, the
cacique said, “I started to study when I was 12 or 13-years-old, but then I stopped
studying and went 5-10 years without studying formally. If I had studied straight through,
today I might be a teacher.” Indigenous teachers are respected as knowledge holders in
Xié Pihun, but they recognize their own limitations and know that they could improve
their pedagogical approach with more guidance and instruction. When asked what he
thought his community needed to improve its formal school education, Paulo said:
We have to build another school, a new school, and all the materials50 have to be there. The school has to be properly equipped. We also
48 He told me it was approximately r$1.090, the equivalent of USD$348 as of April, 2017. Sometimes, he said, the city does not pay him in full or pays him months after his payment is due. Paulo says that nonindigenous teachers are treated this way, as well, although they earn a higher monthly salary than he does. 49 “Acho importante ensinar isso para eles ser como eu também no futuro. Também ser alguma coisa… se eu não estudasse na escola, eu não estaria aqui dando aula para as crianças. Sabia falar na língua mas não sabia ler, passar na quadra.”
50 When I asked what specific materials he was referring to, Paulo mentioned a chalkboard, paper, and pencils. He was uncomforable expressing himself in Portuguese, so I am not sure to what other materials he may have been referring. 58
need another teacher to teach us [the teachers]. We [Ka’apor teachers] stopped studying more than two years ago... We need to study more, to learn more, so we can teach our students better.51
Vanessa teaches second and third grade at the Ka’apor school in Xié Pihun. She is the
cacique’s sister and declined to be interviewed due to her time-occupying household
duties and unfamiliarity with Portuguese. In conversation, both she and Paulo expressed a
love of village life and a reluctance to leave Xié Pihun Renda. They both have family and
community duties involving childcare, farming, and food production, and they insist that nonindigenous teachers come to Xié Pihun to teach them Portuguese and language pedagogy. However, given the recent inauguration of the Intercultural Elementary
Education Teaching Degree Program in the nearby nonindigenous city of Santa Inês, taught only during formal school vacation periods, the possibility of them studying language pedagogy with other indigenous teachers and educators is worth researching and discussing in further detail with community leaders.
Pedagogical Materials
Decree 6.861 (2009) also guarantees Brazilian indigenous groups “the systematic
elaboration and publication of specific and differentiated school material.52” As
previously mentioned, Ka’apor orthography was first developed by Summer Institute of
51 “Melhorar a educação para mim é primeiro, tem que fazer a escola né, outra escola nova, tem que ter todo material dentro para a escola continuar melhor. Agora, se não tiver nada que a gente precisa de material para dar aula… a escola tem que ter tudo equipado. Para mim, ia melhorar mais. Nós precisa de outro professor que pode dar aula para a gente. Acho que com 2 anos agora que parei de estudar... Para aprender mais ainda. Nós precisa mais.”
52 See page 39 of this thesis. 59
Linguistics-affiliated linguists James and Kay Kakumasu in 1988. Since then, academic linguists such as Professor Cristina Caldas of the Federal University of Pará have endeavored to further develop and standardize the Ka’apor writing system. Such efforts to record Ka’apor knowledge and improve Ka’apor literacy are vital to the group’s cultural survival. Indeed, “knowledge is fragile and may be lost in translation. This is particularly true for cultures without writing, which must take great care to pass on their traditional wisdom…. Because knowledge transfer relies on oral transmission, its effectiveness is tied to language endangerment,” (Harrison 2007; 51-53). While K. David
Harrison does not mention the Ka’apor case study in his book When Languages Die
(2007), he cites examples of invaluable indigenous knowledge preserved in the linguistically related Wayãpi language, also of the Tupi-Guarani language family, and examples from geographically proximate Amazonian groups such as the Kayapó, of the
Gê language family, in Pará. Like other orally transmitted, Amazonian indigenous languages, Ka’apor faces the threat of succumbing to the dominant Portuguese language, whose vast written content across a variety of media all but immortalizes its knowledge transmission.
In spite of linguistic research that highlights the vulnerability of orally transmitted languages in a globalizing, literate world, Ka’apor community members remain confident that they will retain their native language and knowledge. 20-year-old Max boldly asserted, “The Ka’apor are very hãtã (strong), right. I think it is difficult for us to lose our language. [In the village], we communicate in our language. For example, the children speak the language at home. In the city, we have to speak our language and Portuguese.
We have to speak with our relatives and with the whites, right.” When I asked him if he 60 thought that his children could successfully learn both Ka’apor and Portuguese, he insisted, “Yes, they can… that is our culture, right. That is Ka’apor culture.53” As mentioned in the first chapter of this thesis, Xié Pihun does not have Internet or phone signal and selectively uses its self-generated electricity supply. This technological isolation certainly removes community members from nonindigenous linguistic and cultural influences when in the village. However, several Xié Pihun residents own motorcycles and cell phones. Many, impressed with my laptop computer, told me that they aspire to own their own laptop computers. It is unclear how or for how long the community will remain technologically and physically isolated.
While many Ka’apor today cannot imagine losing their language, they acknowledge the importance of learning to read and write in Ka’apor before they learn to read and write in Portuguese. Instead of seeing this as a linguistic strategy to retain their native language use, however, they assert this literacy goal as a statement of the community’s priorities. When describing what he thinks Ka’apor children should learn in the school as opposed to in the home, the cacique said, “They should learn to read and write the words in Portuguese and, in first place, the indigenous language.” The segundo liderança, interviewed separately and individually, agreed: “The most important is our language, and second is Portuguese.” In order to learn to read and write in Ka’apor, Xié
53 “R: Os Ka’apor são muito “hãtã” (fortes), né. Acho que é difícil nós perder a nossa língua. P: Por qué? R: Porque nós aqui se comunica mais na língua, né. Por exemplo, as crianças falam mais na língua, em casa, depende da coisa. Na cidade, tem que falar a língua e português, né. Tem que falar com os parentes e os brancos, né. P: E você acha que eles conseguem aprender as duas? R: Conseguem sim… Assim que é a cultura, né, a cultura Ka’apor.”
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Pihun community members must have access to culturally appropriate pedagogical materials in their own language and writing materials for them to practice. Indigenous teacher Paulo already has one phonological teaching resource, which is a start. Ideally, the state will collaborate with Ka’apor teachers to sponsor and produce native language teaching materials and textbooks to fulfill its legal responsibilities per Decree 6,861
(2009).54
The Future of Ka’apor Education
Indigenous school education in Xié Pihun, Maranhão is precarious and limited but functional, especially considering its financial and logistic challenges. According to
Paulo, Ka’apor children study with an indigenous teacher from 7-10 AM and then with a nonindigenous teacher for the rest of the morning. Ka’apor adults such as the segundo lideranca, who hunts, fishes, and farms during the day, attend classes in the evenings from 7-10 PM. The municipality formally employs two indigenous teachers and a nonindigenous Portuguese language teacher who teach in the state-constructed school building.
However, inconsistencies and issues abound. I observed a lack of community awareness of government legislation and programming that could improve the quality and effectiveness of Ka’apor school education. Regarding educational infrastructure issues, I agree with Ka’apor leaders that the Maranhão state government should provide
54 The only Portuguese language materials I encountered when in Xié Pihun were signs in the health post. While I did not have access to nonindigenous teachers during my fieldwork, I believe that they bring Lusophone pedagogical materials with them when they come to teach in the village. They do not leave the materials behind for the community to use, and there is no community library. 62 the community with a new school building and materials per the community’s needs and demands. Instead of moving all community members to study in a larger village, which left Xié Pihun vulnerable to nonindigenous intrusions, or transporting one nonindigenous teacher back and forth over treacherous roads, which results in a highly inconsistent school schedule, the state and community could invest in long-term indigenous teacher training for its currently appointed teachers, Paulo and Vanessa. Serving in their community school during the school terms and attending the indigenous teacher training course in Santa Inês during their breaks, they may learn valuable skills and tools to teach both Ka’apor and eventually Portuguese to their community, eliminating the village’s reliance on nonindigenous teachers entirely. Finally, the state is required to invest in
Ka’apor and Portuguese pedagogical materials that are culturally appropriate and relevant in the Ka’apor context. Paulo expressed his desire to collaborate with other Ka’apor teachers throughout TI Alto Turiaçu to create these materials. What is needed is government funding to support this process.
I look forward to returning to Xié Pihun for further fieldwork, to exploring these ideas with community leaders, and to learning more about their challenges. The Ka’apor leaders, teachers, and parents that I have met asserted that they would use all means necessary to remain on their land and transmit their linguistic and cultural knowledge to their children. With expanded awareness of their rights and local opportunities to pursue these rights, I have no doubt that the community’s leaders will pursue all available resources in order to improve Ka’apor and Portuguese language fluency, literacy, and agency for future generations living in TI Alto Turiaçu.
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CONCLUSION
The Ka’apor founded Xié Pihun in 2001 so that they could protect the surrounding land from illegal loggers. Ever since, they have endeavored to make and defend their home along this Western border of TI Alto Turiaçu. Beyond their territory’s official demarcation, the Ka’apor connection to the land is demonstrated through their community’s daily activities, customs, and rituals; these they aspire to pass down to their future generations, who will, as adults, continue the struggle to maintain their territory’s integrity.
Continuous Ka’apor language use preserves the community’s unique forms of expression and knowledge of their forest home; indeed, language is as integral a part of
Ka’apor identity as their tradition of living on their land. As of 2017, the Ka’apor in Xié
Pihun speak their native language in daily community life; they cannot imagine a world in which they do not speak their language, much as they cannot imagine a world in which they do not live on their land. In such a world, the Ka’apor identity would not exist. At the same time, they want to own motorcycles and pickup trucks to independently navigate their territory. They want bank accounts and financial resources to manage for themselves. They want healthcare professionals to attend to them in their villages and to seek treatment in hospitals when their health conditions become serious. And, as this thesis has discussed in depth, they want bilingual education for their community, formal education that prioritizes their Ka’apor knowledge, culture, and language while also teaching them how to use the Portuguese language to achieve their goals. As they struggle to navigate interactions with a dominant foreign language and society without 64
losing their own language and way of life, the Ka’apor see indigenous school education
as a way to increase their community’s access to bilingual literacy, knowledge, and,
ultimately, the power to protect and advocate for themselves and their interests. When I
asked the segundo liderança if he could imagine Ka’apor children, including his own,
attending a college or university one day, he said:
We are thinking about that in the long-term. Because… look, I am 32 years old. When my father was young, he also studied only a little. He only studied until the fourth grade. After that, he found a wife and worked in the forest, in the fields. Then he didn’t study anymore; he didn’t go to school anymore. Now, with our young people, we want to move forward a little. Our children… how do you say… we are pushing for them to study, to be better educated than us and pursue things outside [of Ka’apor territory] more easily, right. Resources [money], a lot of things that we want for the village. That is why we continue to study with the non-Indian [teacher].55
Ka’apor parents hope that their children will learn enough Portuguese and nonindigenous
knowledge to be able to access resources that will improve their standard of living in Xié
Pihun. Some day, bilingual Ka’apor students may attend college to study medicine, law,
and education, returning home to serve and strengthen their community once they
graduate. In the meantime, Ka’apor parents share the dream of parents throughout the
world: that their children will be better educated and have access to more opportunities
than they have had for themselves. As Ka’apor, they are determined that their children
and their children’s children accomplish these goals without losing their connection to
55 “Isso aí nós estamos pensando mucai de tempo. Porque… olha, eu tenho 32 anos, né. Desde que meu pai era jovem, ele estudou pouco também, né. Ele estudou só até a quarta série só. Depois, ele arranjou mulher e trabalhou na mata mesmo, na roça. Aí, ele não estudou mais, não foi mais para aula. Aí, nossos jovens, nós quer adiantar mais um pouco. Aí, nossos filhos… como é que diz… está aforçando eles para poder estudar para poder mais sabidos do que nós ainda para ele buscar as coisas lá fora mais fácil, né. Recurso, mucai de coisas que a gente quer para a aldeia. Por isso nós estamos continuando a estudar com não-índio.” 65 their culture, community, and land. When thinking about their community’s future,
Ka’apor leaders, teachers, and parents see indigenous school education as a necessary tool to improve skills, such as bilingual literacy in Ka’apor and Portuguese, that will help their future generations live happier and more prosperous lives.
The right to formal education in accordance with Ka’apor community goals is guaranteed by Brazilian legislation, and applications of indigenous school education policies that train indigenous teachers and provide pedagogical support have gradually improved in recent years. In spite of their lack of financial capital and political clout, the
Ka’apor in Xié Pihun are determined to use all resources at their disposal – from their symbolic image in short-lived media attention to long-term collaborations with nonindigenous allies – to fight for their rights. I hope to follow up with the Ka’apor in future fieldwork to document and support their efforts.
Figure 4.1 A liderança took this photograph of Ka’apor women and children with his camera phone at the annual baby naming ceremony in October 2016. He circulated this image to nonindigenous Ka’apor allies via the popular messaging service WhatsApp.
66
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Biography
Sarah Mellman currently lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she will receive her M.A. in Latin American Studies from Tulane University in May 2017. She hopes to
continue working with the Ka’apor in Maranhão, Brazil as they develop their indigenous school education program and curriculum. She will begin her doctoral degree in Applied
Anthropology at Teacher’s College, Columbia University in Fall 2018.