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Land Rights and the Manipulation of Identity: Official Indian Policy in Brazil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Suzanne Williams
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Extract

On 26 January 1981, one of the colonels in Brazil's National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), Colonel Zanoni Hausen, issued an instruction from his department, the DGPC (General Department of Community Development – now extinct), to three public servants hitherto undistinguished for any particular contribution to indigenous affairs in Brazil and with no particular qualifications for the task assigned to them. Their brief was to form a ‘Committee for the Identification of Criteria of Integration’ and they were to present their results within ten days. The criteria, the document states, need no justification or explanation; ‘it is sufficient to list them in their principal groups; ethnic, sociological, economic, linguistic and so on’.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , May 1983 , pp. 137 - 161
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

1 Instrução Técnica Executiva No. 02/81 – DGPC, Ministério do Interior, FUNAI. Signed by Col. Zanoni Hausen, Director of the DGPC.

2 Page 2 of the six-page document also lists ‘psychological criteria’ under Section A, namely (a) psycho-social maladjustment and (b) changes in behaviour. These ‘indicators’ have been applied to Indian communities.

3 ‘One of the key attributes of legal personality is capacity: the ability to acquire rights, to contract obligations, and to appear on one's own behalf in a judicial proceeding. Although natural persons are presumed to have this capacity, the civil codes make exceptions of people who must be represented by a guardian’, Joseph, Grasmick, Land Tenure and the South American Indian: an Anthropological and Legal Perspective, Anti-Slavery Society Working Paper No. 5, 1980, p. 98.Google Scholar

4 Civil Code of Brazi1, Articles 5–6, cited in Grasmic, op. cit.

5 Ibid., op. cit., p. 98.

6 Civil Code of Brazil, article 6, cited by Dalmo, Dallari, ‘O Indio, sua Capacidade Jurídica e suas Terras’, in A Questão da Emancipação, Cadernos da Comissão Pro-Indio, no. 1 (Global Editora, 1979), p. 78.Google Scholar

7 Dalmo, Dallari, op. cit. p. 78.Google Scholar

8 Constituição Federativa do Brasil (2nd edn., Rio, Editora Campos), Art. 198, p. 84.Google Scholar

9 Dalmo, Dallari, op. cit. p. 80.Google Scholar

10 MINTER – FUNAI – DGPC, untitled document signed by Maria da Penha Cunha de Almeida, anthropologist.

11 ‘In Brazil, a peasant working on the land without any title deed, any legally recognized and registered document which defines him as owner of the land, is classified in official censuses as occupier of the land, or, in everyday language, as a posseiro’. José, de Souza Martins, Fighting for the Land: Indians and Posseiros in Legal Amazonia (mimeo) p. 1. As the posseiro has no land title, he is most vulnerable to eviction by more powerful groups or individuals, and is thus often forced into invasion of Indian territory.Google Scholar

12 José, de Souza Martins, op. cit. p. 1.Google Scholar

13 A tabloid monthly newspaper which has recently become the offical mouthpiece of CIMI, the Catholic Indigenist Missionary Council, the progressive indigenist wing of the CNBB (National Conference of Brazilian Bishops). CIMI has become FUNAI's major critic.

14 LUX-Jornal, a Brazilian clipping service, provides this evidence.

15 Large-scale landowner-farmers.

16 ACONTECEU, no. 6, CEDI (Rio de Janeiro, 1980), pp. 7–8, 16–17.Google Scholar

17 John, Hemming, Red Gold (London, Macmillan, 1978), p. 492.Google Scholar

18 Porantim, Ano II, no. 11 (09 1979).Google Scholar

19 Ibid., Ano III, no. 23 (10, 1980)Google Scholar.

20 John, Hemming, op. cit., p. 443.Google Scholar

21 Luiz, Beltrão, O Indio, um Mito Brasileiro (Rio, Editora Vozes, 1977), p. 23: ‘The head of the provisional government considering that the frontiers of Brazil are largely inhabited at present only by Indians, and that the Brazilian government does not have systematic and continuous inspection over them; and that the Indian is a precious element for his moral qualities, physical robustness and adaptability to climate, it is advantageous to make use of and educate [him] by suitable methods, calling him to our nationality before the border countries call him to theirs.’Google Scholar

22 Shelton, Davis, Victims of the Miracle (Cambridge University Press 1977), p. 13.Google Scholar

23 Luiz, Beltrão, op. cit., p. 26.Google Scholar

24 Anna, Presland, ‘Reconquest: An account of the contemporary fight for survival of the Amerindian peoples of Brazil’, Survival Internaional Review, Spring 1979, pp. 20–24.Google Scholar

25 Anna, Presland, ‘Waimiri-Atroari – the Massacres behind the Myth’, in ARC Bulletin, 12 1979, pp. 4–5. The article cites an ex-employee of FUNAI who worked with Gilberto Pinto, the leader of FUNAI's attraction team for the Waimiri–Atroari in the early 1970s, and who claims to have seen and taken photographs of bombshells and trees ripped by machine-gun fire in the forests of the Indian land. Also cited is the claim of an office clerk from the camp of the Battalion to have witnessed an army captain setting off in a helicopter with a number of bombs, stating that he was going to bomb the Indians so that road construction could continue.Google Scholar

26 Anna, Presland, SI Review, 1979, op. cit., 21–23.Google Scholar

27 O Globo, Rio de Janeiro, 20 06 1981;Google ScholarDiário Popular, São Paulo, 20 06 1981.Google Scholar

28 Folha de São Paulo, São Paulo, 11 02 1982.Google Scholar

29 APS Report, Tribes of the Amazon Basin in Braril 1972, (London, Charles Knight & Co. Ltd., 1973), p. 22.Google Scholar

30 Dalmo, Dallari, in A Questão da Terra (São Paulo, Rio Global Editora, 1979), p. 71.Google Scholar

31 Sandra, L. Caldwalader, Director of the Indian Rights Association, in a letter addressed to the president of FUNAI, 26 10 1978, printed in A Questão da Emancipação (Global Editora, CPI/São Paulo, 1979) pp. 23–25.Google Scholar

32 Daniel, Cabixi, A Questão da Emancipação (Global Editora 1979), p. 71.Google Scholar

33 Personal communication from José Sizenando.

34 O Estado de São Paulo, 6 06 1981.Google Scholar

35 A ‘negative certificate’ is a document certifying an area ‘free of Indians’, drawn up by FUNAI.

36 Folha de São Paulo, 23 11 1979.Google Scholar

37 ‘FUNAI vai sugerir a emancipação individual’, reported in O Globo, Rio de Janeiro, 25 07 1981.Google Scholar

38 Diario da Manhã, Goiânia, 2 07 1981.Google Scholar

39 Approximately US $1,760,000.

40 Article in Gazeta das Notícias, Rio de Janeiro, 18 07 1981.Google Scholar

41 Personal information from reports on the hearing on 9 June 1981.

42 O Globo, Rio de Janeiro, 26 07 1981.Google Scholar

43 The missionaries in question are the Salesians, recently under considerable attack for their repressive work amongst the Tucanoan Indians of the Rio Negro Valley, widely denounced within Brazil and at the IV Russell Tribunal on Indian Rights in Rotterdam in November 1980, by the Tukano Indian, Alvaro Sampaio.

44 O Globo, cited above.

45 Sílvio, Coelho dos Santos, Educação e Sociedades Tribais (Rio, Ed. Movimento, 1978), pp. 46–51.Google Scholar

46 CPI of the Indian, 1977, p. 32.Google Scholar

47 Folba de São Paulo, 25 07 1981.Google Scholar