Holding on to a fading Indian identity

Press, 31 January 1983, Page 16

Holding on to a fading Indian identity

From “The Economist." London

For the first time the Brazilians have elected an Indian to congress. Mr Mario Juruna, a Xavante, was elected last November with 31,000 votes on Mr Leonel Brizola's Democratic Labour party ticket in Rio de Janeiro.

Mr Juruna. a larger-than-life personality, is already causing headaches' to those responsible for parliamentary procedure. Sneered at by the Air Force Minister as “a culturised ex-

otic," he has said that he will make all his speeches in the Xavante language, and be has no intention of wearing a jacket and tie. which are obligatory in Brasilia, the country's capital.

Mr Juruna made his name by recording the promises made by Brazilian officals to Indians, and then playing them back to them. He promises to add more than colour to the

Brasilia scene. He will press for the formation of an independent federation of Indians to replace the present Indian foundation. Funai. which is under the control of the interior minist rv.

Mr Juruna'spent Christmas on the Xavantes' Mato Grosso reserve, explaining his election to his people. Today's Brazil has fewer than 200.000 Indians, survivors of the 5 million or so who are thought to have inhabited the country when the Portuguese arrived 450 years

ago. The remnant has a hard time finding a niche in a country where few people have time for even the occasional backwards glance. Funai, long a preserve of the army, now makes some effort to be humanitarian but is the scene of a continual conflict of ideas and interests. The Indians, at least in theory, have something which everybody wants to own: land. Most Brazilians think the Indians don't use it properly. It is not easy to deal with

Indians: they speak about 120 mutually unintelligible languages. About 5000 Indians scattered in groups of 20-600. still try to keep well out of the way of intruders: they can sometimes be hostile if outsiders encroach on their lands.

As their frontiers are rapidly pushed back, Funai sends in its teams to contact isolated groups — and to ask them to move out and make way for an artificial lake behind a dam. a road, a railway or a mine. This invariably results in the deaths of a number of Indians, even though Funai's frontiersmen say they take precautions and treat the Indians delicately. Diseases are transmitted, sometimes with fatal results. Small groups of Indians whom Funai has not reached will probably manage to survive in isolation on the borders with Peru. Colombia and Venezuela for several decades yet. Most of the Indians, however. now live in more or less recognised reserves. Although successive governments have vowed to demarcate all Indian lands, none has actually done so. The date for completion remains as distant as ever. It is complicated by the breakdown of Indian society. When the Indians meet the modern world, the impact devastates their life-styles. A fashionable tactic for integrating them is to encourage farming on Indian reserves or the production of handicrafts, to help them to buy the goods that many try to obtain by begging. However, programmes have been rushed, and their social impact underestimated: the Indians have neither been consulted nor invited to take part in setting things up.

So after a few years of enthusiasm for aid. the Indians tend to lose interest and landless non-Indian migrant workers often move in to run the farms. The Indians, sometimes not really understanding the patient commitment

needed to succeed as a farmer, move to the sidelines and become listless observers. If they manage to get over the shock of contact with the modern world, Indians may thrive; there are many thousands more than 10 years ago. and they could total half a million by the turn of the century. This would put pressure on the limited amount of land available. Funai recently investigated new criteria for defining Indians. It suggested that blood tests might do the trick since all pure Indians in the Americas belong to the comparatively rare ORH positive group. This provoked an outcry from Brazilian anthropologists and nothing was done. Some groups in the Government would like the Indians to disappear completely by being merged into Brazilian society. There was a furore a few years ago when it was proposed that Indians should be emancipated. This has an appealing ring: Indians now only have the legal status of minors, cannot vote or move around freely, and cannot sign contracts. Defenders of the Indians feared that some would sell their tribal lands and end up disinherited. So emancipation was shelved.

The latest suggestion is that responsibility for the Indians should be handed to the governments of the 24 states, but in the states with large Indian populations, such as Mato Grosso and Rondonia, the officials and land-hungry settlers already eye Indian lands covetously. There have been numerous clashes, some fatal, over land in this region in recent vears.

At a series of national and regional meetings of Indian chiefs, some chiefs have called for the establishment of an “Indian nation" within Brazil. Young Indians are delving into their past, reviving ceremonies and myths in a search for their identity.