The Self-Demarcation of Tupinambá Indigenous Land in the Lower Tapajós River Basin

“Hey, Fábio … imagine all this here turning into soy.” With a somewhat apprehensive smile and an uneasy look in his eyes, this comment by Seu Braz, cacique of the Tupinambá in the Lower Tapajós River Basin, on the first day of an intense hike through the rainforest, was a sincere declaration about the dangers to the region. The Indigenous leader, whose village of São Francisco lies within the Tapajós-Arapiuns Extractive Reserve, in Santarém, state of Pará, organized with other Tupinambá warriors and began to open up a trail, independently demarcating their ancient territory, for many reasons. On the one hand, there are the growing threats from the expansion of agricultural, timber, and mining corporations; on the other, there is the failure of FUNAI, Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, to take action, and the federal government’s unwillingness to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples.

For ten days I accompanied the Indigenous organization as it moved through the region and into the rainforest, beginning the process of marking their territories’ boundaries. Over five of those days, we hiked roughly forty kilometers through the jungle, carving out a trail that rarely exceeded two meters in width. While the formal interviews with the Tupinambá warriors, as they’re known, were valuable, it was only during the daily marches, as we shared in the efforts and challenges of the jungle, that I became aware of the extent of the political struggle in which they were locked.

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Established between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, the Tapajós-Arapiuns Extractive Reserve, which covers over 677,000 hectares, came to include several Indigenous territories whose people were engaged in an intense struggle over their rights. The process was seen as a reorganization of the Indigenous movement in the region, a movement which fought for the reserve’s very constitution, considering it a way of defending their lands and ways of life. Nearly twenty years later, however, the reality on the ground—marked by the growing power of the Indigenous movement and the rejection of repeated proposals for damaging clear-cutting, strip mining, and other extractive uses of the land, some of which are being mediated by the ICMBio—has sparked a struggle for the establishment of a unified Indigenous Territory where the extractive reserve lies today.

Threats made against the region and its people are deeply woven into the stories of those who share this territory. Many of those who took to the forest to protect their land once worked for the Santa Isabel lumber company, which was forced out by the establishment of the extractive reserve. According to the Indigenous community, the company’s objective was complete deforestation in preparation for massive fields of soy: they illegally removed ipês and mandioqueiras and resold them in Europe with a green sustainability label. For Seu Ezeriel and his wife the cacica Estevina, from the village of Cabeceira do Amorim (where they and their whole family are staunch supporters of self-demarcation), the open fields and pastures Ezeriel had seen in Amapá, where he had traveled a few years before, appeared to predict the future for the land where he hadbeen born, were it not for the establishment of the extractive reserve and the expulsion of the lumber company.

The fact is, during the nearly two decades the reserve has been in existence, plenty of other threats to the local Indigenous and riverine populations have emerged. ICMBio has been promoting a number of projects that endanger their ways of life, which is defined by an intimate relationship with the rainforest, both with regard to the abundance of fishing and hunting options, as well as access to water and medicinal techniques that come from an age-old understanding of the jungle. Recently, a number of riverine villages and other communities got together to debate and put a stop to two interconnected proposals: one that would effectively have put a price tag on the forest by implementing a carbon credit program under which Finland would own the land, and a second that would have managed and harvested the lumber.

The Indigenous population rejected these proposals. They were concerned about establishing a carbon credit program at the extractive reserve, which would incur a fee whenever a tree was cut down to build a canoe or to create a swidden, thus reversing the relationship between ownership and custody of the region. In effect, their very lifestyle would, under the carbon credit program, be considered a form of deforestation. Such a proposal would have limited the access of people in the Tapajós-Arapiuns Extractive Reserve to the natural resources necessary for their existence. In a powerfully mobilized demonstration, scores of Indigenous people occupied ICMBio in Santarém and managed to suspend the project.

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As we cleared our trail, sustaining ourselves primarily on manioc flour and game from the rainforest, we were careful to make sure that self-demarcation wouldn’t “invade” the territory of other Indigenous peoples. Even though the creation of one common Indigenous Territory was discussed a number of times, the Tupinambá had decided to take matters into their own hands, hoping to put pressure on the government and force it to recognize the area as their own Indigenous land, thus encouraging other villages to follow suit and bolstering the hopes of a unified Indigenous Territory in the area currently occupied by the reserve.

Anthropologists and scholars are aware of the sociopolitical phenomenon that is the reorganization of the Indigenous movement in the Lower Tapajós River Basin and the Arapiuns River. Seu Braz categorically refuses to use the term “emerging Indians,” often used of populations who have recently demanded that their condition as Indigenous be officially affirmed. “We have always been Indians,” he says. Other testimony, such as that of Dona Nazaré, an eighty-seven-year-old who has lived her entire life in Cabeceira do Amorim, points to the violent processes of colonization and eradication of identity that many have experienced. Like her daughter, the cacica Estevina, Dona Nazaré has established a dynamic connection between Indigenous past, the violence they experienced, and the Indigenous future, situated as it is in the midst of their current political struggles and demands for education specifically designed to rekindle traditions for younger generations.

Still, though, plenty of politicians and businessmen, and a significant part of the judicial system, insist that there are no Indigenous people remaining in the region, as if cultural identity and ways of life could simply be erased by colonial violence, asif the Indigenous peoples were unable to reinvent themselves as a power critically opposed to the process being imposed upon them. The proposal of a unified Indigenous Territory in the extractive reserve, one respecting the region’s other inhabitants, is one of the primary topics to be discussed by the movement this year. One of the crucial issues is that of negotiating with the residents of other communities and villages who do not consider themselves Indigenous. For the Tupinambá, though, the fight to defend the territory is a fight for all, because if the rainforest is cut down, or a carbon credit market established, the negative effects on hunting and water supplies will affect all residents, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. Therefore, self-demarcation is closely tied to what many Tupinambá see as a way of being Indigenous and to the rejection of a way of life in which urban work and the buying and selling of goods are central. It is an act of political resistance amid a constant state of war.

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My personal involvement in the early phases of this selfdemarcation was a condition set by the Indigenous people themselves: I was tasked with using GPS technology to help mark the boundaries of the Tupinambá’s territory and guide the hike through the dense rainforest. With a profound understanding of the forest and the ability to guide themselves by the movements of the clouds, the Tupinambá warriors soon demonstrated that the GPS was merely a secondary tool in the process. As for myself and Dani (a graphic artist who also participated in the hike, holding drawing workshops with the children), we ended up needing help rather than actually contributing.

The relationship with the land and the protection of a way of life are the two salient elements in this political struggle. Fundamental to Indigenous cosmology, the Enchanters and Protectors of Waters and Forests seem to be taking part in the fight against the new ways their territory is being exploited. The Mãe d’Água (“Water Mother”), the Mãe da Mata (“Forest Mother”), and other forest beings are woven into the fabric of the Indigenous people’s concerns about the political conflict in the region and the greater world around them. They surface in stories like the one told by Seu Edno, the night before they set off to mark their borders, of a man who mistreated animals until, in a dream, he saw himself transfigured into a peccary and hunted. Stories like this can be considered a perfect equivalent to many Amerindian myths. Particularly striking is the belief in a lake where the elders went fishing and left with only a small catch of manatees, leaving the rest to the Enchanted Beings. This lake has long since disappeared, and yet could resurface, unleashing fresh forces. According to some, this same lake could help to confound the technology used by Petrobras, the state- owned oil company, to detect underground oil reserves.

Self-demarcation is the struggle for this land, for the right to manage it according to the Tupinambá’s own rules and requirements; for a particular way of life, in which a relationship with the rainforest and the Enchanted Beings is of the utmost importance; for a way of life that runs contrary to the impositions of other cultures, in which financial trade and commerce are so central. After expressing his concerns that his territory would face the same fate as the deforested land and open fields he saw Amapá, Seu Ezeriel told a joke of no small consequence—and I will end this story with it:

There was a doctor on a boat. He asked the mestizo boatman:

“Can you read, copperskin?”

“Well, no …”

“So you’ve wasted half your life,” said the doctor.

After a few more strokes, the copper-skinned boatman asks:

“Doctor, do you know how to swim?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Then you’ve wasted your entire life,” replied the boatman.

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WHILE ORGANIZING MY RETURN to a Tupinambá village in Pará, the locals suggested I buy some canvas tarpaulins, provisions, and shotgun shells. We were getting ready to spend a week in the rainforest.

I had very little skill with or knowledge of firearms. The closest I ever came to firing one was when I passed a rifle from one hunter to another, in the middle of the jungle in the dead of night, afraid that it would go off on its own.

I was dreading going shopping for ammunition in Santarém. I was advised to focus my efforts on the Tapajós riverfront around Mercadão 2000, the large open-air market.

At every shop and storefront, every person I asked for help responded with a quick, suspicious look followed by a brusque “no.” After three or four attempts, I finally realized they thought I was a police officer. Standing roughly six feet tall and dressed in sports gear, I doubt anybody could have confused me with an unlicensed Indigenous hunter looking to buy ammunition.

Frustrated and afraid of disappointing the waiting crew, I was on the point of giving up when I decided to try one more store: the grimiest, most chaotic one yet. I asked for ammo. The owner gave me the same suspicious look that greeted me whenever I asked this question. Expecting to be denied once again and forced to abandon my mission for good, I was then asked, “Is it for you?”

This was the first time someone had answered me with another question.

“Yes,” I stammered. “For me, and for the people I’ll be hunting with,” I quickly added.

“So you hunt?” he countered again.

I got the feeling this conversation wasn’t going to last much longer under that withering gaze, so I decided to be asopen and honest as possible: “I just go along with the hunters. I’m a researcher, actually.”

“What, biology?” the shopkeeper asked, his expression unchanged.

The conversation had finally turned in my favor, and I didn’t want to risk that with a lie. “I study people’s relationships with the rainforest,” I summarized.

That seemed to satisfy him. As for myself, I was relieved. My beard might have persuaded him that I wasn’t an undercover cop, though I could tell he wasn’t completely convinced. He sent a young helper to measure out the shot. Not having to perform that function, he could keep his eyes on me. I didn’t want to make any wrong moves: playing with my cell phone would have been the worst idea of all, for he would likely assume I was either calling in backup officers to catch him in the act, or photographing and recording the scene. I chose—or pretended—to entertain myself by looking at the spare parts and tools for the boat engines he was selling.

I was quite relieved, assuming the transaction was going well, when the shopkeeper started asking questions again: “Which caliber? How many grams of powder?” I had no idea how to respond. Instead, I was happy to accept his recommendations, which I’m sure by that point had fully exposed me as someone who had never fired a shot in his life.

I vaguely remembered that there was something else I was supposed to buy other than the shells, but the exact word eluded me. Having made it through the initial trial by fire, I took a chance: “Do you sell shotguns too?”

“No!” the shopkeeper spat, in the same tone I had heard time and again that morning. He completed the sale and shooed me out of his store.

It was only after I had returned to the village, and attempted to explain why I hadn’t brought the full list of purchases, that I understood my mistake: I had confused escopeta, a shotgun, with espoleta, the primer. Without that, the weapons wouldn’t fire.

My Tupinambá hosts spent most of the next week jeering and joking with me over this story.

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