This study is about how two different indigenous groups in two different places of the enormous border area of the Amazon forest in Brazil (approximately 12,000 km) have been resisting displacement and appropriation, prejudice and pre-conceptualizations, ever since Brazil became Brazil and even before. The ability of these groups to resist, entangled to their capacity to endure in face of the colonization of their ways of living, enacted them to becoming political (Viveiros de Castro 1998; Isin 2002; Starn, de la Cadena 2008; Blaser 2010; de la Cadena 2010) in distinct forms depending on the geographies of relationships, land use and various forms of mobility through border areas they have been living in and within. In looking at these “resistances” and “endurances” at different places, I argue that the fact that a group of Ashaninka people became political by moving to and throughout the border between Brazil and Peru and the many reinventions Macuxi and Wapishana people in the present day Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Territory went through for becoming Indigenous peoples at the Brazilian borders with Guyana and Venezuela have corroborated the role of their “existences” in delineating and re-inventing geographical borders by managing the meanings and effects of these very borders on their lives as integral (and integrated) part of the forest.
In a general way, it can be said that borders in Brazil came hand in hand with the appearance of the terminology “Indians” in this country, which prompted me to ask what politics emerged out of it. In a particular manner, by looking at how this politics was practiced through the articulation of the indigenous groups mentioned above allowed me to historicize their own stories about the articulation of their existence or permanence in places that coincided with the space of the border amidst the forest. As I begin this dissertation, I will show that the creation of such space meant no coincidence for governments and their legislative instruments, which equalized the space of the border with territories necessary for the expansion of economic frontiers since the 18th century. Also, and most importantly, it will be discussed that these spaces coincided with the spaces where some indigenous groups were living and moving through on a constant basis making the forest what it was but, especially, considering it the integrative space of their worlds of living and articulating relationships. The politics emerging out of the negotiation of this last world - beyond borders - with the world created and limited by the national borders, as according to the actual and contemporary political practices of the abovementioned indigenous groups, is an important part of this study. This politics will be contextualized vis-à-vis the politicization of the Amazon rainforest as a territory of dispute and a region of political possibilities (Escobar 2008) based on life projects (Blaser et al 2004) as opposed to governmental projects.
Ultimately, this dissertation is an exercise in understanding how some indigenous groups kept on resisting by living in spaces constantly changed by the advances of economic frontiers that intersected with the production of borders and with the changing policies toward managing the landscapes cut across by these same borders. Opposing the idea of borders as the productive site of affirmation by negation, for the indigenous groups I engaged with in this dissertation borders are an integrated place of relationships to human beings, to other beings and to the forest within them; in other words, a landscape in constant change because of peoples’ action. The mobility of some indigenous groups throughout the forest and their contribution to design landscapes on it as related to a cosmology not centered in the human [although relying on a particular conceptualization of the human] brought to the fore of this research the aspect that there are inter-relations between nature, culture and society that do not correspond to distinctive, visible and hierarchical separation, let alone to the limits of an Indigenous Territory. In this sense, approaching different borders to understanding different indigenous standpoints on them means also approaching new worlds of knowing and living to which all sorts of borders are also imposed, including within the very Indigenous Territory. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/16094 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Vecchione-Gonçalves, Marcela |
| Contributors | Beier, Marshall J., Political Science - International Relations |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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