Native and National in Brazil: Indigeneity after Independence

5. A Native Critique of Sovereignty: The Brazilian Indigenous Movement in the New Millennium

159 5 A NATIVE CRITIQUE OF SOVEREIGNTY The Brazilian Indigenous Movement in the New Millennium “I can be what you are without ceasing to be who I am,” is a slogan that has been circulating in Brazil for over three decades. For the protagonists, collaborators, and sympathizers of the Brazilian indigenous movement, it is a well-worn mantra and manifesto. For the ruling minority, some of whom may be familiar with indigenous history and the legacies of indigenist politics, it is an obscure if not outright hostile claim. And for the dominant majority—those who believe that “Indians” belong to the past, to the jungle, or both—the expression remains as unknown as the cause of Native self-representation itself. “I can be what you are without ceasing to be who I am” is a simple phrase, but deceptively so. After all, who am I? Who are you? What does it mean to “be what someone else is” or to “cease to be oneself”? What have been and what can be the political consequences of such an enigmatic claim, such a curious feat? This tenet of the Brazilian indigenous movement defies the dominant nationalist discourses from throughout the region that have long endorsed an expedient move away from “deficient” Indianness through shifting and overlapping paradigms of “cultural loss” and “racial improvement”—ranging , as we have seen, from assimilation, acculturation, transculturation, and mestizaje/mestiçagem during the first half of the twentieth century, 160 / A Native Critique of Sovereignty to hybridity, heterogeneity, multiculturalism, plurinationalism, and interculturality beginning in the late 1960s. In the case of Brazil, the claim undergirding the slogan also exists in tension with the enduring ideals of a racially and culturally inclusive nationhood and national identity that are still often invoked in popular discourse as the raça brasileira—the socalled Brazilian race. More than the mere affirmation of a differentiated “indigenous identity,” though, the idea of becoming like another without ceasing to be oneself posits an indissoluble relationship between indigenous ontologies (ways of being) and epistemologies (ways of knowing), and situates the Native subject in the context of the modern nation-state, where he or she exists in constant contact and potential conflict with dominant forms of being and knowing and, derived from them, with dominant notions of community, belonging, nationhood, citizenship, and sovereignty. Non-Native scholars have responded to the notion of a distinctive indigenous metaphysics in a variety of ways. In what might be characterized as the methodology of classical anthropology, some researchers, backed by the repertoire and implicit authority of dominant Western thought, have chosen to study, select, and “translate” their interpretations of indigenous being and knowing into the lingua franca of the academy, thus necessarily distorting and simplifying them while, at the same time, playing with the fire of “authenticity” (i.e., whose version of the story to choose?). In 1959, Margaret Mead explained the basic subject-object relationship in her ethnographic research as follows: “The anthropologist understands a great many things about the savages which they do not understand themselves . . . . Although many savages may become good friends who spend long hours helping him [the anthropologist]—dictating stories slowly so he can write them down, patiently explaining just how one man is related to another—they do not understand what scientific work is.”1 As Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith reiterates, anthropology was, of course, not the only Western field of knowledge to “employ the practices of imperialism in devastating ways.”2 But it has been among the most systematic in its denigration of Native peoples, oftentimes carried out with the best of intentions, including what Trinh Minh-Ha calls the “imperative of making equal.”3 A second tack among scholars of indigeneity and subalternity has been to assert that differences between indigenous and nonindigenous metaphysics are no more significant than the differences between any two human beings; that the “secret” of Indianness is not so much a hidden truth as it is a carefully deployed stratagem in a larger struggle for A Native Critique of Sovereignty / 161 political power; and that the very language of “secrets” and impenetrable ways of being and knowing are the stuff of Orientalism, hucksterism, or both. Such interventions, the argument goes, are not merely unhelpful but in fact prejudicial to the interests of so-called subalterns, indigenous or otherwise.4 Finally, a third scholarly response to assertions of differentiated indigenous...