Where the Earth Touches the Sky: The Xavante Indians' Struggle for Land in Brazil, 1951-1979

In 1951 landowners and their thugs launched an attack on the Xavante Indians in the village of Parabubu in northeastern Mato Grosso. Parabubu was one of several Xavante villages in the region between the Couto Magalhães and Culuene rivers not yet peacefully contacted, or "pacified," by the Brazilian government. A seminomadic and warrior nation of the Gê lingustic group, the Xavante had shunned contact with outsiders for a century, killing those who encroached upon their territory (see figure 1). ¹ Coveting Xavante land, the landowners resolved to "pacify" the Indians as they saw fit. In the raid several Indians were killed, scores were wounded, and houses were burned. ²

The Xavante would scatter in search of assistance. Some of the communities fled hundreds of miles westward to the Simões Lopes and Batovi posts administered by the government Indian bureau, Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (hereafter SPI). Others would find safety at the missions of Sangradouro and São Marcos operated by the Salesians, who arrived in Mato Grosso several decades earlier to Christianize indigenous people. The landowners succeeded in their endeavors: by 1958 the entire Xavante population of the Couto Magalhães-Culuene region had been driven into exile.

Like other Brazilian indigenous groups, the post-contact history of the Xavante has been marked by death, dispossession, and despair. It is, sadly, a commonplace that Amazonian Indians have been the victims of twentieth-century frontier expansion and economic development. ³ This article, however, explores a concomitant outgrowth of such trauma: indigenous mobilization, galvanized under Brazilian military rule, to recover ancestral lands. During the 1970s the Xavante waged a relentless battle to reclaim their territory in the Couto Magalhães-Culuene region, since occupied and deforested by cattle ranchers, land speculators, and small colonists. ⁴ Their struggle was not unique; it mirrored that of other indigenous communities who have pressured the Brazilian government to create or enlarge reserves and expel invaders. ⁵ However, the effort at Couto Magalhães-Culuene is rather remarkable because indigenous people entirely banished from, rather than encircled within, pre-contact lands attempted to recover usurped territory. ⁶ This essay revisits the historical stage on which the Xavante battle was fought.

Although anthropologists and sociologists have produced illuminating studies of Brazilian Indians, historical research on indigenous people remains embryonic. ⁷ The marginalization of Indians subsequent to the early colonial period within Brazilian historical narrative and analysis reflects the broader tradition in which native Americans have been cast as bygone relics or folkloric curiosities rather than as ongoing products and producers of historical outcomes. The lacuna derives from trends more specific to Brazilian historiography as well. The myth of racial democracy celebrating racial mixture and harmony in lustering Brazilian sociocultural formation, although debunked by researchers, undoubtedly managed to obscure or romanticize the realities of indigenous peoples, as it has elsewhere in Latin America. ⁸ Moreover, for the postcolonial period, historical research has overwhelmingly focused on the northeastern and southeastern regions, due to their political, economic, demographic, and intellectual preponderance in shaping national development. The central-western and northern/Amazonian regions--home to the majority of the nation's small native population of approximately 300,000--have been given short shrift, rendering indigenous history less visible. In recent years a number of scholars have sought to retrieve the Brazilian indigenous experience from the dustbin of history, revisiting the archives in order to reincorporate the disappeared into regional and national narratives. ⁹

This essay seeks to focus further Brazil's blurred indigenous past, centering Xavante political mobilization within an analytical purview of longstanding interest to historians: the processes of capital accumulation and state formation. Indeed, the incorporation of indigenous populations and territories into the nation-state in the context of Amazonian frontier expansion was fundamental to the growth of Brazil's...