As Guarani curator Sandra Benites eloquently put it, ‘there are folks who think that Indigenous peoples do not suffer racism. How so? Racism in Brazil started against the Indigenous peoples, it started with all this exclusion, with this erasure. It started with them saying that the Indigenous peoples were not human. What is that [if not racism]? What other word would one use to describe it?’ (Benites Reference Benites2021).Footnote ¹ Indeed, although historians have long recognised that racism in the Americas is a product of European colonisation, with Amerindians being its first victims, the last decades’ prolific scholarship on racism in Brazil hardly mentions Indigenous peoples. By the same token, the main thrust of anti-racist policy in Brazil has been directed at Afro-descendants, while racism against the Indigenous population is rarely named as such and is marginal to the political agenda, despite the importance of ‘the Indian’ in the national imaginary.

Tuxá anthropologist Felipe Cruz has argued that although racism against Indigenous peoples in Brazil is not different from racism against Afro-descendants (in other words, it usually includes physical and/or verbal abuse, dehumanisation, refusal to offer services, etc.), the way in which racialisation happens is different. Racialisation of Indigenous peoples, according to Cruz, often involves de-authorisation, that is, the denial of someone’s Indigenous identity (Cruz Reference Cruz, Oliva, Chaves, Filice and Nascimento2019: 159). De-authorisation can happen in any context in which Indigenous peoples or individuals are perceived by non-Indigenous as differing from preconceived ideas of Indigeneity: this includes, for example, Indigenous persons making use of modern gadgets, adopting aspects of a Western lifestyle, speaking Portuguese or simply defending their own rights. In other words, the mere fact that Indigenous peoples are in contact with the non-Indigenous (notwithstanding the fact that such contact, to begin with, was often not voluntary) makes them, in the eyes of certain non-Indigenous Brazilians, ‘not Indigenous enough’. According to that logic, then, the only way of being ‘Indigenous enough’ would be to revert to a time prior to contact with non-Indigenous people.

As a result of de-authorisation, Indigenous persons become invisible as Indigenous subjects and racism against them is also rendered invisible. This happens in spite of the fact that de-authorisation is often accompanied by other processes of racialisation that are frequently experienced by other non-white groups: Indigenous peoples are also called dirty, savages and infantile, their cultures and knowledge are dismissed or considered inferior and their spirituality is deemed as superstition. More often than not, racism against Indigenous peoples is based on this paradox: those who refuse to ‘modernise’ are labelled as ‘savages’ or backward and are therefore pressurised to change or ‘modernise’, while those who do adopt certain non-Indigenous life styles are deemed ‘not Indigenous enough’ by the same sectors of society that would see them as ‘savages’ had they not adopted those changes (Sá and Milanez Pereira Reference Sá, Milanez Pereira, Brandellero, Pardue and Wink2020: 169). In the words of Cruz, ‘if this racialisation attempts effectively to proclaim the ephemeral existence of the Indigenous condition, it is successful in the sense that it renders invisible not only the Indigenous persons themselves, but it also manages to operate without being noticed, that is, by rendering the racial dimension of Indigenous peoples also invisible’ (Cruz Reference Cruz, Oliva, Chaves, Filice and Nascimento2019: 160).

De-authorisation has probably become more common since the last decades of the twentieth century, as a backlash to the strengthening of the Indigenous movement after the 1988 Constitution, which made Indigenous peoples more visible as the main defenders of their own rights and interests. But the process in itself is not new. The arrival of Europeans in the territory now called Brazil started a process in which, according to European colonisers, the Indigenous peoples were destined to disappear, to stop being Indigenous. In the ‘Carta a el-rei Dom Manuel’ (Letter to King Manuel), the first document ever written by a European about Brazilian natives, the knight Pêro Vaz de Caminha, acting as scribe for Pedro Álvares Cabral, reputed to be the European ‘discoverer’ of Brazil, explains to Manuel I of Portugal that the natives encountered by the Portuguese had no religion of their own and would most likely be willing to become Christians and subjects of the kingdom. They were, according to Caminha, a blank slate ready to be written on by the process of colonisation. In the years that followed that first landing, the original population of millions of natives was decimated by diseases, extermination and enslavement. The survivors were expected to abandon their ways of living, in a process that was seen as inevitable, as Indigenous peoples were deemed as ‘savage’ and not compatible with ‘civilisation’.

Representations of Indigenous People in the Arts

Representations of Indigenous peoples in literature and visual arts differed little from this view. The eighteenth-century poem O Uraguai (1769), by Basílio da Gama, criticises the Jesuits for their oppression of the Guarani in the south of Brazil. But the poem’s Indigenous heroes, Cacambo, Sepé and Lindóia, all die at the end, with the Guarani survivors being promised civilisation by General Gomes Freire de Andrade, a real-life official in the Marquis of Pombal’s anti-Jesuit government and the true hero of the poem. A few decades later, José de Alencar’s Romantic foundational novels O Guarani (1857) and Iracema (1865) would further popularise the idea of sacrificial Indigenous heroes. O Guarani’s protagonist, Peri, sees his beloved – a white woman, Ceci – as a quasi-supernatural being beyond his reach and ends up risking his life in order to save her from destructive floods. If the end of this novel is ambiguous (with the white woman in his arms, Peri perches in a palm tree that is then carried away by the flood waters), the ending of Iracema is less so, as the eponymous Indigenous heroine dies of sadness after being abandoned by her inconstant Portuguese lover, Martin, but not before giving birth to Moacir, whose name, ‘son of suffering’, is meant to represent all Brazilians. Alencar celebrated the Tupi and Guarani by relegating them to the past, to the role of ancestor cultures whose inevitable destiny had been to convert to Christianity and become ‘civilised’ as part of the new nation.

Some of the best-known Brazilian paintings from the Romantic era also depict Indigenous sacrificial heroes. One example is Victor Meirelles’s Moema (1866), which depicts the death of the heroine from Santa Rita Durão’s epic poem Caramuru (1781). In Meirelles’s painting, the corpse of a rather light-skinned Moema is in the foreground, lying on a beach illuminated by pale yellow sunlight, which presumably refers to the dawn of Indigenous cultures (see Figure 2.1). In a very similar style, Lindóia (1882), by José Maria de Medeiros, portrays one of the most famous scenes from O Uraguay: the death of the heroine. As in Meirelles’s Moema, a fair Lindóia occupies the foreground, having just committed suicide using a poisonous snake.

Figure 2.1 Moema, painting by Victor Meirelles, 1866

(courtesy of Museu de Arte de São Paulo).

Throughout most of the twentieth century, public policies and academic studies continued to foretell the demise of Indigenous peoples, who were expected to disappear as a result of both violence and assimilation. Even sympathetic scholars, such as anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, proclaimed the imminent disappearance of Indigenous peoples, caused by capitalist expansion into their territories and the loss of their ability to carry out traditional cultural practices (Ribeiro Reference Ribeiro1970). The arts, for the most part, continued to echo this view. The avant-garde novel Macunaíma (1928), by Mário de Andrade, is a good example. The novel is in many respects a revolutionary inversion of the colonialist model, as its protagonist, ‘the hero without character’ Macunaíma, leaves his native Amazonia to travel to São Paulo and teach the paulistas new ways of being (Sá Reference Sá2004). However, like most literary Indigenous heroes created by non-Indigenous writers, Macunaíma dies at the end and his people are said to disappear entirely, their language and stories having to be repeated by a parrot. In his first and most successful novel, Maíra (1976), Darcy Ribeiro also presents us with a pessimistic view of the future of Indigenous peoples, as the god of the fictitious Mairum culture decides to capitulate in his battle against the Christian god.

These are just some examples of what is perhaps the most prevalent trope in depictions of Indigenous peoples in the arts. From the beginning of colonisation to the last decades of the twentieth century, the racialisation of Brazilian Indigenous peoples nearly always seemed to include the stigma of imminent disappearance. To be Indigenous is, according to this particular definition, to be always on the brink of extinction.

De-authorisation and Land

At the heart of these processes of de-authorisation is the issue of land. Since colonial times, de-authorisation has been used by state powers and non-Indigenous landowners as a way to deny, explicitly or implicitly, the right to ancestral territory. In his letter, Pêro Vaz de Caminha assured the king of Portugal that the lands they had just found were fertile and ‘everything one plants will grow’. In other words, if the Indigenous peoples were a blank slate that would gladly accept the Christian religion and be subject to the Portuguese crown, then the territory where they lived would be available to the king. As ownership by the Crown slowly gave way to private ownership, with land titles being distributed by the Crown and, later, by the monarchic, republican and local governments of independent Brazil (as well as being extensively falsified by land-grabbers), de-authorisation became ever more prevalent. Recognising someone as Indigenous is to acknowledge that their ancestors were there before the colonisers arrived. It implies, therefore, a recognition of their right to the land where their ancestors lived. Refusing to identify someone as Indigenous, on the other hand, is to deny their right to ancestry and to land. In the words of Cruz: ‘As a reminder that those territories had been occupied before European conquest, these peoples were extremely dispensable and in fact, had to be exterminated, civilised or whitened in order for the colonial enterprise to be successful. In this sense, Indigenous racialisation was grounded on an alleged fragility, since the only fate for this race was disappearance’ (Reference Cruz, Oliva, Chaves, Filice and Nascimento2019: 153).

A very current version of this logic is the resurrection of the racist legal argument called ‘time frame’ (marco temporal). ‘Time frame’ originally emerged as a ‘thesis’ in the Federal Supreme Court during the trial for the demarcation of Raposa Serra do Sol Reservation in Roraima (Amazon) in 2009. At the time, one of the ministers (judges) of the Supreme Court defended limitations to the originally proposed extension of the Indigenous reservation by arguing that Indigenous peoples should only be granted rights to land they occupied at the time of promulgation of the 1988 Constitution, which occurred on 5 October. Since then, landowners and anti-Indigenous lawmakers have repeatedly attempted to turn this ‘thesis’ into actual legislation and, after the election of Jair Bolsonaro, the ‘time frame’ argument gained momentum as the most recent attempt to inscribe de-authorisation into law. It has gathered strong support from the mainstream press and considerable parts of the non-Indigenous population, who are willing to believe the 1964–1984 military dictatorship slogan of ‘too much land for too few Indians’ or simply accuse Indigenous peoples of being ‘fake Indians’.

Not surprisingly, the ‘time-frame’ argument has been the subject of fierce opposition and intense mobilisation on the part of the Indigenous movement. Although Indigenous peoples of Brazil always resisted colonisation through organised rebellions and wars against invaders and land-grabbers, the current pan-Indigenous movement in defence of legal rights and ancestral territories started in the 1970s, initially under the umbrella of the Catholic organisation CIMI, Conselho Indigenista Missionário (Indigenous Missionary Council), which sponsored meetings among regional Indigenous groups to discuss needs and demands. By 1978, several regional Indigenous organisations were coming together against the military dictatorship’s proposal to ‘emancipate’ Indigenous peoples – a cynical suggestion of liberation that in reality would allow the commercialisation and trading of Indigenous lands. In 1980, a group of Indigenous leaders founded UNI, União das Nações Indígenas (Indigenous Nations Union), which would become the most successful pan-Indigenous organisation in Brazil: their skilful negotiating guaranteed the inclusion of fundamental Indigenous rights in the post-dictatorship 1988 Constitution, especially articles 231 and 232, which respectively granted Indigenous peoples the right to keep their traditional practices, beliefs and territories, and to defend their own interests. Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak’s performance in the 1987 constitutional debates, in which he delivered a speech against the violation of Indigenous rights while painting his face in traditional style, has become the most iconic moment of the Constituent Assembly.

The Constituent Assembly was followed by a period of relative stability under a neoliberal democracy that nevertheless sponsored the increasing extraction of natural resources and deforestation. The election of ex-military Bolsonaro as president in 2018 brought back the rhetoric of the 1970s’ dictatorship in favour of a supposed ‘emancipation’ of Indigenous peoples, and violent, undisguised and systematic attacks against Indigenous rights, land-grabbing and invasion of Indigenous territories. On the judicial and political front, these attacks have supported the ‘time frame’ argument, trying to push it into law.

Indigenous mobilisation against the ‘time-frame’ and other forms of violence and racism has happened on the political and juridical fronts (with Indigenous lawyers and lawmakers pressing to overturn attempts to officialise it) and on the streets. The ability to maintain or recover original land and territory has always been at the core of Indigenous activism. For most native peoples in Brazil and the Americas, land rights are often synonymous with the ability to follow traditional practices and beliefs. Most Indigenous peoples see themselves as guardians of forests, rivers and mountains, which they regard as their relatives and ancestors. For these reasons, in the last two decades Indigenous peoples have been at the forefront of environmental activism in Latin America. A common slogan in Indigenous activism in Brazil is that Indigenous peoples belong to the land instead of the land belonging to them. It is not surprising, then, that during the Bolsonaro government there were massive demonstrations when the ‘time frame’ proposition was being voted on in Congress, in addition to the demonstrations and encampments that happen every year (for example, the Free Land Camp that happens every April in Brasília). On the political front, the Indigenous activist Sonia Guajajara ran for vice-president in the 2018 presidential elections with a platform that defended ‘good living’ or bom viver (on the ticket of Guilherme Boulos, the candidate for PSOL – Socialism and Liberty Party). In the same year, a Wapichana woman, Joênia Wapichana, was elected to the national Congress, together with many Indigenous mayors and councillors in local elections. In the 2022 Congressional elections, although Joênia was not re-elected, Sonia Guajajara and Célia Xakriabá were, doubling the Indigenous representation. Immediately after coming into power in 2023, president Lula da Silva appointed Guajajara as head of the newly-created Ministry for Indigenous Peoples and Wapichana as president of FUNAI (National Foundation for Indigenous Affairs), the first-ever Indigenous person to assume that role.

Indigenous Resistance through Literature and Visual Arts

Along with juridical, political and street activism, the arts have emerged (particularly since about 2020) as a new and powerful arm of the Indigenous movement. Several creative fields – literature, visual arts, cinema and music – have joined the legal and juridical battle in defence of Indigenous rights and traditional territories, by exposing to wide audiences the physical and legal attacks made against Indigenous peoples during Brazil’s long history of colonial and colonialist violence. At the same time, the arts are also working in areas that go beyond the reach of the legal and the juridical. Their collective work has been using epistemic tactics that challenge colonialist conventions and knowledge systems. These epistemic changes start with their mere presence in spaces that have traditionally excluded Indigenous cultural production and Indigenous bodies, such as literary festivals, bookshops, museums, art galleries and universities. In what many Indigenous artists have dubbed retomada (reclaiming, occupation), Indigenous writers, filmmakers and visual artists have been main features in festivals and exhibitions in the galleries and museums of the most important cities in Brazil. Their presence in these spaces not only challenges what Sonia Guajajara described as the feeling of being constantly made aware that we ‘are in the wrong place, that we were not meant to be there’ (2019), but also questions established notions of what literature, cinema, music or visual arts are or should be.

Needless to say, all Indigenous groups had their own artistic production before the arrival of the Portuguese: this included narrative and poetry (in oral forms), visual arts (basketry, feather art, body painting, ceramics, architecture), music and dance, and many groups continue these practices today. These art forms are usually collective and play various roles in the communities, being related to activities such as cooking, fishing, hunting, planting, giving birth, providing spiritual protection, rituals, healing, dreaming and so on. Some of these art forms, particularly narrative ones, have long registered the changes brought about by colonialism and protested against those changes. From the end of the nineteenth century, narrative forms also began to be printed and published, though usually under the name of a mediator, often a traveller, a priest or an anthropologist who listed the authors as ‘informants’. It is only since the late 1980s, and more widely from the 2010s, that Indigenous peoples from all over Brazil have started to sign their own works individually or collectively, as well as to make use of Western media and genres to target non-Indigenous audiences. The writer Daniel Munduruku explains that individually signing works of Indigenous literature is a phenomenon that dates back to the rise of the Indigenous movement in the wake of the Constituent Assembly, in the mid 1980s, and that has become more ubiquitous with the entry of young Indigenous women and men into universities, particularly with the creation in 2012 of quotas for Indigenous students in public universities.

The first writer to describe herself publicly as an Indigenous author was Eliane Potiguara, who started to publish poetry in the mid 1980s, at the same time as taking a very active role in the Indigenous movement. Born in Rio de Janeiro from parents who had to abandon their traditional territory in Paraíba, Potiguara has highlighted the fight of those who were obliged to leave their land and hide their culture, particularly women. ‘Brasil, que faço com a minha cara de índia?’ (Brazil, What Do I Do with My Indian Face?), first published in 2004, is one of Potiguara’s best-known poems. It delves into the issue of identity for Indigenous people who are supposed to have lost their culture: ‘Brazil … what do I do with my Indian face / and my spirits / my strength / my Tupã / and my circles? // What do I do with my Indian face / and my toré [ritual] / my sacredness / my cabôcos / and my land?’ (2018).Footnote ²

Along with Potiguara, Daniel Munduruku and Olivio Jekupé are the best-known names in contemporary Indigenous literature from Brazil. Originally from the state of Pará, in the Amazon, Munduruku lives in the countryside of São Paulo and is one of the main organisers of Indigenous literature events in the country, from weekly interviews and podcasts to conferences, festivals and workshops. He is also a prolific writer and his production includes Indigenous versions of Brazilian history that analyse colonisation from the point of view of the colonised (Reference Munduruku2017), as well as traditional tales, usually published in well-illustrated editions that target mostly young readers. Jekupé is a Guarani from the Krukutu village in the outskirts of São Paulo and, like Munduruku, has published an extensive list of books directed at young readers. Both make a point in presenting their works regularly at elementary and secondary schools, as they believe that a function of Indigenous literature is to educate non-Indigenous people about Amerindian cultures.

Since the 2010s, the Brazilian publishing scene has seen the arrival of another type of Indigenous literature: theoretical or philosophical essays that find acceptance among academic readers, particularly those involved in environmental issues. One example is Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert’s The Falling Sky (Reference Kopenawa, Albert, Elliot and Dundy2013), which was originally published in French (2010) and later in Portuguese (2015). Considered one of the most important books recently published in Brazil, it is an attempt (in some sense, not dissimilar to Munduruku’s or Jekupé’s) at teaching non-Indigenous audiences (or whites, as they are called in the book) about Yanomami culture, explicitly as a way to deter Western extractivism in the Amazon forest. Kopenawa and Albert’s book is important because it is the first book-length testimony by an Amazonian shaman and the first ever to offer a thorough analysis of Western extractivism from the point of view of an Indigenous Amazonian native. In addition, The Falling Sky offers key theoretical and philosophical insights into Yanomami ways of seeing the forest and points to conceptual differences between Indigenous Amazonia and Western ways of thinking, particularly with regard to what is normally called ‘nature’ in Western traditions. The Falling Sky has also become an important inspiration for Indigenous artists and activists, as a written Indigenous source that confirms and brings together philosophies and ways of living common to various Indigenous peoples of lowland South America, while being strongly grounded on specific Yanomami beliefs. At the core of these philosophies is the idea that humans are part of affective networks that involve not only their own species, but other living and dead beings, and what Western languages tend to refer to as ‘spirits’ (which is a much more complex concept in Yanomami and Amerindian thought and includes the ‘spirits’ of non-human beings) and even entities that Western science considers ‘inanimate’, such as rivers and mountains.

In a related genre, Ailton Krenak has published a series of very short books based on the oral interventions he has made in the last few years, challenging Western capitalist assumptions about, for example, the importance of work, the meaning of ‘humanity’ or why the idea of ‘the future’ is not found in native Brazilian cultures. Published by the prestigious Companhia das Letras (with some translated into English), these mini-books have reached a wide readership interested in alternatives to the political establishment (Krenak Reference Krenak2020a, Reference Krenak2020b).

The dramatic rise in publication of Indigenous authors in the last five years is challenging assumptions long held in Brazilian society about what it means to be Indigenous. As the academic and popular success of authors such as Kopenawa and Krenak demonstrates, Indigenous literature has the ability to invert the still popular nineteenth-century socio-evolutionist view that Amerindian cultures and points of view are backward, savage, inferior and therefore destined to be ‘improved’ and to ‘progress’ or disappear: these books’ success lies precisely in their radical approach to pressing contemporary issues, such as climate disaster and social inequality – an approach that is seen not as something from the past but, on the contrary, as presenting potential solutions for the future.

Indigenous Visual Arts in the Amazon: Jaider Esbell and Denilson Baniwa

The cultural field that has seen by far the most dramatic changes in production and public recognition is contemporary visual arts, which will be the focus of the remainder of our analysis.Footnote ³ In the last four years, some of the most prestigious art venues in the country have held exhibitions featuring works by artists such as Arissana Pataxó, Daiara Tukano, Denilson Baniwa, Glicéria Tupinambá, Gustavo Caboco, Jaider Esbell and Naine Terena, among many others. Like the writers mentioned earlier, all of these artists participate actively in the movement for Indigenous rights in their communities and at a national level, and their works are often thematically and organically linked to those movements, being also frequently produced for and exhibited at activist events, including events protesting against the ‘time frame’. Some of these artists define themselves as ‘artivists’, as did Jaider Esbell, whose tragic death in 2021 shook both the art world and the Indigenous movement in Brazil. In a television interview on the occasion of the opening of the 2021 exhibition Moquém_Surarî, which he curated, Esbell declared: ‘I am not a visual artist. What I try, maybe, is to do politics, cosmopolitics’.Footnote ⁴ In the fields of philosophy and history of science, the term ‘cosmopolitics’ is usually associated with Isabelle Stengers’ essays compiled, in English, in the books Cosmopolitics I (Reference Stengers2010) and Cosmopolitics II (Reference Stengers2011).Footnote ⁵ It is impossible to know whether Esbell’s use of the term was directly connected with her work, but in any case, Stengers’ use of ‘cosmopolitics’ to refer to an ‘ecology of knowledges’ resonates well with Esbell’s critique of the limitations of Western thought.

Several examples of Esbell’s cosmopolitics can be found in Carta ao velho mundo (Letter to the Old World, 2018–2019), an artwork that consists of physical interventions into a 1972 Brazilian publication titled Galeria Delta da pintura universal (Delta’s Universal Gallery of Painting, a volume that drew on an older Italian multi-volume set called Enciclopedia universale dell’arte), which, in spite of its over-inclusive title, did not feature any Indigenous art. Esbell intervened in the volume by redacting, drawing, painting and writing on every single one of its 477 pages.Footnote ⁶ Many of those interventions denounce violence committed against specific Indigenous leaders by land-grabbers; others mention the poisoning of food from mercury contamination caused by mining in the Amazon rivers and the environmental destruction caused by extractivism and large-scale agriculture. Several pages make reference to colonialism, the enslaving of Indigenous peoples after the arrival of the Portuguese and the persecution of native religions by Christians.

But Esbell’s interventions are not limited to direct denunciation. Many of them put into practice his cosmopolitics by questioning, from his Indigenous Macuxi perspective, various Western cultural assumptions. Several pages of the book, for example, had their written text occluded by drawings of animals. Taking the place of an alphabetical historical narrative that celebrates ‘art history’ in Western terms, these animals stand for another kind of teaching, for an alternative narrative that is not necessarily human-centred and that is based on affective ties between humans and other kinds of beings. His intervention into Andrea del Castagno’s Crucifixion and Saints (c. 1441), for example, includes drawings of birds pecking at the cross (see Figure 2.2). At first sight, the animals appear to create a humorous, potentially disrespectful commentary on one of the gravest, most serious icons of Western culture: Christ’s crucifixion. Although that may of course be the case, the animals also help us to imagine another narrative, not necessarily humorous: as in so many traditional Amazonian stories where animals save humans or proto-humans from danger, the birds could be there to help free Christ from the cross, while adding Amazonian animal protagonism to a biblical story.

Figure 2.2 Intervention into Andrea del Castagno’s Crucifixion and Saints by Jaider Esbell, from his Carta ao Velho Mundo, 2018–2019

(© Galeria Jaider Esbell de Arte Indígena Contemporânea, by permission).

As mentioned, Esbell was never comfortable with being called a ‘visual artist’. He wanted to go beyond ‘mere visuality’ (Esbell Reference Esbell2018b: 37). In his own words, his work was designed to ‘be in the soul of whoever is nearby’ (é projetado para estar na alma de quem esteja próximo, Reference Esbell2018b: 115); in other words, it was designed to affect those around him. This desire to affect entails layers of ‘extrapolated senses and dimensions’, a loss of control and a feeling of ‘being in a non-place, sensing a non-image, not finding time/space, not finding form’ (Reference Esbell2018b: 115). For Esbell, then, his art should affect viewers by freeing them from expected forms and putting them in touch with unexpected, other, non-Western forms of knowledge.

This can be seen in his acrylic painting Feitiço para salvar a Raposa Serra do Sol (A Spell to Save Raposa Serra do Sol Reservation, 2019). Raposa Serra do Sol is an Indigenous territory that took a long time to be demarcated – the process only ended in 2008, after several years of judicial disputes, which included the coining of the ‘time frame’ thesis and a lot of actual violence against Indigenous peoples in their territories. The marks of centuries of oppression caused by agro-industrial exploitation in the region are still there – in the young Indigenous people who never learned their native languages (because their elders were forbidden to); in the land that mostly became pasture due to cattle ranching; and in the illegal gold-mining enterprises that have damaged the environment. If Raposa Serra do Sol needs to be healed by a spell, those are some of the symptoms. The painting portrays the assistants who will help to carry out the spell: that is, the animals. Several animals are represented, connecting the painting to the series of Macuxi (and other Indigenous Amazonian) narratives that involve the ‘father’ or other ancestor of some creature – usually a talking ancestor, from a time before humans existed. Some of these animals have the appearance of a known animal – there are fish, a jaguar, an armadillo, the heads of some birds. Others are not so recognisable and look like molluscs or even bacteria. They all inhabit the same plane – there is no perspective that organises them and leads the viewer to distinguish the foreground from the background. And yet the painting appears to form a whole, in a way that resembles a map, as if the spiritual powers of the lands and waters of the Raposa Serra do Sol were being ‘mapped’, to be called upon when casting the spell.

In this painting and in other works by Esbell, Raposa Serra do Sol is both the Indigenous land and a symbol for anti-racist struggle. The fight for demarcation encountered powerful reactionary resistance in the state of Roraima and in several national organisations (such as the Brazilian armed forces). More than a decade after the demarcation process ended in 2008, it was still common to see stickers on car windows in Roraima’s capital, Boa Vista, with sayings such as ‘Down with the demarcation of Raposa Serra do Sol’ or ‘I support the island-type demarcation’.Footnote ⁷ These were not displayed only by large-scale farmers or by people who would profit directly from the use of the land. It became an ideological struggle with racist tones: much of the regional media would either repeat the classic de-authorising slogan that the Macuxi were fake Indians or reproduce the myth of the ‘Indian who does not work’ as an ‘argument’ against demarcation. Besides the obvious racism, this ‘argument’ presupposes the Lockean notion that ownership of land comes from working it, one of the ideological drives and part of the liberal justification of colonialism. By picturing Raposa Serra do Sol in terms of the animal spirits that inhabit its lands and waters, Esbell opposes this utilitarian view of territory.

In 2020, Esbell exhibited a pair of giant colourful snakes intertwined around the pillars of Santa Tereza bridge in Belo Horizonte as part of the street-art festival CURA. Titled Entidades, a word that for many Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian peoples can mean ‘spirits’ or supernatural beings, the snakes were subsequently on display in Porto Alegre and on the lake outside the São Paulo Biennale pavilion in 2021. Very colourful during the day, and illuminated from within at night, like giant lanterns, the snakes became a popular attraction in the three cities where they were exhibited, with people of all ages travelling especially to their location to be photographed near them. Yet not all reactions were positive, as some people also threatened to destroy the snakes and, particularly during the Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre exhibitions, their author became the target of vicious abuse on social media, mostly from attackers who described themselves as adherents of evangelical Christianity (a movement that has gained force in Brazil and that has much support in the country’s congress and senate). Such strong reactions are related to the different symbolic meaning attributed to snakes in Christian mythology (which sees them as embodiments of the devil that caused Adam and Eve to be expelled from Paradise) and in Amazonian Indigenous traditions (where they are often associated with the big Amazonian rivers and seen as ancestors and relatives of humans).

The racist attacks against Esbell’s sculptures are a clear example of the epistemological and affective shock that Indigenous art is able to provoke in Brazilian society. Not that these attacks were necessarily extraordinary: evangelical Christians have been known to burn down Indigenous prayer houses and Afro-Brazilian Candomblé venues. In the case of Esbell’s snakes, what is interesting is the agency attributed to the artworks themselves, whose mere existence in a public space was deemed a threat – in other words, the snakes were seen as able to affect a desired moral order. For some evangelical Christians, there is no place for spiritual or epistemological manifestations in public spaces other than their own form of Christianity. Moreover, those who support the censoring of Indigenous spirituality or forms of knowledge in public spaces are also likely to accuse Indigenous peoples of being ‘fake Indians’. The only alternative for Indigenous peoples, according to this logic, is hiding or conversion, becoming ‘non-Indian’. Esbell’s monumental sculptures brought Indigenous cosmogonic beliefs into the public view, affirming their existence in bright colours, forcing them to be seen and commented on on in the media. And forcing racist hatred to become visible.

Like other Indigenous artists, Esbell’s artistic practice went beyond a single medium – besides painting, he also wrote fiction, curated exhibitions, founded an art gallery, hosted radio programmes and podcasts. Moreover, he theorised constantly about contemporary Indigenous art, a concept he was highly invested in, through speeches, interviews and in programmatic texts. The result was a kind of never-ending performance, registered in hundreds of social media posts and videos in the years before his untimely death. He had a sense of mission, of being a representative both of native artists and of his people, the Macuxi. As he once said, ‘representativeness is intrinsic’ (Esbell Reference Esbell2018a) – that is, he could not avoid being a representative, but if he had to be one, then he also had to constantly destabilise the ways in which Indigenous peoples were perceived in Brazilian society. He had to fight de-authorisation with his own ever-performing body and his art. It was as if he was trying to use the potentialities of several media to capture a cosmology that went beyond what could be seen, read or heard, and which could, to use his words, ‘penetrate the soul’ of his viewers. This is the meaning of cosmopolitics in Esbell’s work: if political change is to happen in the Amazon and involve Indigenous peoples, it has to include an understanding of and affective connection with the various cosmogonies that make up the Amazonian world.

Esbell is not the only Indigenous artist to invoke ancestral cosmogonies in their work. In a talk for the University of Zurich immediately following Jaider Esbell’s death, Denilson Baniwa told the traditional story of the three prawns, ancestors of the Baniwa. Set in a time prior to the existence of humans, the story describes how the prawns were originally recovered by the primordial jaguar grandmother from the bottom of the river, inside a finger bone of one of her grandson’s victims, whose remains had been thrown in the water. Fed and well cared for, the three prawns (called ‘those from inside the bone’) went on to transform themselves into several other creatures (e.g. woodpeckers, crickets) and to initiate the transformation of the universe. They turned fruit into the animals we have today and into proto-humans, the ‘people who knew everything’ (Cornelio and Wright Reference Cornelio and Wright1999). Baniwa has depicted the prawns in some of his digital art as luminescent beings, set over what appears to be a satellite image of water, for example in his Camarão – Tapuya (see Figure 2.3). In his talk, he compared the task of the original prawns, which was to repopulate a world that had been emptied by the constant wars caused by the jaguars, with the work of contemporary Indigenous artists, who have to reconstitute a world that has been nearly emptied of Indigenous perspectives:

Figure 2.3 Camarão – Tapuya by Denilson Baniwa, Reference Baniwa2021

(© Denilson Baniwa, by permission).

The comparison is illustrative of the affective connections that characterise contemporary Indigenous art: artists work in constant communication and consultation with each other and with other Indigenous activists and leaders. These processes certainly include a great deal of intellectual exchange, but they also rely strongly on affective ties based on love and respect. Indigenous individuals in Brazil refer to each other as relatives (parentes) and it is precisely this concept of family that can best translate their way of working together. Similarly to families, there is often the need to overlook or negotiate differences, but those differences are seen as less important than their shared history of being on the oppressed side of colonialism, as well as the experience of being and doing things together. Gustavo Caboco recently referred to it as a ‘methodology of going together’ (ir junto), of speaking for, and in consultation with, the collective.

In one of Baniwa’s images, the bright orange prawn has a human inside its body. This image is part of a series of works – some of them digital, others acrylic paintings – that depict individual animals (a peccary, a frog, a beetle, a tortoise, a snake, a vulture, a fish, an alligator) each with a human inside its body. The images invoke the ‘fathers of animals’ already mentioned, who, at the beginning of time, were all human like us. But ancestral time in Amazonian Indigenous cosmogonies does not usually refer to a period that is past and gone, but rather a time that can coexist with the present and that is periodically reinstated through ritual and through the work of the shaman. In most Amazonian cultures, shamans can transform into other animals and in that guise they are able to see the world that those animals see. This is done with the purpose of healing, solving conflict, deciding future actions and, above all, maintaining the equilibrium among all living things.

For Baniwa and Esbell, the work of visual artists is akin to the task of the shaman: Indigenous artists have to transit between different worlds and translate these worlds to one another. Dressed as a jaguar-shaman, Baniwa has made several performances in different parts of Brazil and outside the country. These performances have a healing and didactic purpose aimed at non-Indigenous society: they fight the invisibilisation and de-authorisation of Indigenous peoples by confronting non-Indigenous society with ‘Indians’ in spaces where they are normally not seen. In doing so, they aim to heal the contemporary maladies of non-Indigenous societies, such as pollution, monoculture and climate catastrophe. In 2018, followed by other Indigenous artists and collaborators, Baniwa ‘hacked’ (his word) the thirty-third São Paulo Biennale. In the final edit of the performance, uploaded onto Baniwa’s site, we see him looking at a few exhibits before buying a book at the gallery bookshop titled Breve história da arte (A Brief History of Art). In the next scene, he addresses an audience in front of a large-scale ethnographic portrait of two Selk’nam men from Tierra del Fuego. ‘Brief History of Art’, he says, holding the book, ‘so brief that I cannot see Indians in it. So brief, that it does not include Indigenous art’. Pointing at the photograph, he asks: ‘Is this an Indian? Is that an Indian? Is this how you want Indians to be? Stuck in the past, with no right to the future? They steal our image, they steal our time, they steal our art. Brief history of art. Theft. Theft. Theft. Theft. White art. Theft. Theft. Indians do not belong just to the past.’Footnote ⁸

In another talk in the same year, Baniwa described the jaguar-shaman as a ‘herald of the new times, who makes Indigenous memories become present and active in all places’ (Baniwa Reference Baniwa2018). This link between memory, tradition and contemporary art is central to the works by Esbell and Baniwa. For example, both have reworked drawings from pre-Cabraline petroglyphs, often through the use of recent technology, as in Baniwa’s projections on skyscrapers in the city of São Paulo in an event protesting the election of Bolsonaro to power in 2019. A 2022 solo exhibition of Baniwa at the Goethe Institut in Porto Alegre included a mural in which a traditional Arawak longhouse (maloca) was surrounded by various animals in the style of ancient petroglyphs. Painted in bright colours over a black background, the mural was reminiscent of Esbell’s works (it was most likely a homage to Esbell). The animals surrounding the house in a dark sky looked like constellations, establishing a clear connection between the cosmic order of the universe and the complex designs in the Baniwa maloca. The architecture of the maloca was also similar to the shape of a frog, one of the animals displayed.

By establishing a continuity between pre-European art and contemporary Indigenous art, Baniwa and Esbell offer a response to de-authorisation and to the freezing of Indigenous peoples in an imaginary past. They also reaffirm the uninterrupted presence of Indigenous peoples in the territory now called Brazil, reclaiming Indigenous rights to ancestral lands against ‘theses’ such as the ‘time frame’. Such rights are based on current and prior occupation but also, crucially, on affective ties between living Indigenous peoples and a network that includes all ancestors and their spirits, as well as the spirits of animals, plants, forests, rivers, mountains and so on. In many of his performances, the jaguar-shaman distributes flyers saying that the specific location of the performance is Indigenous land (Terra indígena). During an intervention that happened just a few months before the pandemic outbreak in 2020, on Paulista Avenue located in the most distinguished business zone of São Paulo, Baniwa recited a poem reminding the audience that all that the rich buildings framing the landscape were built on colonial territory over sacred Indigenous land: ‘All colonial territory / Is ancestral land, first of all / When all the scum is scraped off / Plastic, asphalt, metal / Untold stories in History / Oxygen fills the blood / Those who have always been from here know / São Paulo has always been / Indigenous land’.

The Northeastern Coast: The Art of Arissana Pataxó and Glicéria Tupinambá

If the connection between de-authorisation, invisibilisation and land-grabbing permeates the historical and present experience of most Indigenous peoples in Brazil – and in other parts of the Americas as well – working as a particular marker of anti-Indigenous racism, perhaps nowhere in Brazil is this more true than in the northeast region. Centuries of continuous colonial violence forced many Indigenous groups to forget their language and hide their traditions and spiritual beliefs, as described by Potiguara in the poem cited earlier in this chapter. The retomada (retaking or reclaiming) movements that took place after the 1988 Constitution saw many groups in the northeast, among them the Pataxó and Tupinambá, reclaim their ancestral lands while recovering and fostering the use of language, rituals and traditions. Northeastern Indigenous groups suffer constant physical violence and harassment, as well as frequent accusations that they are ‘fake Indians’ who do not legitimately have the right to their land. These groups are well organised and mobilised, and since the 2010s they have seen an impressive surge in artistic interventions.

Arissana Pataxó’s work Indigente, indi(o)gente, indigen(a)-te offers a poignant comment on the implication of the arts (in this case, photography) in processes of historical violence against Indigenous peoples in the Americas (see Figure 2.4). The work consists of a triptych with interventions into nineteenth-century black-and-white portraits of Indigenous persons (two of them in antique frames). In two of the portraits the individuals are sitting down, posing with blankets covering the lower part of their bodies. The middle photograph includes four persons holding typical Indigenous artefacts (bows, arrows, maracas, etc.). The portraits do not differ from other nineteenth-century ethnographic photographs apart from one detail: in her intervention, Pataxó erased the faces and the naked parts of the bodies of the posing subjects. They are blank, or rather blanked-out, portraits. The title of the triptych plays with the apparent – but etymologically ungrounded – connection between the words ‘indigent’ and ‘Indigenous’. In Brazilian Portuguese, the word ‘indigent’ means pauper or destitute, as it does in Latin, but it is also a legal and journalistic term used to describe unidentifiable dead bodies, particularly in the expression enterrado como indigente (buried as someone with no identity and no relatives).

Figure 2.4 Indigente, indi(o)gente, indigen(a)-te by Arissana Pataxó, 2020

Figure 2.4 long description.

(© Arissana Pataxó, by permission).

Figure 2.4Long description

The portraits on the left and right have antique frames and show individuals sitting down, with blankets covering the lower part of their bodies. The middle unframed photograph shows four people, one sitting and three standing, holding typical Indigenous items (bows, arrows, maracas, a stone axe, etc.). The artist has erased the faces and the naked parts of the subjects’ bodies.

The original portraits, taken in Paris by E. Thiesson in 1844, belonged to the Museé de l’Homme’s collection of Botocudo (Krenak) photographs, which are now housed in the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. Little is known about the individuals who posed for the portraits, but it can be assumed that they were among the various Indigenous individuals who were taken to Europe in the nineteenth century to be exhibited and/or studied as exotic humans. The original photographs emphasise the naked upper torso of men and a woman (the exposed breasts sexualise the woman for non-Indigenous viewers) and body piercings and ornaments. Photographs of Indigenous persons were common from the early days of the camera and many studies have discussed the topic at length, with emphasis being placed on the violent coloniality of such practices (Bell Reference Bell2011). For our purposes, it is enough to say that this type of photograph did not usually identify the subjects, beyond minimal information about their ethnic group. In most cases, the Indigenous people photographed were meant to represent ‘the Botocudo’, ‘the Bororo’, and so on (if not the generic ‘Indian’). Pataxó’s intervention equates the lost identity of the photographed subjects to the lack of identity of destitute dead bodies which are buried without a name, without relatives or friends – in other words, cut off from any affective connections. By removing their faces from the portraits, she makes the violence explicit: these are portraits without faces, without markers, without identity. In other words, the photographs of unidentified Indigenous individuals that populate European museums have transformed those individuals into ‘indigents’, unknown corpses, separated from their life history, their family, their community – in the same way that the photographed individuals themselves were separated from their communities when taken to Europe to be exhibited and studied.

By linking the word indigente to indígena, Pataxó also interpellates the racist dehumanisation of Indigenous individuals by Western knowledge practices, a fact that becomes even more explicit with the poetic transformation of the word indigente into indi(o)gente (Indian [is] human). The last part of the title/poem, indigen(a)-te, calls the viewer to ‘indigenise yourself’ – which can be read in different ways: for Indigenous viewers, it can be presumed to be a call to reconnect with one’s Indigenous roots, to become ‘more Indigenous’. For non-Indigenous viewers, it is probably an invitation to learn Indigenous ways of being or to become an ally, to create affective links with the Indigenous world. This last element of the title allows us to extend the reading of Pataxó’s erasure of the faces and undressed parts of the bodies beyond nineteenth-century photographic practices. The blanking out of Indigenous identity in the portraits can then be read as a comment on the forced erasure and invisibilisation of Indigeneity in Brazil’s colonial and recent history through de-authorisation, a process faced by all Indigenous peoples, be it the Krenak of the photographs or the Pataxó: Indigenous peoples have either to hide and/or erase their Indigenous markers or have their Indigenous identities de-authorised, de-recognised, erased by others. The way out of that process is to indigenar-se, to ‘indigenise oneself’, to assume, in other words, one’s ancestral roots.

Ancestral memory plays a crucial role in the work of Glicéria (also known as Célia) Tupinambá, who describes the process of creating her Manto Tupinambá (Tupinambá Mantle) as a ‘cosmo-agony’:

The three images she describes tell the story of the ritual mantles used by the Tupinambá people in sixteenth-century Brazil. Those were sumptuous mantles made of feathers that included a body-length cloak and a headpiece. Only eleven of those mantles are still extant, all of them in European collections, taken by ships to European destinations centuries ago. None remained with the Tupinambá people of Bahia.

According to Glicéria Tupinambá, the sixteenth-century mantles were still alive in the oral culture of her people when they saw the mantle again. The elder Dona Nivalda visited an exhibition in São Paulo, in the year 2000, in which one of the original mantles was displayed, on loan from a Danish museum. Dona Nivalda petitioned for the mantle to be given back to the Tupinambá people and, although the request was denied, this inspired Glicéria to make a new mantle in 2006 as an offering to the encantados, the supernatural or spiritual beings that are part of the cosmology of her people, and to make other versions afterwards. The creative process involved travelling to France to see a mantle in the Musée du Quai Branly collections and studying images of the other mantles, but above all it involved talking to the encantados in dreams and visions. This is what she describes as ‘cosmo-agony’ – a trance-like state of deep, visceral communication with the ancestors and, crucially, with the mantles themselves: ‘I am not the one who weaves the mantle: the mantle weaves itself’. The mantle, she adds, ‘guided her’ in making its return to the Tupinambá in Bahia, where it acquired a life and a purpose for its people (see Figure 2.5).Footnote ¹⁰ The new mantles perform an epistemological repatriation of the cultural artifacts stolen by European colonialism. The old mantles that are preserved in Europe will remain there as a kind of cosmogonical penance for the colonial violence her people suffered:

Figure 2.5 Manto tupinambá by Glicéria Tupinambá, Reference Tupinambá2020, for the project Um Outro Céu

(© Glicéria Tupinambá/Um Outro Céu, by permission).

As we can see, Glicéria’s description of her creative process and of her people’s relationship with the mantle is steeped in an emotive vocabulary (agony, penance, forgiveness) with echoes in Christianity, specifically the story of Christ’s suffering. But similarly to Esbell’s rereading of Christ’s crucifixion, Glicéria’s description actually subverts the narrative of sacrifice and forgiveness: agony refers not to Christ, but to a process of trance that allows her to communicate with the very Tupinambá encantados that centuries of Christian missionary activity tried to expurgate, and with the mantle itself (whose agency and sentiency would not be recognised by conventional Christianity either). Likewise, ‘penance’ is a punishment reserved not for Christ but for the European museums, that is, the heirs of the colonial agents responsible for severing the Tupinambá mantles from their affective connections with their own people.

Conclusion

If racism against Indigenous peoples is characterised by de-authorisation, that is, the denial of Indigenous identity and/or the pronouncement of their imminent disappearance, anti-racist Indigenous art and literature, as the examples in this chapter demonstrate, is a reaffirmation of Indigenous existence in the present and in connection with ancestral territory. This involves not only denouncing violence, land invasions and legal attempts to curtail Indigenous rights, but also what Jaider Esbell described as cosmopolitics: being part of affective networks that include live and dead humans, animals, plants, mountains, rivers, ‘spirits’ and ancestral artefacts. Affective networks, that is, that constantly challenge, at an epistemological level, the anthropocentric logic of capitalism.