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 What were the significant contributions of our native
peoples to this place we call Brazil? Except for some toponyms, none.
Indians are only good for postcards and for people
from non-governmental organizations to earn a living.
By Janer Cristaldo
Translation: Tereza Braga
"I think Indians now have a path for the future, and this is what my work is
about, to educate Brazilian society about the philosophy of the indigenous
civilization"—said Marcos Terena, in a recent interview for the magazine Caros
Amigos [Dear Friends]. These declarations by chief leader Terena brought me back many
memories of my teaching days in [the southern Brazilian state of] Santa Catarina. The
degree in Philosophy at UFSC [Federal State University of Santa Catarina] included in its
curriculum, as I found out, an exotic course—nothing less than "History of the
Philosophy of Santa Catarina". As a country, Brazil has not even created what we
could call its own philosophy yet. But Santa Catarina already had, in the 1980s, nothing
less than a history of the islander philosophy (1). Therefore, in this country of ours,
where Marilena Chauí or Carlos Nelson Coutinho can dispute with Kant or Plato the
prestigious title of philosopher, no one should be surprised by the fact that Santa
Catarina has its own history of philosophy or that there should be, in Terena's imaginary
world, a philosophy of the indigenous civilization.
While the Phoenicians, several millennia before Christ, had already discovered the
alphabet, now, two thousand years after the death of the Jew, Brazilian indigenous
cultures have hardly arrived at a preamble of a grammar. Cultures with no writing system,
they had to borrow an alphabet from the colonizers in order to express their languages
graphically. Defenseless in time, living in an economy of hunting and gathering, they
still have no words to designate new things created by human ingenuity. The Terena
language has no word for train, for example. They say "ru mumocóti
ituko-xané". Which means, sort of, "the one who walks on the rail".
Also according to Marcos Terena, Indians can only count to three. After three, it is
too many. Which means that our indigenous peoples, who can't even use the five fingers of
one hand to create an arithmetic and with no specific words in their language for things
that are part of our daily life today, can already form in their noodles the sophisticated
concept of philosophy. And not any philosophy, but the philosophy of the indigenous
civilization. The way the Brazilian public university system is going, we should not be
surprised if tomorrow we are offered a course in the History of Brazilian Indigenous
Philosophy.
Next week [this article was originally written in April 2000] we celebrate the 500th
anniversary of the Discovery of Brazil. A "Marcha Indígena 2000" [Indigenous
March 2000] arrived yesterday in Brasília and is proceeding to Bahia in order to protest
the scheduled celebration events. They will save no efforts to create confrontation with
police, which will provide exciting headlines abroad. With the ceremonies approaching, an
anti-western hysteria has been overcoming both the domestic and foreign presses.
There is a story circulating now in Brazil, with the attributes of dogma, that there
were six million natives at the time the Portuguese arrived and that today there are only
350 thousand. Therefore, what we have here is another genocide committed by European
whites. According to indigenous leaders, there is nothing to celebrate. Because Brazil
belongs to the Indians and all white people are invaders. This figure of six million is
not fortuitous. It goes back to the holocaust. It is arrived at by bad math and the figure
is created through a complicated intellectual juggling based on migratory, linguistic and
archeological estimates.
Deep inside, it is a desire to condemn the white colonizer and, by extension, Europe
itself. Which coincides with these times when crack-brained utopias are on the low. Even
if we in fact had all those millions of natives, how can anyone prove the massacre? How
many actually died as a result of tribal wars, endemic diseases, pandemic diseases,
malnutrition and even war-like confrontation with the colonizers? Nobody knows.
Without these slandered navigators, there would be no Brazil today, or Latin America,
with everything that those two concepts mean, for the best and for the worst. What were
the significant contributions of our native peoples to this place we call Brazil? Except
for some toponyms, none. Indians are only good for postcards and for people from
non-governmental organizations to earn a living. They are, yes, human beings—a
condition that the clergy, now their defenders, denied them—and they should be
treated as such. And emancipated, too. But not all of them wish to be emancipated, because
it means they will have to start obeying the law and accepting responsibility for certain
acts which are defined as crimes. What would be a dream for a Representative in Congress
constitutes a right for a savage.
In a revealing document drafted in July of 1981 in Geneva, the Christian Church World
Council recommended to missionaries "to instruct and teach reading to the indigenous
peoples, in their mother tongues, inculcating in them courage, determination, boldness,
bravery and even a little bit of an aggressive spirit, so that they can learn how to
protect their rights. It is necessary to take into consideration that the Indians of these
countries are apathetical, malnourished and lazy. It is necessary for them to see the
white man as a permanent enemy, not only their enemy but also an enemy of the ecological
system of Amazônia. It is necessary to awaken in them whatever pride they have inside
(…) It is necessary to insist in the concept of ethnicity so as to awaken in them the
natural instinct of segregation, or the pride to belong to an ethnic nobility, the
conscience of being better than the white man."
This document, published two decades ago in the Brazilian press, is said to be
apocryphal by the defenders of the Indian cause. Maybe it is. But its authors—because
even apocryphal documents have authors—were anticipating what we see today. Bugres
(2) who have never evolved enough to even have a grammar now wield concepts such as
philosophy and genocide in order to condemn the immigrants who really created this
country.
There is a film running in Brazilian movie theaters now called The Insider. The
film denounces the maneuvers of the American tobacco industry, which spread cancer all
over the world by omitting data about the effects of nicotine. Every smoker who sees the
film walks away in horror of the cynicism of the Yankee capitalists. Well, if the Indians
of this continent have made any one truly universal contribution to humanity, this legacy
is tobaccoism. But nobody wants to remember that.
(1) [translator's note]: the state has many islands off its coast.
(2) [translator's note]: bugre = coarse or savage person
Cristaldo is an author, translator and journalist and suffers São
Paulo. His e-mail address is cristal@baguete.com.br
Tereza Braga is a professional free-lance translator accredited by the
American Translators Association. She specializes in technical and legal translation, as
well as simultaneous interpretation, for corporations doing business with Brazil. Tereza
came to the U.S. in 1984 as Trade Promotion Officer with the Consulate of Brazil in
Dallas, where she served for nine years. She can be reached at tbragaling@cs.com
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