I had already met Ailton Krenak in the mid-1990s when, walking with my sister Clarice, who is an anthropologist, through the streets of Olinda, Pernambuco, we happened to meet him and filmmaker Vincent Carelli, creator of Videos nas Aldeias. We then went to the house where they were staying and I was fascinated by their stories, with Vincent telling us about being stung by a stingray in the Xingu and how he threw himself against the walls in so much pain. I met Ailton again years later, when he started staying at the house of the late João Fortes in Rio de Janeiro, which was next door to mine in an old workers’ quarter. Then, talking to him, I proposed publishing a book of his interviews and testimonies in the collection Encontros – The Art of the Interview. He agreed on the spot (years later, he would recall this story in a conversation with rapper Emicida, saying that he told me he didn’t write texts, and that I replied that his speeches were texts – Ailton said it was at that moment that he became a writer). It was a challenging project, with years of research to bring together the interviews Ailton had conducted over his three decades of activity. To finalize the volume, I conducted an original interview with him in 2013, which was originally published in Nau magazine, which I was editing. The Encontros book came out in 2015, organized by me and presented by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and ended up being of great importance for Ailton Krenak’s trajectory, showing the public not only his political importance, but also that he is one of the greatest living thinkers. [Sergio Cohn]
How did your work as an indigenous leader begin?
I’m always faced with this question, because I ask myself it too, and it’s very common for people who work with me to ask it when they get a bit more intimate. They ask: “Ailton, when did you become an indigenous spokesperson?”. Then I look for myself, go back a bit and end up going to my childhood. Because it reminds me of the discomfort I felt when I was a kid, realizing that the other person looking at me was always asking me such a silly question, “where did you come from?”. When the settlers in our region saw me, they usually called me “Cape Verde”. They were probably from the Portuguese colony and thought I was from Cape Verde, back in Africa. 50 years later, people meet me in my office or on a street in Belo Horizonte and ask me: “Are you Peruvian?”. Or Indian, or Arab. Then I ask Brazilians, my fellow citizens, why is it easier to identify a Peruvian, an Indian, a Bolivian, or even a Japanese walking down our streets and not one who is Indian, a native of here?
And the other discomfort was identifying myself as an Indian, because Indian is a Portuguese mistake, plagiarizing Oswald, who said that when the Portuguese arrived in Brazil it was pouring rain, so he dressed the Indian, but if it had been a sunny day the Indian would have undressed the Portuguese, and everyone would be walking around naked. That’s still true today, and I’ve updated it to say that “indio” is a misunderstanding of Portuguese, not a mistake, because the Portuguese man left to go to India. But he lost track and came crashing down here in the tropical lands of Pindorama, saw the passers-by on the beach and ended up stamping them as Indians. That wrong stamp has remained valid for the rest of our relationships to this day, and the answer to such a direct and simple question could be just as direct and simple. When did I realize that I had to do these things that I’ve been doing for the last 50 years of my life, which is almost repeating the same mantra, saying to this other person: “Hey, man, that figure you’re seeing in the mirror isn’t me, it’s you, that little mirror you’re selling me isn’t me, that’s a mistake”?
This went from feeling to practice with my relatives who were older than me, who were being sent from the countryside to the miserable outskirts of Brazil, which happens everywhere, in the North, the South, anywhere. In Rio Grande do Sul, which is all pretty, tidy and German, there are also peripheries, misery and poverty. People have made a mental sanitation of imagining that some areas of our country are so well colonized that there are no more favelas, no more crime, no more misery overflowing from the edge of streams and sewers. In reality, there isn’t a place in Brazil where misery doesn’t overflow; only those who are blind or have lost their sense of smell can’t smell the shit. The relationships between the different cultures and peoples that have come to live here in Brazil are a reflection of the environmental state I’m describing. That’s why they are so disqualified. People relate to each other in such an ostentatious way, the poor flaunt their anger and misery and affront others with their 38 mm when they can, the rich affront everyone with their arrogance, with their shopping centers and their Mercedes Benz, as if we were in a crazy race where no one has anywhere to go, but everyone is running.
I spent some time with Danielle Miterrand in the last years of her life. After her husband François Miterrand died, she came to Brazil once a year. In some cases more than once. She was always involved in very important campaigns. One of them was the campaign for an inalienable good that we all need, which is water. Danielle saw that water was going through a process of becoming a commodity, and big companies, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, are buying up the planet’s natural water sources and putting it all on the counter. More and more people will have access to sewage and less and less pure drinking water. Can you imagine what a pain in the ass it will be if, when you want to drink pure water, you can’t access it because of the economic barrier around it? And there will be people with water and people without water, just as we already have people with money and people without money, people without land and people with land, we will have people without water and people with water. The warning about this water issue that Danielle brought to these parts mobilized the visit of some shamans from South America, Colombia, Peru and Brazil. She even took some wise men from a people who live in the Santa Marta mountains, on the Pacific coast, and some friends of mine on a tour with her in France to raise awareness in Europe about the market policy that was taking care of natural resources. Then one of the shamans, from a people in the Pacific, watching the Europeans rush to open roads, change nature, change the landscape, drill into the land, open canals, dams, everything, said that looking at this rush to transform the planet, he wanted to ask the whites: “This rush you’re in is taking you exactly where?”. That’s my question too. I believe that this place of my childhood, and that of other people too, was a place where people could be born, grow up and die in nature, looking for everything they needed to live. People and resources were more or less close by. People’s relationships in these places had a certain quality, but when we began to be invaded from all sides, eyes, nose, ears, the seven holes in our heads, from then on we were able to understand every external provocation.
The Indians who lived in my family’s region, the Krenak, were almost all expelled from their original territories and sent anywhere, with no address. Five or six generations after these expulsions, many people were left without any idea of their original address or where they came from. And then the Portuguese question: “Are you from Cape Verde?”, it could be from anywhere in the world, it doesn’t make any difference anymore, because this Indian has been uprooted from his cultural territory, a place where everything has meaning for him, and has gone wandering around the planet where every thing he sees opens up a new meaning for him, but he is no longer sure of anything.
From this feeling of banishment, did you go in search of your identity?
I clung to this question and went deep into the search for this identity. I knew from the start, even before the idea of an indigenous movement existed, that my personal choice to unveil this identity would open up a huge front, because identity implies the recognition of rights, the invention of new rights, the creation of new personas. The eruption of new identities means new rights, other relationship parameters. And whoever is making this statement must also prepare to command the guerrilla, the war, where the rearguard retreats and the vanguard advances, where the rearguard advances and the vanguard retreats. I think that in every sense, when the landless, when the first leaders realized that there were people who didn’t have access to a place to plant, to land, to a place of their own, and began a timid demand for land, it resulted in an immense movement in Brazil, the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, so immense that it spawned many offspring. Some of these expressions later translated into political power, new forces within the society we live in. In the case of the Indians, declaring an identity means claiming Brazil back.
Did you have other Indians in the media, in the press, anywhere else that you could use as examples?
Examples? No, because it wasn’t a very positive time for that kind of expression, because we were going through a period in the whole of South America, in the whole of the Southern Cone, when only generals were in charge. In Chile, Colombia, everywhere, it was all over. It was already the dictatorship of Pinochet, Geisel and his gang. There were only monsters on the outskirts. And here on the axis there were people saying that we were an island of peace and the wood was breaking. The Brazilian miracle… There’s a guy I became friends with later, called Shelton Davis, he’s a consultant for the World Bank on these development programs for Latin America, he was commissioned to do a report on Brazil in the 1970s; when he finished his report, he had picked a fight with almost all the governments in the Amazon basin and, above all, he had become an enemy of the Brazilian government, he published a book called Victims of the miracle. It’s a book about destruction. It shows when Brazil discovered that it could destroy itself from an environmental point of view, because Brazil became a Transamazonian construction site, the Perimetral Norte, this thing that Dilma’s government keeps pretending it’s inaugurating, it’s not inaugurating, it’s just taken the dictatorship’s package, scanned it, enhanced it with new technologies and it’s hot off the presses. Geisel would be happy to sign Dilma’s package. From the point of view of the concept and the procedures they use, it’s the same. They haven’t even changed their style. That immense tragedy that was foretold for the heads of Indians in every corner of the Amazon basin provoked an awakening in Indians who were still lighting fires with a toothpick, twirling a stick in their hands, and Indians who were doing university courses in Brasilia, Funai scholarships, or who had some privileged contact with information about the whites, about the whites’ instruments, governance and everything. And I got together with this generation, the first generation of Indians who were being expelled from their origins, for a kind of unplanned convergence of ideas. That’s what allowed one Xavante boy, another Bororo, Guarani or Kaingang, some of them six or ten years apart, but all of them with similar experiences, to start closing ranks in a front that we called the indigenous movement.
Where did they start meeting? When did they feel that they were voices that added up?
There was no specific inauguration event. Of course, every narrative ends up choosing a starting point for itself and people say that there was a first National Meeting of Indians. The people who say this are the friends of the Indians, the missionaries, the anthropologists, the promoters of that first meeting. But many of the Indians who were there didn’t know it was a meeting, nor that it was the first. Some of those guys were seeing each other for the first time at that big meeting in São Paulo, others already knew each other. If they already knew each other, how could it be their first meeting? They had been doing militancy for three or four years, traveling, meeting each other, going to the villages.
My initial experience was not in a meeting, but on the road, visiting places that were worse off with one or other of my comrades. Where the Indians couldn’t even raise their heads, because their neighbors were shooting them, and this ranged from the Kiriri in the Northeast to the Kaingang in Rio Grande do Sul, or the Bororo in Mato Grosso. The newspapers didn’t report on what was happening to the Indians, who existed even less than they do today. Today they manage to invade the canvas, invade land and canvas, two landscapes that they have learned to occupy. I think the term invade can be misunderstood, it can give more meaning to the aggressive and symbolic charge than to the positive meaning of the term occupy.
Which has been used a lot, Occupy Wall Street.
And occupy is positive, invade is kicking in the door. And at the time we were occupying there was no way around it, we had to kick in the door. We had to kick in the doors of the banks, of the big corporations that were establishing themselves on indigenous territories for good. The government itself, with its infrastructure projects, was establishing itself on indigenous territories. We couldn’t occupy, we had to invade, and we had to confront those who were doing the invading. From the banks who discovered that they could receive Indian land from bankrupt companies as collateral for their bankruptcies, to the government itself, state and federal governments giving away Indian land in bargains with various interests, with the mining sector, with the colonization people. Incra itself would come and put their map in places without asking if the Indian was there and would subdivide the Indians’ land, the National Institute for Agrarian Reform. We had more than half of the land in Mato Grosso, including the Xingu National Park allotted by Incra. Do people know that the Xingu has it been plotted several times?
Were they able to solve it?
But do you know how many people had to die to solve it? Dying, military personnel, exposing themselves to violence, confronting the police, confronting the army, blocking roads. So when people see in the newspaper: “Indians take government officials hostage, Funai employees”, they weren’t watching, they didn’t know what was happening in these people’s lives. From one hour to the next, it seemed that the Indians had burst through the screen and came back to show that all those fantasies people had about Indians on horseback, running around with a hatchet in their hands, were true. This caricature that many Brazilians had only began to be dispelled when real Indians started appearing on news programs, interviews with Miriam Leitão, Alexandre Garcia, who are the spokespeople for the Big House. Because when I’m interviewing Washington Novaes, Heródoto Barbeiro, when I’m discussing a subject like this with a newspaper or magazine editor from the 1980s or 1990s, a full-page interview for Correio Brasiliense, or when Marcos Terena goes to the yellow pages of Veja, or when Paulinho Paiakan appears as a big bandit on the cover of Veja at Eco-92, good or bad, people are coming into contact with Indians who sweat, who perspire, who are afraid, flesh and blood. Some even have ID cards.
I remember my childhood, when I first saw Juruna and other indigenous leaders speaking on TV, and the other day I re-watched an interview from the 1980s with Aleixo Pohi Krahô, and they were done with every degree of prejudice and ridicule possible. There was a conquest of voice there that was terrible, because you had to deal with all kinds of affronts.
The interview was already an affront. When the reporter or anchor addressed us, he would ask us questions. It wasn’t an interview, it was an inquiry. The guy would send all the imaginary prejudices that people assumed in our faces, you got the point very well. When is this interview with Aleixo Pohi Krahô from?
It’s from 1984, 1983. It’s from a soap opera in which Stênio Garcia was an Indian and Aleixo Pohi Krahô appears saying that Stênio wasn’t an Indian, didn’t represent the Indians, and asks him to speak, but they won’t let him explain. Creating the voice must also have led to deaths.
But there’s no doubt about it. Many were executed by Rolleflex and never again. These executions sometimes happened selectively, some guys who would never have a place on screen and in some cases, collectively, a generic accusation: “No Indians”. Then, along this path, I began to notice something in reflection. As I realized that there was a place of representation of white power that we weren’t going to get any visibility if we didn’t manage to occupy a few pieces of it, I decided very early on to start mimicking it in order to occupy the place of the guy who speaks on screen. The first thing I did was propose to my colleagues in the indigenous movement that was being born that we had to have a bulletin, a newspaper. So we started something called Jornal Indígena, in São Paulo, at PUC. The law students had to take up popular causes and defend them in order to finish the course, as if it were a student residence. Then I became a collaborator with this law group, presenting cases of violence against Indians to these lawyers and they wanted me to turn these complaints into articles. Articles of denunciation. So I started writing them in bulletins that were sent to 300 villages in Brazil. Then I discovered that a written bulletin wasn’t going to do the job, so I started recording cassette tapes. Each bulletin was audio, it became a radio program, the Jornal Indígena became a radio Indian Program that reached 600 villages. A cassette tape in a sealed envelope reached the Solimões River, the Negro River, it reached the riverbank dwellers of the Amazon rainforest in the 1980s.
One day I arrive in a village and hear my voice on the tape, and the Indians say to me: “Ailton, this tape is that interview you did about the rights of the Indians, to land, language, culture. We play it every day at the afternoon meeting. At that time, television was not yet widespread, the television receiver was still a novelty. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the television set became more commonplace, and then with the advent of video and cell phones and everything, this whole screen exploded in everyone’s face. But the screen we fought to occupy a millimeter of was much more rigid, hard. Today the screen is liquid, the screen we broke a corner of to get in was made of stone. Today it’s liquid, because I myself can generate my image, the content and spread it around, send it like a virus. Before there was no such possibility, we were in such a closed block that either we were accepted by the editor or we didn’t go on air. It could be Tupi, Record, Canal Brasil, Globo, Bloch, whatever. At Manchete magazine, whoever the owner let in came in.
Or what’s worse, he let them in and edited the speech to make it his own.
Generally, when the Indians appeared in Manchete, it was the owner’s speech, the Indians were used just to illustrate. There was a great journalist from Manchete who went to all the Kuarup in the Xingu, he was like National Geographic, all the Kuarup were the same, as if they were a ballet, a Bolshoi ballet that performed once a year. It was depersonalized, any real sense it had, that people’s lives were being cut short by a road, that the Indians were dying of tuberculosis, or the flu, freaking out and dying there at the Paulista School of Medicine trying to save them, didn’t appear. Entire groups, tribes of 130, 150 individuals were reduced to 15 individuals, worse than chemical warfare. So they killed that many people, the magazines gave the pasteurized news, it seemed totally normal. Then, when these people began to have a voice, to speak out, incredible things happened. I think there was a discovery of Brazil by the whites in 1500, and then a discovery of Brazil by the Indians in the 1970s and 1980s. The one that is valid is the last one. The Indians discovered that, although they are symbolically the owners of Brazil, they have nowhere to live in this country. They will have to make that place exist day by day. It’s not a ready-made achievement. They will have to do this day by day, and do it by expressing their vision of the world, their power as human beings, their plurality, their will to be and live. Not by putting an Indian issue on the table and saying: “I’m here to live this Indian life”. But he’s going to have to raise his children in the face of a new reality. Today, I don’t think there’s a single village that doesn’t have a Brazilian education network school set up inside the village, linked to the regional education superintendence, where Portuguese is one of the compulsory languages in the classroom, in some cases it’s the only language. Mother tongues are allowed, but they don’t take precedence over the language that the mother tongue should have. We are experiencing several layers of colonization simultaneously. At the same time as you are invited to have a school in your village, you are also invited to forget the entire repertoire of your culture and start updating your repertoire in order to negotiate the conditions of your survival. And I haven’t seen much progress since the 1990s. Everything we achieved was from the 1970s to the end of the 1980s, with the advent of the 1988 Constituent Assembly. Since then, it’s been as if we’ve gone into overdraft and we’re just skating along. As if the Constituent Assembly had been an overdraft.
You had to, I don’t know if you went looking for it, or if external alliances appeared in this process. Foreigners were very important in your trajectory. How did that happen?
Perhaps we could consider that external doesn’t actually have to be foreign in this case. The alliances came from all directions. I think that starting from the event of the Indians looking outwards, the whole relationship is foreign. The Krenak created an expression to designate this other, they call it craí. Craí, which is similar to that other caraí, which the Tupi, the Tupinambá, our relatives from the coast called the foreigner. The French foreigner, the Portuguese foreigner, any of them. It’s another person who doesn’t yet have a place in your constellation, in your cartography. There’s no window for him yet. When you open the window and he enters, he enters already named, in a category of ally. He becomes a brother-in-law, a brother, a cousin, a txai, a friend. Included, but included and allocated. It’s not an open inclusion, where you’re included and that’s it, you’re included within a category. These allies were allocated. Then you clearly had that ally from Europe, whose front was to shape public opinion there with regard to what was happening to us here in South America. The guy could be from the World Council of Churches, a large humanitarian organization like Bread for the World, a network like Doctors Without Borders, an international cooperation foundation in England with projects in Asia, Africa and South America. We qualified these allies, we tried to combine these types of skills that we thought were important for us, and we also knew that the Indians weren’t going to do this. None of us was going to become a specialist and stay in Europe doing public opinion, but we were going to have allies who would do it in Europe, in their language, in their country. We knew that there were few of us and that we didn’t have enough people to fill all the spaces, so we had to replicate ourselves in our allies. They were the ones who began to occupy the spaces we needed, and the allies vocalized us in those spaces. Vocalizing through a huge network of allies, partners and so on. This network experience, I had this network dynamic in my head before the web thing existed. I was already experimenting with networking, because I knew I was in Brazil, in Mato Grosso, but there was a guy in Holland who didn’t speak Portuguese and I didn’t speak Dutch, but who knew that I was on this path and he was spreading the word. I was sure that he was doing this, and that this resulted in power for what I was doing. That’s networking. At the same time that I was going into a risky situation, that tomorrow I could be imprisoned or dead, there was a guy raising funds in Holland so that I could continue doing it today, tomorrow and the day after. That’s networking, man. And there was no contract, no protocol. It was a relationship of trust, which I called affective alliances. As I was in charge of communication, I came up with something and found a place for myself in this new arrangement that was emerging in the indigenous movement, the place of the National Publishing Coordination. That’s because at that time, in the 1980s, making a bulletin and a cassette that reached 300 villages, 600 villages, was a fantastic, impressive full-time job. So much so that at the end of the 1980s I had a grant from the Ford Foundation which supported me to continue working as the National Publications Coordinator. But then I was already accumulating our communication with the fact that I was the political and executive coordinator of the indigenous movement, and I already had a schedule that was totally invaded by airports, New York and Europe. I went to meetings with the World Bank, the UN, I traveled the world, I was at every conference. In the 1980s, in the run-up to Rio-92, I spent half the year traveling outside Brazil.
Thinking about these emotional alliances, today, whenever a ruralist wants to attack or belittle the indigenous movement, he says: “These are international NGOs trying to invade Brazil!”. At that time, when the international alliances began to appear, did they already try to demoralize these alliances as a weakening of the Brazilian nation-state?
You hit the nail on the head. It was a reflex. When we managed to be effective in mobilizing this network, which we managed to design before the Internet existed worldwide, the reaction here was immediate. The first to say this were not the ruralists or the businessmen, but the military itself, the National Security Service, which was still active and aggressive at the time. And the institutional media, which was huge, began to report this, saying: “Foreigners are watching the Amazon! They’re using the pretext of protecting the Indians and the forest to invade the Amazon!”. They began to react with this…
Information terrorism, so to speak…
Yes, there was this reaction. Since we were succeeding in an opinion campaign and in the vast and visible expansion of a network of affective alliances that brought together everything from young rockers, Sting only appeared later, but we had already brought musicians together back then. He didn’t appear from one moment to the next, but because the people, the musical movement, including the punks, already had a lot of connections with us. The punks in Germany, the punks in England, donated to the Indians’ campaigns to protect the forest. They would receive the Indians in Bonn, in Bremen, in schools in Europe and for a week they would run fundraising campaigns that would raise money for the Indians to hold 20, 30 assemblies here in the Amazon. They knew, they had a connection. In Canada, too, we had connections with the whole world. Then what happened? The government began to criminalize some of these indigenous leaders. I myself suffered embarrassment at various times. If the word “bullying” existed, I would say that I was bullied all the time, because almost every goal I tried to score, a guy came up and shanked me. I’d get a red card, caned and everything. What was it? It was about not allowing this movement to really exist, to take shape. Because if it did, it would occupy, even minimally, a space that since the First Republic has only been occupied by one type of people, the landowners. In the real sense, who occupy and dominate territorial spaces, even the guys who are symbolic owners of land, who are the colonels, those who rule Brazilian politics and who dominate the Senate, like Renan Calheiros, like Sarney, who have dominated politics since the 1950s. I was born in 1953. When I was born, Sarney was already in charge of Brazilian politics, and he still is today. Is there a worse example than this to say that we were competing for a place on the screen with such consolidated powers? They don’t want even a millimeter of that screen to be occupied by another voice or another communication noise other than the hegemonic one, theirs.
This doesn’t just happen with the Indians. I believe that even what they call organized crime is the same thing. I suspect that organized crime isn’t as organized as that, in the same way that they attributed to the Indians an alliance that we never considered, of building with foreigners to occupy and invade the Amazon, I also have doubts as to whether everything they attribute to organized crime is really true, or whether there are a lot of people there who dominate these spaces, who occupy the prisons, who have the prisons as their political territories and who aren’t going to let anyone compete with them. If you’re in the slave quarters or in prison, that doesn’t mean that you dominate the space of the slave quarters or the prison. You can be in spaces that are already predetermined. You’re in the slave quarters, but you’re not the one who has the map there and who governs and mobilizes. In the same way that the Indians have been fighting for the last 30 years to make themselves heard from a totally ignored place, there must be other segments of life in our country that are shouting and that nobody hears from where they are, because there are people who own the places where they are shouting from and they won’t let their voices leave that place. I can’t think of the struggle I took part in to gain a voice, I can’t think of this trajectory without thinking of all the other possible paths parallel to mine that are making the same search and that don’t have visibility. When, at the end of the 1990s, this discussion began about reparations policy for black people, which unfolded later…
Quotas…
Yes, but also in the broad demand by blacks for land for the quilombolas, access to education, health, representation on the boards, in the places, in the jobs that exist, then in the seats of the courts, in the ministries; when this bill began, the discomfort, the irritation of the guys who have always been in control of the political and economic life of the country was so great that they reacted in the same way as against the Indians. They reacted by hitting out at everyone, disqualifying the demand of the blacks, saying that this quota business is a joke, saying that you have to go through the university entrance exams, through meritocracy.
Were the blacks supportive of the indigenous movement? When it started, did they understand?
There’s a story that blacks and Indians cooperated with each other in the quilombos, which I suspect didn’t happen. There’s a myth about the Quilombo of Palmares that it was founded by the three races, I think it’s a collage of myths…
To invent a Brazil of solidarity, cordiality…
Pre-capitalist, pre-modern. I don’t believe this really happened, because when I tried to do it, to raise what we call the indigenous movement, there was no contact, no connection. It’s as if we were running on parallel tracks, so different from each other that we didn’t meet. And one of the explanations I gave myself was this: in Brazil the Indians are from the bush, and the blacks are from the city. Black people in Brazil are urban.
Even in small towns?
Black is Pelé, you know? Gilberto Gil. Abdias do Nascimento. Who else is black? Black in the sense of bringing with him, representing something… Milton Gonçalves. They’re all urban. Black people in Brazil are urban, there’s no point in saying there are rural black people.
And the quilombola?
It’s also a construction that took place in the 1988 Constituent Assembly. But the main thing to think about is that many of these quilombolas are also reclaiming urban spaces. They are terreiros and other sites that are considered symbolic sites, but which have an impact on urban spaces. So people are claiming this space, but I think it’s less about physical space and more about recognition and having a voice. The big demand is less for things and more for visibility and a voice. When people say that black people are invisible, or Indians in our society, I say that the mobilization of Indians and black people is for visibility. Less for access to things, those that give power, that are effective forms of representation of political power, which is access, domination, control over areas, territories, material goods, and so on. Together they claim less access to these physical places and more to these symbolic places of recognition.
The problem is that what people fear most is the visibility of these peoples.
I think we’re closing the cycle of our reflection here, because this contestation dialogues with the question that opened our conversation, which is what triggered my awareness of acting as a leader. And here we come to the same point as my initial answer. When you manage to occupy this symbolic place of representation, you become empowered to actually occupy the place, to claim the territory, to say: “this isn’t the white man’s land, the farmer’s land, the bank’s land, it’s the land of my ancestors, of my ancestors. I’m going to live here, I want to live here, it means something to me. This mountain is sacred, it has a mood, it speaks; I wake up in the morning and see the mountain’s countenance and I know if it’s happy, angry, well, rested, resting. The mountain speaks to me, because I recognize myself in this place. The moment they take me away from here and throw me in any corner, I no longer hear the mountain’s voice, and I no longer hear what language the river is speaking. If I don’t understand the language of the river, it becomes a sewer for me. If the mountain doesn’t speak to me, I can pick it up and throw it on a train and send it to some ore dump. Because you depersonalize the landscape, take away the sense, empty the meaning of this worldview, kick the castle, and it comes crashing down. If you don’t have an imaginary, if you don’t occupy an imaginary, if your collective doesn’t share a space that is recreated all the time by the soul, the spirit, the culture, the environment of the vision, the vision of the culture, you’re aiming for something totally miserable, that has no meaning at all. You’ve been thrown anywhere. Now if you want to claim a voice of humanity, of fixing humanity, you have to be able to create a platform that fits everyone. Where you can stand on your own two feet and talk to a world of beings who are real, not a mime, a bunch of assholes at a freak festival on the planet, ravenous on the planet eating themselves, kicking their own asses.
Observing you these days, your home, your texts, I was reminded of that phrase by Darcy Ribeiro, about the desire for beauty among the Amerindians. It’s visibility, but it has the essence of a desire for care, for beauty. Do you think Darcy really captured the essence of these Amerindian cultures?
He captured that spark, he managed to translate it into this statement, I have no doubt. Because even when you have a small group of families, be it two or three families from any of our peoples, if they’re living by the side of the road, by a river, on top of a mountain, their priority will be to recreate that beauty, whether it’s in a small feather from a child’s headdress, or in a small bamboo lame where they can put water, put small sticks of wax with absorbent cotton to light a fire up there and with that small altar create a symbolism of transcendence from here on earth to other lands and other heavens. There’s always a gallery of mythical, sacred, representational spaces that don’t need to exist in the world we live in now because there’s the possibility of another heaven. Above this sky there is another sky and after that there is another sky without stars. And there’s another sky, and another, and another. This earth that we live on now may have been a sky, it was a sky at some point, it fell and we’re here on this platform, it’s a sky too. Then it could fall and become a sky. These perspectives of us inhabiting skies, but we only don’t experience it because we haven’t yet realized all the beauty and power it has, then it falls and we’re left in another landscape that we’ll have to work, work, work to create, evoke this beauty again, make it hover. The moment it is hovering, capable of constituting itself in this collection of skies, then it will be sky, if only for a moment. Then comes that dancing thing, putting on the headdresses and dancing to keep the sky suspended. Then someone says: “But it’s at the end of those feathers, those things that are so… How childish…”. It’s not childish! That’s magical thinking! It’s what allows the feathers to hold up the sky. Or that singing suspends the sky. This magic of re-establishing the gift of humans, giving humanity back this power to suspend the sky, to make the earth move, the mountains speak, this is rescuing the cosmic meaning of life. It’s the cosmovision, living within the thing. Not just verbalizing it, but living inside it. This is wonderful, because it opens up the possibility for us humans to recreate the world. Now, how do we bring this magic into everyday life? I think that’s what Darcy got out of it: “These people are always recreating the sky, recreating beauty, calling beauty, expressing it in a pot, in a little clay doll, in a little bucket, in everything”. It’s in everything. In the detail of everything. That’s it. I think it took me a long time, about 40, 50 years of my experience, to understand, to be able to bring this magic into my daily life. These things that I saw back then and that I had a kind of anxiety about, it’s as if I was waiting for something that had already existed a long time ago, but that I longed to make exist again, to be able to have it again. From this came the idea that I can count my time not as everything that has already passed, but as everything I have from now on. I’m experimenting with this vision very often: everything I have is from now on. And from that, I see that what has passed is very little. It’s as if from here on in you have eternity, from here on out there’s only what you’ve already seen. And from now on there’s everything that could happen. I think that the fact that we were found here in the tropics, in the psychotropics, and were mistaken by the Portuguese for something pre-established, which was these people they called Indians, this may last for a while, but I have a vision that this is not what will prevail. That this mess that happened here, this half millennium of confusion, will be something else in the future.
Yesterday you recalled “me and my circumstances”, which refers to Ortega y Gasset’s expression. We’re talking about that here, aren’t we? That definition that has the capacity to be open to the world in order to think, which is how you defined yourself. What does this ethics in the world look like?
Understanding that all the mess we’ve lived through so far, which has resulted in our anger, our frustration, the motivation to look at life in this battle, all of this, in the future, in everything that we have to happen, will be enhanced in other skies, in other creations. That’s the guarantee of circumstance. “Me and my circumstances” isn’t just a bet on emptiness, it’s a confidence in a future, in something. Because otherwise it becomes arrogance, “I am me”, and it has nothing to do with it.