::
Indian Arrogance
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.
"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
Translated
by Tereza Braga