Experts talk education on Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day

In July last year, a law defined April 19 as Brazil’s Day of the Indigenous Peoples—no longer “Indian Day”—aimed at celebrating their culture and heritage in the country. Approved by Congress, the measure does away with the term “Indian,” considered prejudiced against the original peoples.

Still, in the view of Dinamam Tuxá, executive coordinator at the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil—APIB—prejudice is ultimately reinforced by stereotypes that still persist in celebrations and textbooks.

“Schools have kids dress up. They try to fit indigenous people into a mold, inside a little box. The indigenous people are the people who live in the forest, walking around in their traditional clothes. This builds a scenario tainted by racism, as these children grow up thinking of indigenous people as having straight hair, slanted eyes, and reddish skin. We’ve undergone miscegenation. We were the victims of violence. How many indigenous women have suffered sexual abuse? Miscegenation was forced among them.”

The history of the indigenous peoples in Brazil is scarred by centuries of violence. In Dinamam Tuxá’s view, this persists in the form of racism—a remnant of Portuguese colonization.

“It’s been a process of fierce violence and forced assimilation. The indigenous people have been abused, stripped of their language, and forced into a reality that does not belong to them, with indigenous lands left undemarcated and with no public policy to encourage their culture. This also contributes to the spread of violence in and out of indigenous territories,” Tuxá noted.

Indigenous child at Camp Terra Livre, in Brasília – Collection / Marcelo Camargo / Agência Brasil

Genocide

History Professor Fabrício Lyrio, from the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia, notes that the arrival of the Portuguese brought a series of attacks on the original peoples, which resulted in genocide. While approximately 5 million indigenous people lived in Brazil back in 1500, this number stands below 1 million today.

“Above all, there’s the symbolic violence of affirming one’s presence in a land where other people were already living. This action had ripples. Both the intentional violence of war and enslavement and the violence that was not planned but had a huge impact on native peoples—the arrival of new infectious agents—no doubt bring to the picture a dimension of genocide,” Professor Lyrio said.

The native people were the first to be enslaved by the Portuguese in Brazil—even before before immigrants and African people, the professor recalls. The first sugar mills in the country, he added, were erected with indigenous labor, mostly slaves.

The Portuguese who landed here in 1500 believed they had arrived in India. As a result, they referred to locals as Indians. The correct term, however, is “indigenous,” a Latin term meaning “native to the place where one lives.”