Abstract: Indigenous agencies at recovering expropriated territories are a phenomenon of great importance for understanding their contemporary societal projects. In Brazil, indigenous struggles for territories are best known by two modes of occupation and organization: retomadas (retaking lands) and autodemarcações (self-demarcating lands). Although each people have specific strategies to recover stolen territories, connections established over indigenous social movements and the historical alliances and networks of relationships between different groups leads us to inquire about the similarities, specificities and tendencies in the struggle for land in Brazil. This presentation takes as its ethnographic context the autodemarcação of the Tuxá people in Dzorabábé, known as Aldeia Avó, in Rodelas in the State of Bahia and which began in 2017. The Tuxá’s autodemarcação is a remarkable process in the recent history of this people, which seeks to re-establish itself on the banks of the São Francisco River, known locally as “Opará, River-Sea”, from where they were systematically removed due to the Itaparica Hydroelectric Plant in 1988. After decades of waiting for different governments to proceed their land regularization, the community came up with plan to occupy the area, built fences and carried out the territorial demarcation themselves. Our objective with this presentation is to bring the Tuxá voices about this process, inquiring how autodemarcações challenges State’s sovereignty by refusing to recognize its monopoly in the demarcation of indigenous territories. We also seek to highlight the meanings of land, of inhabiting the land and of articulating traditional knowledges with creative and meaningful new ways of living in spite of the state's inoperability, claiming themselves the responsibility of the demarcation process. By weaving the historical web that leads the community, of which I am part, to recover this portion of its ancestral territory, I seek to connect past, present and future, highlighting the dreams that become possible to be dreamed together and alongside the Opará River, and the desires for future generations.
Convened by Andres Gonzalez Dinamarca and Laura Rival
