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ISSUE NO. 31
Between 2016-2017, during my research on the Kayapó and the Assuruni people in the Brazilian Amazon about their body paint and cosmology, I shot a video with the Kayapó chief Tuire. I interviewed her about the issues of the Indigenous peoples of Brazil.
Interviewing Tuire and other Indigenous leaders and members of the community was a methodology I devised to document my process and also learn about the people I work with. These interviews are ways to mark my first encounters with them in a way that values conversation and allows for documentation and preservation of intangible culture. I would describe these interviews to be a conversation rather than a scientific study which informs anthropology.
My process does reveal itself to be interdisciplinary as I work with linguists and anthropologists as field experts, such as Prof Lucivaldo Costa – a linguist specializing in Jê speaking people of Brazil from the University of South and Southeastern Para and Katop Ti Xikrin – a pedagog from the department of education in Para, whom, I also interviewed for this article.
I was introduced to Tuire Kayapó as an artist from Turkey. I was not an activist, not an anthropologist, a journalist, certainly not a missionary. Independent of all this which gave me autonomy, but in the Indigenous context, as an outsider, as much as I would like to think that I do not carry the burden of the histories that come with such titles, I wondered what I represent for them? There was hostility towards kuben, the non indigenous people as they called them/us/me. I question my own subjectivity in this context more than theirs.
If I were to study their body painting which is considered something sacred, how could we truly collaborate? When approaching these communities, whether as an artist or an anthropologist, how should one engage with them?
When I asked Prof Lucivaldo about his methodologies he answered: «First, we need to show them respect. They need to realize that you are no longer the one wanting to explore their knowledge and integrate them into the national society, denying their history, their culture and their language. We need to show them that we are different from the colonizers. We need to show them that we are their allies and that we want to help them develop activities that contribute to the revitalization and/or sustainability of their languages and culture, while understanding that they need to obtain knowledge of the culture of the non-Indigenous as a survival strategy».
The Indigenous people of the Amazon have a spiritual connection to nature beyond meeting their needs for shelter and food. Their mythologies which are passed from generation to generation through oral histories are a proof of this. The patterns which they use in their body painting that they adorn themselves with, imitate the animals of the forest and connect them to the spirits of the forest. They don’t see themselves as the owner but rather as a part of the universe.
The Kayapó and the Assuruni are the two Indigenous communities of the Brazilian Amazon who use body paint on their entire body (from the arms to the elbows and on the legs to just below the knees). Body paint is like a Victorian-like garment, as anthropologist Terry Turner describes it, and is a communication tool for them.
They have patterns that indicate the seniority of the people in the community, their marital status, even how many children they have or whether their wife is pregnant. These patterns are related to the cosmovision, mythology and belief systems of the Kayapó. The body painting is a boundary between the metaphysical world and their own body and a silent language between the members of the community.
Since their first contact with the non-Indigenous, both communities as well as other Indigenous groups in Brazil had their territories invaded and destroyed. Many have died as a result of infectious diseases such as malaria, diabetes, tuberculosis.
Deforestation has had an irreversible and unprecedented effect resulting in global warming and climate change. Today, these groups are in danger of being destroyed by either the infectious diseases such as Coronavirus or the environmental violence which comes with the destruction and criminalization of the Amazon. Following the soft coup in 2016, the area described as ‘Amazon Legal’ has experienced 1.180km2 of deforestation.
The Brazilian Amazon is the biggest area in the world where deforestation takes place the fastest. Illegal fishing and logging are rampant. Those who try to talk about these issues, the Indigenous people, indigenistas and human and environmental rights activists are being intimidated and silenced such as journalists Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira who were killed in June 2022.
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According to a study done by IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) in 2016 based on the 2010 consensus, there are currently 305 Indigenous ethnicities with a total population of 900 people speaking 274 different languages. Brazil is the most diverse country in the world, in terms of its socio-cultural structure.
The Kayapó people, among all the ethnicities, own the most land in the Brazilian Amazon with 3 million 284 thousand hectares, according to ISA (Socio-environmental Institute) – this number includes the sub ethnicities of the Kayapó with a total of 11 million 346 thousand and 326 hectares, and their population is at 7 thousand. Looking at these numbers we can understand why the Indigenous populations became a target for the natural resources of their land. Brazil was invaded by the Portuguese in the Sixteenth century.
The Indigenous population was estimated to be 3 million before most Indigenous people died en masse of infectious diseases as a result of the first contact with the non-indigenous and some populations went distinct. Among these populations the Kayapó, who were located in Northern Para, didn’t have their first contact until the 1950s and some until later in the 1960s since they were located deep in the forest without any transportation access.
There are still isolated and uncontacted groups in the Brazilian Amazon. All the identified Indigenous territories have gained autonomy and protection by the government since the foundation of FUNAI (The National Foundation of the Indian, formerly SPI (Indian Protection Service) in 1967.
It is forbidden for the non indigenous people to enter these territories. After the military coup which started in 1964 and lasted 21 years, the Brazilian government initiated mega projects in an effort to develop the rural areas, such as the construction of the Trans-Amazonian highway and Belo Monte and Tucurui Dam.
The construction of the Trans-Amazonian highway began in 1972 and ran 4.000km beginning from Brazil’s Northeast, cutting through the Amazon region and stopping at the Peruvian border. During the early stages of these projects, engineers, military personnel and missionaries working for the government and the SPI were recruited to go to these areas and many Indigenous populations had their first contact with them during the construction of these projects. On behalf of the Brazilian government, their duties were to pacify, remove and assimilate the Indigenous people and as a result many were raped and killed by them.
The political and environmental activism of the Kayapó people started with the 1989 meeting in Altamira opposing the construction of the Belo Monte Dam organized by the late Kayapó leader ‘Paulinho’ Paiakan (who passed away from Covid-19 in 2020).
When I was doing research on the Kayapó, mostly about their body painting practice, before even knowing how to get to their villages, I was interested in interviewing Tuire Kayapó, who is a female leader in her community known for her activism but historically less recognized by indigenistas and completely unknown to the general public as a public figure. In my early research, at the New York Public Library, I saw pictures of Tuire in the books about the Mebengokre people. The photo of her pressing a machete against the dam’s engineer’s cheek at the Altamira meeting was used over and over again as a gesture and symbol of Indigenous resistance.
However, I could hardly locate her name and did not have any information about her beyond that. When I managed to go to her village Kaprankrere in 2017 with Prof Lucivaldo Costa, she said nobody had interviewed her before.
The late anthropologist Terence Turner wrote that the Kayapó women were at the peripheries of the society and that they were in the domestic sphere, in the home. When I visited their villages, I did not think this was the case. My observation was that because most anthropologists and photographers were primarily male and from the West, they were intimidated to talk to the females and did not make it a point to speak to them.
As Prof Lucivaldo wrote in his essay titled «The appeal, the denunciation and resistance from Tuire Kayapó, «Some anthropological studies on gender relations between the mẽbêngôkre people point out that women in that society occupy a marginal position in the political life of the community, their actions being considered politically irrelevant (cf. JOAN BAMBERGER, 1967, p. 128).
According to these studies, the circular structure of the mẽbêngôkre villages, with the houses arranged in a circle and in the center the Ngà – the warrior’s house –, would be a parameter for the establishment of the division between the social space, inside the village, represented by Ngà, a place restricted to men, where they gather to take the political and social decisions that guide and organize community life, and the natural space, that is, the space of the forest inhabited by animals, spirits and enemies, who are considered as infra-social beings, next to which women would be, in the domain of the houses, in the domain of the periphery of the village (cf. TURNER, 1991a, 1993)».
Based on what Tuire told us we were able to document that the women were central to the Kayapó society and actively participated in political decisions affecting the Kayapó community. Today, there are many female Kayapó and other Indigenous leaders that follow in the footsteps of Tuire such as O E Paiakan, Sonja Guajajara, Sam Satere Mawe, Celia Xakriaba, Txai Surui. Among them Maial Panhpunu Paiakan, daughter of the late Paulinho Paiakan and niece of Tuire Kayapó who received her law degree in 2015, launched her campaign for her candidacy for federal deputy in August 2022.
In my video piece titled Tuire Kayapó – First Contact (2021), Tuire says: «Temer’s government is in the place of the previous president Dilma. I don’t know what he is thinking, he wants to end indigenous health. We have our own indigenous (natural) medicine. Today we need indigenous health because of all the diseases that the white man brought, malaria, yellow fever and all those diseases. We live near the city today (due to rapid deforestation and cities as a result are expanding close to Indigenous borders) and we need better quality healthcare today, but the government doesn’t want to help us, they want to end indigenous health. We are in Brazil, the government has to respect us, we are human beings as well living in this nation; they need to respect us as well».
It took me more than a year to be able to get the transcripts of the interview translated from Kayapó to Portuguese and then for me to translate them to English and Turkish. This became a process in and of itself and it was a burden for me to maintain the integrity and meaning of Tuire’s words in each language. I did the interview in Kayapó with the help of a translator, Tuire’s brother, who is bilingual in Portuguese and Kayapó.
I noticed there were moments where due to generational differences, there were some words or expressions of Tuire that even he, as a Kayapó native, did not understand. In my research I witnessed those who resist to speak the national language of the colonizers such as Tuire and those who speak the national language but cannot truly translate certain concepts such as her brother and researchers I worked with. Since the cultural differences are so wide, the heritage in the meaning can get lost.
How does this affect the communication between these communities and the researchers who are typically responsible for the transmission of the knowledge and information to establish historical facts regarding these communities?
Prof Lucivaldo, who has been helping me with the Portuguese translations, explains the chal- lenges: «The work of translation is not easy. This is quite a challenge for the Xikrín (Kayapó sub ethnicity) Indians who are starting to develop writing in their native language. Now they need to think about translating concepts that are not familiar to them, like noun, adjectives. We non-Indigenous people also have difficulties in translating concepts that are restricted to Indigenous contexts. The best way to overcome this difficulty is to immerse yourself in each other’s cultures and make this cultural exchange».
In some social contexts, Indigenous people speak their native language without learning Portuguese is interpreted as an inferiority. «The first methodology is respect for the people, respect for differences. We need to understand that being different is not being inferior or superior to anyone. When I went to Xikrín for the first time, I watched the people, their daily practices, without making any value judgments». This made me understand the value of language preservation as resis- tance for invisibilized communities.
Later in a conversation I had with Prof Lucivaldo, he told me that Indigenous languages are at risk of going extinct as younger people are educated without a native curriculum in schools.
«I carry out research in a village where there are ninety people, of which only one person speaks the Indigenous language. As he does not use the language in everyday conver- sation, he sometimes forgets some words and expressions in his mother tongue. The problem is the lack of resources for the development of a language revitalization program, as it has been done by Leane Hinton in (UC Berkeley) California with the master-apprentice method. The State does not invest in the promotion of Indigenous languages and cultures».
Katop-Ti Xikrin who is working with the secretary of education to develop a curriculum in Jê language which is being taught in Indigenous schools alongside Portuguese, is helping to decolonize Brazilian education.
Professor Katop Ti says: «We are beginning to understand the process of Brazilian education. It is broad. There are several fields of education in Brazil, and we know that in the indigenous community there is specificity needed for each of our people. Our learning begins within the family and in the coexistence of everyday life in the particular community where one lives since childhood».
«We begin to understand things from the Xikrin reality; we speak different languages from each other (different İndigenous ethnicities) and with the arrival of government school in our territory, it had a bad impact at the beginning, forcing us to learn to speak in Portuguese, which led to the losing of the mother tongue in some communities. With a lot of struggle we, indigenous peoples, managed to guarantee our right to have a differentiated education, but that does not mean everything is solved. With time, for the indigenous people to prepare, we are going to put into practice what is provided for in Art. 1st (1st Amendment of Brazilian Constitution)».
«Establish, within the scope of basic education, the structure and functioning of Indigenous Schools, recognizing them as schools with their own rules and legal system, and establishing the curricular guide- lines for intercultural and bilingual education, aiming at the full appreciation of the cultures of the indigenous peoples and the affirmation and maintenance of their ethnic diversity.In indigenous pedagogy, everything is passed from generation to generation, teaching every- thing in practice, as we teach our children».
Unlike body painting, language is the non-silent way of resistance for the Indigenous against cultural supremacy and dominance. Today, many are able to use social media and denounce criminal acts and spread information that otherwise would not be available. Many of them are also able to defend themselves in the court of law thanks to their bilingual education. When I ask Prof Xikrin what the value of the language in Indigenous resistance is, he answers: «Our mother tongue is just as valuable as any other people’s language, for us the Indigenous, our language is our identity and without it, we are nobody».
Born in Ankara, Turkey in 1981, Pinar Yolacan studied fashion at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and Fine Art Media in Chelsea School of Art before graduating from The Cooper Union with a BFA in 2004. Yolacan had solo shows at YKY in Istanbul, Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki, Center for Contemporary Art in Lagos, and Wetterling Gallery in Stockholm.
Istituto Svizzero has contributed to extending Switzerland’s cultural and academic influence outside its borders and above all in Italy since 1947. The Institute develops a broad programme of exhibitions, lectures, concerts, meetings, conferences and book presentations in Rome, Milan, and Palermo.
ISSUE NO. 31
Lampoon is a cultural magazine.
Culture today means sustainability – in its honest meaning.
Culture has always been about human respect, tolerance. It’s not only about accepting human diversity but it’s about searching for the beauty of every human peculiarity.
Inclusion is the first value that defines art. Culture today means one thing only: to be part of a community, to think as a community.
Reading Lampoon, you see that these themes are smoothly aligned. A good part of the articles’ content discusses practices to restore our environment and stories about understanding the others.
Reading Lampoon, you find a dialogue between science and creativity. From sharp and edgy photo sessions to fashion, architecture, technology – the commitment is dedicated to a future that is all about us – together.
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