HOW BRAZILIAN URBAN AMERINDIANS FIGHT AGAINST ERASURE: UNDERSTANDING INDIGENOUS RIGHTS

J. P. Linstroth’s book chapter, “Brazilian Nationalism and Urban Amerindians: Twenty-First Century Dilemmas for Indigenous Peoples Living in the Urban Amazon and Beyond” (2015), examines a reflection on at least two significant points: the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” (Foucault 1980) and “invisible histories” (Linstroth 2005). These two notions are intertwined. First, by "insurrection of subjugated knowledges," Linstroth claims that indigenous peoples have for centuries been subjected to destruction, oppression, and marginalization as minorities within nation-states through enslavement, epidemics, eradication schemes, forced settlement, debt peonage, massacres, proselytization, rape, and numerous other abuses, and other untold atrocities. Moreover, to understand this J. P. Linstroth examined the forceful seizure of the National Health Foundation (Fundação Nacional de Saúde, FUNASA) in Manaus in June 2009 by hundreds of urban Amerindians and Indians from reserves in the interior. He argued that the appropriation of the FUNASA buildings was more than a call for the acknowledgment of Native health rights but rather was also directed at white society and its control over governmental organizations such as FUNAI and FUNASA. The urban Amerindians were making a stand against their invisibility to Brazilian governmental organizations like FUNAI and FUNASA, which did not recognize them because urban Indians are considered to be "civilized" or civilizados, a pejorative entirely removing their Indianness.While such political indigenous struggles are well-known in the city of Manaus, Brazil, in the middle of Brazilian Amazonia, they are less known beyond Manaus. Thus, these events are mostly invisible to the world and even the Brazilian nation. Urban Amerindians such as the Sateré-Mawé have been campaigning for years for their rights for better health care but also just recognition as true Indians and not as civilizados. Likewise the Munduruku have been in conflict with the Brazilian government for the legal demarcation of their lands in order to suspend hydroelectric dam building and to prevent illegal mining activities. These are largely “invisible histories.” Therefore, states’ relations with indigenous peoples are like the Brazilian saying about the jaguar: Năo cutuque a onça com vara curta—"Never poke a jaguar with a short stick” because to state governments such as that of Brazil, Indians are continually poking the stick at them and thus statist retribution often ensues against indigenes as it has for the past five-hundred years, evidence the Sateré-Mawé and Munduruku cases.