The voices of native Brazilians outside the Amazon are rarely heard. We speak to Lucca Messer, whose documentary on the Piaçaguera indigenous portrays their plight – then and now.
If we’ve been resisting for 500 years, we’ll carry on resisting.Indigenous woman of the Piaçaguera community
Resistance isn’t only a general sense of struggle against the vestiges of colonial genocide and institutionalised racism. Brazil’s indigenous today face yet another challenge on the path to something that may, eventually, resemble equality in the shape of Jair Bolsonaro, who became president of the most populous Latin American nation in October 2018: a far-right, populist leader described as the “Trump of the Tropics” (though if the Brazilian elections had come first, we’d probably be speaking of a “gringo Bolsonaro”).
The complex intermingling of indigenous history and contemporaneity in Brazil emerges in the short documentary simply called Indigenous Struggle in Brasil by Lucca Messer, a young filmmaker and photographer split between London and São Paulo. After over a decade living in South America’s largest city, Messer packed his camera to meet and film the eleven tribes of Piaçaguera, a stretch of indigenous land only an hour and a half away from São Paulo. This area is home to around 350-400 inhabitants, part of roughly half of native Brazilians who don’t live in the Amazon.
Brazilian tribes’ right to land is sanctioned by the 1988 Constitution, which ended two decades of military rule, and their territories occupy around 13 per cent of the country’s land mass. This right is under severe threat because of Bolsonaro, whose disregard towards his country’s native inhabitants stands in evident contrast to his closeness to large commercial lobbies such as the agro-industrial and mining sectors. As promised during the electoral campaign, he inaugurated his mandate by stripping the Funai, the governmental body in charge of indigenous affairs, of its mandate to demarcate indigenous lands, transferring it to the Ministry of Agriculture.
To legitimise such moves, he has spurned out a deluge of hate speech, encouraging racism towards native peoples as well as, concomitantly, the exploitation of Brazil’s natural resources – which indigenous territories are rich in, especially in the Amazon. Some commentators have pointed out how episodes of violence against Indians have in part been fuelled by this rhetoric, such as the recent killing of the leader of the Amazonian Waiãpi tribe by illegal gold miners.
Indians shall have their social organisation, customs, languages, creeds and traditions recognised, as well as their original rights to the lands they traditionally occupy, it being incumbent upon the Union to demarcate them, protect and ensure respect for all of their property.Article 231 of the Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil
Though Messer didn’t explicitly set out to investigate the effects of Bolsonaro’s policies on indigenous communities, his documentary paints a stark (though cinematographically beautiful) picture of the intense pressures they face. “I feel attracted to speaking to marginalised people because they have something to say but nobody listens to them,” he explains. Many focus their gaze on the plight of native tribes in the Amazon – also given the dramatic ecological pressures this vital ecosystem in facing, with some predicting that deforestation rates, which have spiked under Bolsonaro, are reaching a point of no return. But Messer looks beyond, narrating the social drama unfolding in a community that lives in a small slice of the 1.5 per cent of indigenous Brazilian located outside the Amazon. An area that is equally vital to the preservation of native cultures and ways of life.
Can you tell us about the Piaçaguera community’s battle for land demarcation?
In 2016 Dilma Rousseff sanctioned the land shortly before she was impeached. Her government was one of the worse in sanctioning ind