The Right to Nature: Contested Landscapes and Indigenous Territoriality in Martírio (2016)

Abstract

This chapter engages with Vicent Carelli’s 2016 documentary Martírio, which broaches important human rights issues, namely territorial injustice and indigenous ethnocide. It discusses these issues in relation to the depiction of indigenous contested landscapes, portrayed through a historical account of the struggle of the Guarani-Kaiowá groups in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, in Brazil. The chapter argues that, through a historical prism that problematizes the relationship between archive images, temporality and human rights, the film exposes the marginalization and ethnocide of indigenous groups and their evident disadvantage in the plight to regain their ancestral land from powerful landowners, whose financial resources and political privileges unlawfully vindicate them from the often illegal land appropriations. It concludes with the contention that the documentary’s display of indigenous displacements and evictions characterize a disputed geography, based on a clash between different visions of territoriality where land ownership is perversely placed above indigenous rights to nature and to their life-worlds.