Abstract
The chapter presents the history of the use of photos and videos against the Laklãnõ people and the recent recontextualization of the use of audio-visual materials by the indigenous people. We discuss the political use by the Brazilian State of photographs of the Laklãnõ people as a way of constructing an image of the Indian as wild, fierce, dangerous and violent. We also argue that there is a scientific construction by historians and anthropologists who present the Laklãnõ as a vulnerable and miserable population. The chapter shows how the Laklãnõ use visual campaigns supported by the use of documentaries and photographs to reveal acts of violence, neglect and exploitation that are subject to the national state and its agents. The chapter concludes with a detailed presentation of a recent case study when the Laklãnõ began to use visual campaigns as an innovative way of accountability for projects financed by international funds overcoming previous language barriers of communication and the extreme non-indigenous bureaucracy.
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Notes
- 1.
A previous version of this chapter is included in Chapter IV of my doctoral thesis (Virgílio, 2022).
- 2.
Available at https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/32975/2829141.
- 3.
In the year of 1808 the Portuguese crown moves to Brazilian territory. In 1850, a law is published requesting colonization of lands by Europeans. The colonizers come from Europe and most of the colonies are settled in the South of Brazil, invading the Laklãnõ traditional and sacred territory. The Brazilian State offers large territories to the colony companies and other small advantages to the colonizers.
- 4.
The indigenous tutor was a state officer acting as a legal responsible person to the indigenous until 1988. In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most of them were religious. Since the eighteenth century, some scientists and mainly the military started to occupy such positions. The indigenous tutor of the Laklãnõ people got the position after having successfully concluded the first pacific contact after 150 years of battles between Laklãnõ and non-indigenous people. His work began in 1914 and ended in 1954, when he was substituted by other military tutors. The tutelage ended in 1988. The first tutor was very conservative and prevented indigenous people having any major contact with the non-indigenous (e.g., through forbidden marriages, but also in relation to work, study and religious conversion). The other tutors widened access to the indigenous Land. See Santos (1987) and Virgílio (2022).
- 5.
The indigenous were considered legally incapable, just like children, the mentally disabled, animals and people in a coma. So, they needed someone to decide all aspects of their lives. The indigenous tutelage ended in 1988 with the new Constitution of Brazil.
- 6.
See for example “Indians pour liquid gold into the mouth of a Spaniard” (Theodore de Bry), “Tapuya Woman” (Albert Eckhout) and “Scene of cannibalism among the Tupinamba native Indians of Brazil” (Jan Van Kessel Le Vieux), among many others, especially in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
- 7.
Kessel Le Vieux uses the books of Hans Staden (True history: An account of cannibal captivity in Brazil) and Jean de Léry (History of a voyage to the land of Brazil) as main sources.
- 8.
The relations between national identity, indigenous people and literature in Brazil is discussed in the first part of Chapter IV of my thesis (Virgílio, 2022).
- 9.
The end of this protection coincides with the end of the Brazilian dictatorship. Put simply, the indigenous lose their tutelage and become an autonomous people. The movement to gain their autonomy started in the 1970s with help from anthropologists, lawyers, NGOs and religious institutions. With the new constitution, the tutelage was eventually removed.
- 10.
The Indigenous Post is a reduced form of Indigenous Attraction Post. The indigenous Attraction Post was a tiny military base built to attract uncontacted indigenous. The idea was to reduce them to a small area to free large territories for agricultural purposes and create new colonies of non-indigenous. The Laklãnõ's traditional territory was reduced from 50 thousand km2 (eighteenth century) to a few thousand hectares (1926).
- 11.
The two most famous cases in Laklãnõ history are Vekug and Koziklã. A son and a daughter of a tribal chief who were kidnapped and brought up to be civilized. The first one becomes a catholic priest, the second one learns to sing, play the piano, write poems, talk four European languages (Portuguese, German, French and Latin). Both received new names and most of the pictures of them just mention the non-indigenous names in the captions.
- 12.
The theatricality of the pictures is so grotesque that the “simulated combat” is disarmed and performed sitting on the floor. This combat technique is characteristic of other indigenous peoples. The Laklãnõ people use large white weapons as clubs in their battles. Both seated and unarmed combat are non-existent among the Laklãnõ (see Virgílio, 2021).
- 13.
José Ruhland was a photographer and was the first one to take photos of the Laklãnõ people after the settling. All the pictures taken by him (see Silva, 1930) show very imponent and strong indigenous. There are no people being photographed as weak.
- 14.
The archaeology researching indigenous people in the South of Brazil moves in the opposite direction.
- 15.
Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTKNmogdQAY.
- 16.
This drive towards accountability is motivated by the desire to justify how the funds benefit the community rather than individual interests. The underlying rationale here is that if the group responsible for the project accounted publicly for every action, they would then avoid criticism and could, furthermore, even recruit potential critics for the upcoming phases of the project.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
Santos worked with the Laklãnõ indigenous population from 1960 to 2000. He has more than fifty publications on this population. He is the only anthropologist who has explored the image of this population repeatedly. There are no other “visual memories” known to the Laklãnõ people produced by other authors.
- 21.
At the same time (1980s) that Santos was trying to attract international attention to the Laklãnõ people, the Brazilian state was denounced for the practice of genocide against another indigenous people, the Yanomami. It is so far the only complaint that has reached the UN since the creation of the United Nations in 1948. The Yanomami is the people described as naturally violent and the fierce people by Chagnon (1968).
- 22.
Like the Brazilian Association of Anthropologists (ABA), Santos was very close to the military while the dictatorship. He had never found it difficult to keep his job at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, while other professors, such as Florestan Fernandes, were removed from their activities. During the dictatorship, Santos accumulated functions and was repeatedly promoted. With the end of the dictatorship, he became the president of ABA. I talk more about the situation of the ABA in my thesis (Virgílio, 2022), but for instance, all civil participants in some commissions that were formed mainly by the military during the worst period of the Brazilian dictatorship were restricted to members of ABA. The book mentioned is on the references as Santos (1978).
- 23.
To be specific: A small group of Laklãnõ people, uncontacted, living in the highlands of Santa Catarina.
- 24.
The result achieved was the exact opposite. At some point, between the years 1978 and 1983 this uncontacted population was totally extinct.
- 25.
The INP focused on Parana Pine, while the IBDF focused on all natural plant resources and IBAMA deals with all issues involving the environment.
- 26.
In fact, I have identified at least two cities in southern Brazil that stopped having snow after the disappearing of the Zág tree. The area where the Zág tree predominates and the Laklãnõ people understand as traditional territory is the coldest area in Brazil and the only place where it still snows.
- 27.
APIB can be found online at https://apiboficial.org/?lang=en and also at http://www.instagram.com/apiboficial/.
- 28.
About the indigenous theory a brief reading also appears in Chapter IV of my doctoral thesis (Virgílio, 2022).
- 29.
I would like to thank the reviewers for their thoughtful comments and efforts towards improving my manuscript, especially to the editor Maria Rovisco who made useful comments and suggestions to the first version of the essay.
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Virgílio, J. (2023). The Appropriation of Visual Campaigns by the Laklãnõ People (Brazil). In: Veneti, A., Rovisco, M. (eds) Visual Politics in the Global South. Political Campaigning and Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22782-0_14
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