A preservação ancestral: a mobilização indígena pelo patrimônio arqueológico

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to show how the contemporary struggle of indigenous peoples for archaeological heritage is directly related to the historical exclusion they experienced in the process of formation of Brazil. To do so, we started by analyzing the actions of the Apiaká, Munduruku and Kayabi ethnic groups, who between 2010 and 2019 claimed the right to possess twelve funeral urns belonging to their ancestors, which were removed from their sacred location due to the construction of the Teles hydroelectric plant. Pires and were kept at the Alta Floresta Museum (MT). Their dispute for the right to vote is within the scope of a broader struggle: the right to their way of preserving archaeological heritage. Thus, in different manifestos and interviews, indigenous people question how the preservation of cultural heritage in Brazil was and is thought of. Therefore, this study also investigates how, following the creation of SPHAN (Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico Artístico Nacional), in 1937, temporal and conceptual landmarks were established regarding the origin of preservation policy and cultural heritage. In the perspective proposed by the first director of SPHAN, Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade, the genuineness of Brazil would be in baroque art and colonial architecture, as they would be productions of a civilization with “technical superiority”. This understanding, however, was not a consensus among intellectuals who gave relevance to archaeological heritage. Within the scope of this underlying dispute around heritage hierarchies, historiographical silences were constructed, in relation to the importance of Museums, and social silences, in the exclusion of indigenous people in the process of formation of archaeological and ethnographic collections that materialized the national narrative. However, when analyzing the demands of indigenous peoples for the return of archaeological urns, we note that Museums or unofficial musealization initiatives, such as the Center for the Preservation of Indigenous Art and Science, which existed in Alter do Chão in the 1990s, Since the middle of the 20th century, they have been seeking new ways of acting within society, in which racist and ethnocentric practices lose space for new theoretical perspectives, such as decolonial and even indigenous perspectives. In these terms, indigenous peoples are keen to establish a distinction in relation to the cultural heritage of non-indigenous people: indigenous heritage maintains a living relationship with nature and ancestry.