Indians In Brazil: Is Genocide Inevitable?

INDIANS IN BRAZIL: Is Genocide Inevitable?.

In 1957, the noted anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro wrote a short paper in which he gave a statistical overview of the effects that a half century of Brazilian policy had brought its indigenous people. Despite the dry, technical tone of "Indigenous Cultures and Languages," the report was deeply disturbing. Between 1900 and 1957, the population of Indians in Brazil had dropped by more than four-fifths, from over 1 million to less than 200,000. In little more than fifty years, 87 tribes had become extinct -- more than one-third the total -- and another 38 were on the brink, the survivors living in the most abject poverty and suffering. And this despite the fact that national and international outcries after the turn of the century had moved the government of Brazil to reform its particularly vicious Indian policy.

Almost 40 years after Ribeiro's study, the situation of Brazil's 206 Indian nations has improved only marginally. The vast majority of those that have come into permanent contact with Brazilian society continue to live under the most wretched of conditions, while those who have managed to maintain some form of isolation are currently suffering the same cataclysmic population declines endured by tribe after tribe exposed to contact with Brazilian society throughout this century.

Of the approximately 270,000 indigenous peoples -- in 554 separate communities living in Brazil today, few hold legal rights to their lands. Indeed more than half of these Indian communities' lands are not even recognized by the government. Of those 210 reservations that have been created, more than 80 percent are under assault by gold miners, colonists, timber companies, or cattle barons and the Brazilian government appears incapable and unwilling to afford even the slightest protection for Indian people, who find little security in their own reservations. While the plight of Brazilian Indians, as well as the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, has attracted international attention, it has done little over the years to stop the general historical trend of the 20th century -- a trend which is characterized by the continual theft and destruction of Indian lands, the obstinate refusal of the Brazilian government to uphold Indian rights and defend the integrity of Indian territories, and a pattern of...