The Political Nature of the Forest: Research Notes about the Forced Displacement Politics of Indigenous Peoples during Military Regime in Brazil

Abstract

In colonial and modern imaginaries, the indigenous peoples of Amazonia have always been defined by categories of incompleteness. One of the most conspicuous arguments supporting this view was the alleged nonexistence of urban complexes in the forest landscape, both in the ancient past, as archaeological evidence, and in the modern present, as large-scale spatial infrastructures. Supposedly constrained by the environmental conditions of the tropics, technological limitations and “subsistence economies,” forest peoples thus also were said to lack that most remarkable product of “civilization”: the city. The cartographies presented in this essay challenge this colonial perspective. They are part of an investigation into the genocidal campaign conducted against the indigenous peoples of Amazonia by the Brazilian State during the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 80s. Through an archaeology of the violence as it registers in maps, documents and the forest’s botanic fabric, this research reveals a radically different image of the nature of Amazonia. By carefully studying these evidence we see that the forest is to a great extent an designed construction that results from the various ways indigenous societies engage, manipulate and transform the land.