After attending the Amazonia exposition at MOA, I had the opportunity to reflect on several objects and facts that stood out to me and that, as I have come to realize, represent a lot to South Americans, myself included.
The object that stood out to me the most was the hammock, or as I call it, rede. The hammocks there were beautiful, colorful, comfortable and complex in their own way but if we stop to reflect on what the purpose of that object is and what is the equivalent of it today, we start to notice that, with modernization and the ever crescent technology, we tend to distance ourselves from the simplicity of objects like these to search for more luxurious, technological and “extra” comfortable ways to do things, even the simple act of sleeping. I am not saying that we should all leave our comfy beds and start sleeping in hammocks every day, but when did simple objects start to incorporate such technological designs and become complex things that we sometimes, do not even need? That’s right, after the contact with settlers.
This contact is something that I would like to explore as it is a topic that is very prevailing and relates to all classes in our CAP program.
I have to start by saying that being Brazilian, I cannot help but talk about my own relationship to this. Brazil, as the exhibition mentions, is a country that has 64.3% of jurisdiction over the Amazon Forest, so it is a very important country to the reality that I am going to expose. There are thousands of Brazilian indigenous communities that currently live in the Amazon Forest and are in danger, as is the fauna and flora of the forest. They are at risk because of the over exploration of goods and mostly because a lot of its surface is being given to mining concessions and industrial conversion.
I actually own a rede and when I go to the beach, I lay there comfortably and look around. It is almost like it was designed to make you contemplate your surroundings, look at the sky, look at the high trees, look at the birds flying by… I love my rede but I never gave a special meaning to it, I never stopped to think about why it was there and perhaps most importantly, I never thought about who made it.
In that sense, with pain in my stomach and at the most of my vulnerability, I have to say, I am a settler. I am a settler not because part of my ancestors came to Brazil and followed the footsteps of other Europeans (diminishing, exploring and not caring for indigenous societies). I am settler because every day, I conform to the situation that those communities, those native individuals live. Every day I make the decision to put my life above theirs and not do anything about it. I used to learn in school that each day, indigenous are targeted and assassinated in order for big corporations to have another piece of land to grow cattle. I know this, my teacher knows this, all of my class knows this and in fact, most Brazilians know this, and yet, we don’t do much about it.
But I am also indigenous. Again, not because part of my ancestors were (and they also suffered in the hands of Europeans) but because part of my Brazilian identity is central to the beauty and exotic characteristic of the landscapes and that includes the enchanting and diverse Amazonia. I want to preserve and exalt that part of my identity and I want to do something about the current situation there. I chose to be vegetarian because of that but I know that this small action does not make that much of an impactful difference in such a big site as Amazonia and yet again, I accept that.
In many ways, as I have come to learn in this last semester at UBC, the settler-native relationship in Brazil is similar to that of first nations in Canada. However, Brazil has two very distinct features: first, we have a much more complicated relationship with the native populace as the majority of our population has an indigenous background; secondly, Brazil’s motive for the exclusion of native minorities is much more economical than was the Canadian one.
In Brazil, the sole purpose of killing and excluding these people from society is driven by the capitalist need for further expansion of agriculture and other commodities and our government very explicitly puts this indigenous in detriment, not caring for their rights and making a point to show them that a piece of land is more important than their w-h-o-l-e e-n-t-i-r-e c-o-m-m-u-n-i-t-y. I will not cite legal and court examples because I do not wish to dwell on this too much and because there are simply way too many.
Moreover, we have a more complicated relationship than the extreme distinction between white and indigenous people that Canada has due to most of the Brazilian population being a mix of European immigrants with Indigenous people. I am an example of that. That is why we say that Brazilians “don’t have a face”. We are all different and we all have different mixed backgrounds and so you could not look at someone and say “He/She looks Brazilian”. Different people can look more or less “European” or “Native” and have more or less of a relationship with indigenous people.
Nevertheless, as I have mentioned, we all tend to adopt settlers attitudes by choosing to forget that the Amazonia, something so important to us, is being devastated and indigenous societies eradicated every day. That becomes even more problematic when we learn it in school because we are presented with facts, not solutions or ways to prevent/ intervene in this problem. By putting questions about “how much Amazonia is being explored?”, “what is the percentage of the Amazonia that was given to cattle companies?” and “how many species are extinct?” in national exams, schools are not producing thinking minds; they are normalizing those facts to our eyes.
In that sense, I have to give Canada credit. The Canadian government and institutions, despite the atrocities made previously in history, nowadays make a constant effort to recognize those communities and their lands and demonstrate that they have in fact invaded their territories and still use them for their own benefit. Canadians are more evolved and apologetic in that sense.
That is one of the reasons that I decided to come to Canada. I wanted to be able to take an outsider’s look at my country and through classes like Sociology, Political Science, Geography and ASTU, learn what I can do for Brazil. Learn what, in the course of history, made the Canadian society pause and say “No more. Let’s start recognizing indigenous people and their struggle for rights and land”.
As I looked at a hammock at MOA, I thought: this is a symbol of an object that is so simple and perfect and yet we felt the need to construct something entirely different and much more elaborate and make THAT the “normal” and the model for the rest of the world. Today, the hammock is just a piece of furniture in a settler’s balcony (outside) whereas the bed is undoubtedly placed in the bedroom (inside).
We have done the unthinkable, the improbable. We did the impossible. We integrated indigenous culture and objects into our own while excluding the indigenous themselves.
That is why we do not think about who made the objects we interact with every day.
That is why we think about a tree or a jaguar when we think of “Amazonia” rather than thinking about the communities that live there.
That is why we need expositions like this to remind us that what were are doing (or conforming to others doing it) is not ok.