Brazil’s “March to the West”: Memories of an Indigenous Shaman and other “Moderns”

Abstract

The Amazon forest and savanna became central for the realization of Brazilian modernity in the 1940s when aviation networks were created by a government expedition to open up the western territories. Indigenous peoples played a number of roles in this state project. Through a focus on the autobiographical account of an indigenous shaman working as a team member and the memoirs of the expedition leaders, I contrast how indigenous peoples were scripted as the antithesis of the “modern,” how their labor made them the means of the realization of this sort of modernity, and how some came to share, in part, the goals of this “modern” project. The juxtaposition of non-indigenous with indigenous accounts of this project allows for a reevaluation of the terms popular in the “ontological turn”—namely, “Amerindian” and “modern” thought—and calls for moving from these categories to examining the historically specific contexts in which people engage with each other in joint projects.