Contact Strategies: Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil

Abstract

Until recent decades, Brazilian scholarship was not particularly kind or faithful in narrating the historical experience of the nation's Indigenous peoples. Neither was public policy for that matter, built on similarly racist, paternalistic, or evolutionist premises. In the nineteenth century, historians such as Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen called for the forced integration or elimination of Indigenous peoples, while public officials and intellectuals espousing protectionism aimed ultimately for their disappearance as well. Twentieth-century historiography tended to romanticize Indigenous peoples' colonial-era cross-cultural interactions, while national-period narratives largely silenced their histories. Anthropologists often conjured cultural isolates who faced possible extinction. Nevertheless, Indigenous political mobilization accompanying late military rule and democratization in Brazil in the 1980s, alongside the efflorescence of social, environmental, and cultural history among professional historians, prompted new perspectives on the past. Heather Roller's richly empirical work adds to this revisionist scholarship, foregrounding and complexifying the role of Indigenous agency in the making of Brazilian history.There is so much that could have gone wrong with this book project. Where most histories or ethnographies in Brazil focus on one Indigenous group, Roller opted for two—the Guaikurú (or Kadiwéu) and Mura—located in two separate regions of the nation, and she often draws comparisons or connections to other groups as well. Where most Latin Americanist monographs compartmentalize historical analysis according to a colonial- and national-era divide, Roller's periodization ranges from the eighteenth century to the contemporary era. And perhaps most notably, where the difficulties of a bottom-up account of the past can lead historians to avoid or window-dress it, Roller conceptualizes her monograph in this mold, necessitating a supple methodological approach. All along, Roller demonstrates mastery of archival sources and bibliographic materials as well as giftedness as a storyteller.Privileging non-Western epistemologies, ethnohistorical approaches may succeed in “provincializing Europe” but can also obscure the dynamic interface between traditional peoples and histories of colonialism and nation building. Roller avoids such pitfalls by showcasing Indigenous peoples' proactive and adaptive strategies to situations of “contact,” or what Marshall Sahlins would refer to more broadly as the process of the “indigenization of modernity.” Like Sahlins and Brazilianist anthropologists Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Carlos Fausto, Terence Turner, and Aparecida Vilaça, Roller emphasizes Indigenous agency in interethnic cultural zones; as a historian, however, she has adopted a longue durée approach and a method more akin to historical sociology. In other words, Roller tracks changes and continuities in Indigenous engagement with dominant society through a methodical and far-ranging combing of archival and printed sources. She locates strategies of aggression, appropriation, adaptation, co-optation, and dissimulation, as well as countless other “weapons of the weak” (and of the strong too, given the hit-and-run aptitudes of Guaikurú and Mura), but the book's larger takeaway in many ways is its upending of reductionist notions of “tradition,” “assimilation,” and “resistance” that have distorted our understandings of Indigenous history. Although contemporary ethnographers and Indigenous activists have likewise challenged such essentialist frameworks, Roller's ability to ground the chapters of this sprawling diachronic study in the patterned initiatives of Indigenous populations is innovative and illuminating.What would the history of contact look like from an Indigenous perspective? Roller urges us to deconstruct the question's very terms: to reconsider “contact” as an ongoing and contested process heavily mediated by Indigenous agency rather than the “pacification” or defeat of an ethnic group; to rethink “Indigenous,” since groups such as the Guaikurú and Mura lacked the ethnic homogeneity and political unity that many outsiders ascribed to them; and to problematize “history,” whose periodization, teleology, and evidentiary bias have conspired to erase or distort Indigenous initiatives. Her portrait relies on a pointillist rendering of the historical contingencies of Indigenous and frontier societies. The subjects of her canvas are the interimperial rivalries of the late colonial period on South American frontiers that accorded Indigenous peoples significant latitude; the geopolitical strategies and advantages of the Guaikurú in their strategic alliance with Brazil during the Paraguayan War; and the logistic conditions and material demands that Indigenous peoples consistently placed on Luso-Brazilian officials in return for cooperation or alliance, including the threat of revocation for perceived breach of contract. In a poignant final chapter, which reads more as an afterword than a conclusion, Roller spotlights contemporary struggles of the Mura and Kadiwéu for self-determination, which the reader can now situate in a long history of Indigenous ways of being in a world remade by Portuguese colonialism, Brazilian developmentalism, and, critically, Indigenous peoples' agency.Roller's book is a significant contribution to the fields of Indigenous studies, comparative frontiers, and Brazilian history. The elegance of her prose and the clarity of her argument make the work well suited for classroom use for advanced undergraduates, while the sophistication of her methodology and conceptualization can provide a template for researchers in related fields. In Roller's scholarship, one sees the historian's craft at its finest.