From ‘Flocking for Rights’ to the Politics of Death: Indigenous Struggle and Indigenous Policy in Brazil (1980–2020)

Abstract

This article presents an overview of the recent history of the relations between indigenous peoples and the Brazilian state. While also looking back to the 1980s, the central focus of the article is on the public policies on development adopted by different governments over the last twenty years. It shows how these policies increasingly affected the lives of the indigenous peoples, taking strategic advantage of a weakening of the existing legislation in the country and a disregard for international guarantees, won over several decades of political struggle. The article analyses the harmful effects of these public policies, which have reached their apex in the present policy of death claimed and applied by the government of Jair Bolsonaro. Finally, the article demonstrates how the indigenous movement not only confronts, but reinvents forms of resistance to this catastrophic scenario.