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What do we know about the indians?

 

Much of what we, non-Indian Brazilians, believe we know about Indians are scattered facts, superficial stories and generic images, all of which impoverishes reality enormously. Beginning with the shallow - when not prejudiced or misinformed - way with which our schools and textbooks treat the subject. The media in general does not do much to help better understand Indian reality. A most common thing is to read, see or hear in the media news with the name of the 'tribe' either changed, spelled or mispronounced in an arbitrary way. It is equally not at all uncommon to see an Indigenous people associated to places where it has never lived or to images that are in reality of another ethnic group.

Non-specialists interested in knowing more about the Indigenous peoples that live in Brazil face many difficulties. In the first place, because the channels and spaces for the direct expression of the Indians in the cultural and political scenarios of the country, although increasingly more common, are still few. Often living in places difficult to be reached, with basically oral traditions of communication and frequently monolingual or with tenuous knowledge of the Portuguese language, the different ethnic groups face many obstacles to freely express themselves in the non-Indian world. Their points of view are generally taken out of the context where they live, mediated by frequently precarious interpreters and registered as fragments, and in Portuguese.

Secondly because, in fact, little is known about the Indians. Consistent information about them usually come from studies made by ethnologists and linguists. The problem is that a great number of native peoples and languages of contemporary Brazil has not been researched. And many of those specialized studies have not been published, or are accessible only in foreign languages, thus remaining restricted to academic circles.

The availability of updated, contextualized information in this site is a contribution to fill in the cultural and political gap between Indians and non-Indians.