In July 2022, a law defined April 19 as Brazil’s Day of the Indigenous Peoples—no longer “Indian Day”—aimed at celebrating their culture and heritage in the country. Approved by Congress, the measure does away with the term “Indian,” considered prejudiced against the original peoples.
Still, in the view of Dinamam Tuxá, executive coordinator at the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil—APIB—prejudice is ultimately reinforced by stereotypes that still persist in celebrations and textbooks.
“Schools have kids dress up. They try to fit indigenous people into a mold, inside a little box. The indigenous people are the people who live in the forest, walking around in their traditional clothes. This builds a scenario tainted by racism, as these children grow up thinking of indigenous people as having straight hair, slanted eyes, and reddish skin. We’ve undergone miscegenation. We were the victims of violence. How many indigenous women have suffered sexual abuse? Miscegenation was forced among them”, said Tuxá in interview to Agência Brasil.
The history of the indigenous peoples in Brazil is scarred by centuries of violence. In Dinamam Tuxá’s view, this persists in the form of racism—a remnant of Portuguese colonization.
“It’s been a process of fierce violence and forced assimilation. The indigenous people have been abused, stripped of their language, and forced into a reality that does not belong to them, with indigenous lands left undemarcated and with no public policy to encourage their culture. This also contributes to the spread of violence in and out of indigenous territories,” Tuxá noted.
Genocide
History Professor Fabrício Lyrio, from the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia, notes that the arrival of the Portuguese brought a series of attacks on the original peoples, which resulted in genocide. While approximately 5 million indigenous people lived in Brazil back in 1500, this number stands below 1 million today.
“Above all, there’s the symbolic violence of affirming one’s presence in a land where other people were already living. This action had ripples. Both the intentional violence 
of war and enslavement and the violence that was not planned but had a huge impact on native peoples—the arrival of new infectious agents—no doubt bring to the picture a dimension of genocide,” Professor Lyrio said.
The native people were the first to be enslaved by the Portuguese in Brazil—even before immigrants and African people, the professor recalls. The first sugar mills in the country, he added, were erected with indigenous labor, mostly slaves.
The Portuguese who landed here in 1500 believed they had arrived in India. As a result, they referred to locals as Indians. The correct term, however, is “indigenous,” a Latin term meaning “native to the place where one lives.”
Indigenous Peoples Secure Decisive Victory in Brazil
On September 21, Brazil’s Supreme Court upheld Indigenous peoples’ rights to their traditional lands by ruling against the so-called cutoff date, a legal argument that Indigenous peoples should not obtain title of their ancestral territories if they were not physically present on them on October 5, 1988, the day Brazil’s current Constitution was adopted.
Following the decision, Indigenous people across Brazil celebrated what they have called “the ruling of the century.” It is also of major significance for the global climate, as demarcating Indigenous territories has been repeatedly demonstrated to be one of the most effective barriers against deforestation in the Amazon.
The case, which had been on the Supreme Court’s docket for years, stems from a dispute in which Santa Catarina state used the cutoff date argument to challenge lands claimed by the Xokleng Indigenous people. Even before deciding on the merits, the Court determined that its ruling on this case would be applicable to similar cases across Brazil.
Indigenous people from around the country travelled year after year to Brasilia from remote locations, to call on judges and lawmakers to respect their rights. This ruling will strengthen their tenacious fight to preserve the environment and their way of life, which depends significantly on the land.
The ruling brings immense relief to Indigenous people. If upheld, the arbitrary cutoff date would have made the titling of Indigenous territories impossible for communities who were expelled from their land before 1988 and could not prove they were involved in an ongoing dispute over their claim back then.
However, the rural caucus in Congress, which is tightly linked to agribusiness, also introduced an initiative that would enshrine the cutoff date thesis in legislation. The fate of that proposal remains to be seen.
The court’s decision is consistent with precedent from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which has recognized the right of Indigenous peoples to their land and said that right continues as long as their “material, cultural, or spiritual connection” with the land persists.
Source: Agência Brasil and Human Rights Watch