Anticolonial geopolitics in the trans-scalarity of the indigenous struggle

Abstract

The paper analyzes the trans-scalarity of the indigenous struggles on the basis of the idea that spatial strategies and tactics with political goals of the Brazil’s indigenous people’s movement are an example of what we call the anticolonial geopolitics promoted by indigenous peoples. In the first part, we offer a critical bibliographic survey of the literature on geopolitics, in whose context we identify two perspectives: state-centric and state-critical geopolitics (anticolonial geopolitics being a strand of the latter). Afterwards, we analyze the politics of scale of the indigenous movement in Brazil, emphasizing on the Lower Tapajós river region, in the state of Pará, and the multi-scalar web of indigenous organizations, from village to APIB (“national”) to COICA (“transnational” in relation to the Amazon Watershed). We have highlighted trips and interventions by Brazilian indigenous activists in forums and other instances of global reach and the evidence of “return” of this trans-statal publicity for the struggle in ancestral territories. After that, we have discussed how the environmental issue acts as a catalyst for the trans-scalarity of the indigenous struggle, examining the limits of a “liberal-adaptative” environmental policy approach as well as the possibilities (and necessities) of epistemic and political rupture, supporting us in the idea of a double fracture of modernity (colonial and environmental). We conclude by underlining the main points raised in the text, placing the potential of approaching the geopolitics promoted by indigenous peoples as anticolonial geopolitics; moreover, whenever we see the environmental issue as something central to the struggle for ancestral territories, we propose to take it as an “indigenous ecogeopolitics”.