The indigenous people’s denial in Brazil’s historical-territorial formation process: A colonial past tied to the present

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to reconsider the question of the indigenous people denial in the historical-geographical formation process in Brazil as a problem that has expanded and worsened due to the permanence of the logic space’s use guided by capitalist technical-instrumental rationality. The method chosen to reflect on this issue was based on the analytical-reflective perspective as a means to explain the spatialization of enclosing indigenous territories problem in the face of the expansion of agribusiness, within the scope of critical social theory, which was supported by the technique of superimposition of two maps prepared for this purpose. The main result of this work was translated into the realization that, if the logic inherent to the capitalist technical-instrumental rationality does not change, indigenous peoples will continue to be threatened with having their territories taken and their cultures erased, making unfeasible the assumptions of well-being that could be used to build another world on Earth. For that, this paper draws attention to a continuous and permanent process that marginalizes the territories of indigenous people, condemning them to the condition of precarious existence and denial of their rights due to, notably, the permanence of coloniality based on the violence and elimination of these people who are not directly interested in the process of accumulating goods. Thus, denying the existence and importance of their territories reinforces the inequalities situation and socio-spatial injustices that constitutes the essence of Brazilian historical-territorial formation.

Keywords: Original peoples; Agribusiness; Territorial fencing; Threatened territory.