Fire at Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro

In early September 2018, a devastating fire engulfed the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro.  The 200-year-old structure, Brazil’s oldest scientific and historical building, held an archive of around 20 million artefacts.  Among these artefacts were invaluable materials documenting the history and culture of Brazil’s indigenous communities.    

Journalist Camila Zarur reported that little to nothing was salvaged from the Centro de Documentação de Línguas Indígenas (CELIN), which has documented indigenous languages for the past two centuries. Indigenous rights advocate José Urutau Guajajara believes the fire was the “death of the memory of the originary peoples, negligence to [their] patrimony. The memory of all Latin American languages was [there]. Sonic and written records of peoples who no longer exist,” concluding  that we are watching indigenous culture being erased. Brazilian philosopher Djamila Ribeiro says that the fire mirrored the country’s “institutional neglect” and disregard for its history, further stating  that the loss of artefacts and research “reflected Brazil’s ignorance of its African and indigenous heritage, and its indifference to an ignoble history of slavery and oppression.”  Writer and political theorist Mirna Wabi-Sabi believes the tragedy of the fire began long before the flames. She reports that the country feels ashamed not to have been able to maintain a European notion of history, and that the loss of rare artefacts must be considered  with an understanding of the value that is attributed to said artefacts, without forgetting the ethno- and Euro-centric processes inherently tied into Brazilian history.

The fire at Museu Nacional has not been the first to affect documents and artefacts pertaining to indigenous communities. In 1967, a fire erupted at the Ministry of Agriculture, which housed the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (Indian Protection Service).  The SPI held many documents in relation to land rights and indigenous registries. In a pre-digitisation era, the loss was great. Amongst registries was the Figueiredo Report. Released in the same year, the 7,000 page document detailed mass murder, enslavement, bacteriological warfare, land theft, and negligence committed against indigenous peoples in Brazil from 1940 to 1960, often at the hands of the SPI itself. The document was believed to have been lost in the fire, until it was more recently uncovered in the Indian Museum in Rio de Janeiro by human rights lawyer Marcelo Zelic. 

With Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, declaring war on Brazil’s indigenous population, using rhetoric that aggressively discriminates and incites violence, 2019 has already begun with a great mobilisation for the protection of indigenous rights, including  the right to their own memory.

The photographs featured in this article are from Travelling Through the Territory, by photojournalist Gabriel Uchida--a project which positions itself on the other side, as a counter-discursive, collaborative narrative which attempts to shift our perspective on the understanding of otherness. The images are archaeological fragments of a history between us and them. Uchida explores indigenous people’s narratives in reaction to the encounter with settlers.  He writes: “since the end of the 18th century, date of the first naturalistic expeditions to the North and Central West regions of Brazil, the increasing sophistication of image production has been put on the service of exploration and control of territories.” Working with the Uru-eu-wau-wau people in the Brazilian Amazon, he was given access to the community’s collection, which held pages of magazines, academic texts and other visual records accumulated over several years. The Uru-wau-wau had stained the documents and images with “urucum” (red natural ink), scratched and punctured, creating a visual story of the contact between themselves and the world outside. Uchida documents their collection in his work, investigating the Uru-wau-wau’s gaze upon us, making us the other.

Protagonismo Índigena

Protagonismo Indígena, or indigenous protagonism,  is a term which often appears in relation to indigenous empowerment movements in Brazil. More indigenous protagonists are needed to tell their stories. Although the digital divide is still very much present, digital technologies provide increasingly accessible and affordable tools. Cultural Survival, an advocacy organization that partners with indigenous communities,  reports on the different ways that the internet is used by indigenous communities. This article shares some concepts and projects which promote indigenous protagonism, archives, and future archives of first-person narratives.

Rádio Yandê

Katú Mirim

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