THE AMERICAS

70:4/April 2 0 1 4 / 7 0 7 - 7 3 0
COPYRIGHT BY THE ACADEMY OF
AMERICAN FRANCISCAN HISTORY

HISTORY, MEMORY, AND UTOPIA

IN THE MISSIONARIES' CREATION OF THE
INDIGENOUS MOVEMENT IN BRAZIL
(1967-1988)

O
n April 17, 1974, and die two days following, a gathering of 16
indigenous participants from nine different indigenous societies was
held in Diamantino, Mato Grosso, Brazil. During the three days, ver-
nacular narratives, trivial announcements, and critiques of the government and
local ranchers were presented—without any of the participants significantly
engaging with one another. Only one primary source on this event, a short,
typed document, is available today.1 The historicity of this "Assembly of
Indigenous Chiefs" is granted by both the anthropological and the historical
situations of the participating communities. For the first time, individuals from
indigenous societies that did not share ethnic borders or history met to
advance indigenous rights; for the first time also, these individuals were
granted political representation (of their groups), a notion largely foreign to
indigenous political traditions. There was a conscious effort to draw chiefs
from as many communities as possible and to establish a large, pan-Indian
movement.

Yet, the real impact of this meeting remains difficult to appraise. There seems to
be a paradoxical discrepancy between what happened—the small size of the
event, its near-obscurity, and the lack of both media coverage and repercussions

My archival research was carried out in the headquarters of CIMI in Brasilia and in its regional branches in
Cuiaba, Beldm, Manaus, and Campo Grande; the Centra Burnier, in Cuiaba, where the archives of former
Jesuit missions of Mato Grosso are hosted; and the Tia Irene Community Center in Sao Felix do Araguaia
(Mato Grosso). I thank their very helpful staffs. I also conducted interviews with historical missionaries and
lay missionaries in Brazil and Paraguay: Msgr. Pedro Casaldaliga, Bartomeu Melia, S.J., Thomaz de Aquino
Lisboa, Egydio Schwade, Renato Athias, Egon Heck, and Nelo Ruffaldi. 1 want to thank all of those named
here. For reasons explained in this article, this study partly relies on their important corpus of oral memory.
Finally, I thank the two anonymous reviewers of The Americas whose informed comments significantly
improved this article. All of the translations and their imperfections in the article are mine.
1. Assembleia de Chefes Indigenas, Diamantino, Mato Grosso, 1974. Available at the CIMI Library,
Brasilia.

707
708 HISTORY, MEMORY, AND UTOPIA

in the indigenous world—and how it is now remembered: as the founding

moment of the indigenous movement in Brazil. The French scholar Michel de
Certeau called it "the great Indian awakening," and Jesuit historian Jose Moura
e Silva compared it to the sixteenth-century Tamoyo Confederation, which
united several enemy tribes against European colonizers, a reference widely
adopted by both students and activists of the indigenous movement in Brazil.2

There are today more than 200 indigenous organizations in Brazil; in the
1990s, large indigenous mobilizations defeated World Bank-supported devel-
opment projects in the Amazonian basin and for the past 20 years, indigenous
actors have developed alliances with many transnational NGOs. 3 Indigenous
leaders representing national, regional, and local organizations are received by
Brazilian presidents and travel around the world to defend their cause. All this
is supposed to have started with that single, small assembly attended by just 16
participants.

Three more such Assemblies of Chiefs followed in 1975, two more in 1976,
four in 1977, one in 1978, two in 1979, and two more in 1980. In total, from
1974 to 1988, the year of the new Brazilian constitution, about three dozen
such assemblies were held. What is rarely acknowledged is that the Assemblies
of Chiefs were entirely conceived, organized, and financed by a non-indige-
nous organization, the Indigenist Missionary Council (Conselho Indigenfsta

2. Michel de Certeau, "The Indian Long March," in The Indian Awakening in Latin America, Yves
Maternes, ed. (New York: Friendship Press, 1980), pp. 113-127. Jose Moura e Silva, Jesuitas em Mato Grosso
do Sill, Rondonia e Mato Grosso (Cuiaba, Mato Grosso: unpublished, 2003), p. 143. At the same time, Moura
e Silva, to my knowledge the only surviving observer of the first assembly, thought of it as a failure and called
it "an imitation" of an assembly (ibid.). A reading of the minutes leaves little doubt that the preparation was
insufficient. Some participants were seemingly unaware of the purpose of the event. The comparison between
the early contemporary indigenous movement and historical figures of armed indigenous resistance to colo-
nization in Brazil is recurrent in activist and scholarly literature, although the former, in principle a social
movement, relies on the "peacefulness" of means and methods used to articulate demands and confront the
state. For example, see Egon Heck and Benedito Prezia, "500 anos de resistencia e luta," Povos indigenas: terra
e vida (Sao Paulo: Atual Editora, 2002), pp. 10-41; Benedito Prezia and Eduardo Hoonaert, Brasil indigena.
500 anos de resistencia (Sao Paulo: FTD, 2000); Hoonaert, "Da importancia das Assembleias Indi'genas para
os estudos brasilciros," Religiao e Sociedade 3 (1978), p. 177-187; Poliane Soares Bicalho, Protagonismo indi-
gena no Brasil: movimento, cidadania e direitos (1970-2009), (Ph.D. diss.: Universidade de Brasilia, 2010);
Maria Helena Ortolan Matos, Oprocesso de criacao e consolidacao do movimentopan-indigena no Brasil (1970-
1980), (M.A. thesis: Universidade de Brasilia, 1997); Frans Moonen, "O movimento indigena no Brasil: mito
ou realidade?," Cadernos Paraibanos de Antropolqgia 1 (1985), pp. 25-41; and Maria Castro Ossami, "O
papel das Assembleias de Lideres Indi'genas na organizacao dos povos indi'genas no Brasil," Serie Antropologia
1 (1993), pp. 1-50.
3. Bruce Albert, Organizacoes na Amazonia, Institute Socioambiental [herafter ISA], Sao Paulo, http:
//pib.socioambiental.org/en/c/iniciativas-indigenas/organizacoes-indigenas/na-amazonia-brasileira
(accessed January 10, 2014, in English). See also Albert, "Territoriality, Ethnopolitics, and Development: The
Indian Movement in the Brazilian Amazon," in The Land Within: Indigenous Territory and Perception of the
Environment, Alexandre Surrallees and Pedro Garcia Hierro, eds. (Copenhagen: rVVGIA, 2005), pp. 200-228.
On indigenous mobilizations to resist development projects, see Terence Turner, "Amazonian Indians Lead
Fight to Save their Forest World," Latin American Anthropology Review 1:1 (1989), pp. 2-4.
 JEAN PHILIPPE-BELLEAU 709

Missionario, or CIMI), an official branch of the National Conference of Brazil-

ian Bishops (CNBB).4 CIMI selected most of the participants by relying on a
network of sympathetic field missionaries, and the assemblies were, without
exception, convened at locations associated with the Catholic Church: on mis-
sion grounds, in indigenous villages at the periphery of missions, or in urban
locations owned by a Catholic congregation.5 If die idea that micro-societies
without financial means, expertise, or intellectuals (at the time) could organize
such events and conceive a common project is appealing, it remains improbable
and factually incorrect: the historical involvement and instrumentality of mis-
sionaries is undeniable. Yet, tlie master narrative on the subject presents the
assemblies as the effort of some indigenous ex machina. Because those who
conceived and organized die assemblies were fliose who shaped and produced
tJiis narrative, there is littie in tlie scholarly literature on die key role played by
CIMI in die creation of the indigenous movement.

In this article, I will first clarify tiie missionary role in tlie launching of die
indigenous movement in Brazil and its early form. I will briefly describe a
double causal link, between inculturation-theology Jesuits and die indigenous
movement and between CIMI and pan-Indian collective action. In the central
part of the article, I will explore three effects of this link: the production of his-
tory, with the naming, numbering, and listing of the assemblies designed to
impose and legitimize the indigenous movement; the concealment (or, for lack
of a better word, divestment) by CIMI of its own role for reasons of safety and
politics; and the relation between the locations of the first assemblies and die
Jesuits' sense of memory.

The years addressed in tiiis study are 1967 to 1988. The year 1967 marked an
important turn for indigenist policy in Brazil, for it was tiien that die National
Council of Bishops officially created the National Secretariat for Missionary
Activities (Secretariado Nacional de Atividades Missionarias, SNAM), then

4. CIMI financed the first six encounters, after which it received some financial support from Oxfam
Brazil. See Renato Athias, Oxfam, trente anos apoiando povos indijjcnas no Brasil, (Unpublished, 2002); and
Temas, probkmas c perspectivas em etnodesenvolvimento: uma Icitura a partir dosprojetos apoiados pela OXFAM
(1972-1992), (Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa, 2002).
5. How CIMI chose participants deserves a separate study since it raises questions pertaining to political
science, such as legitimacy and political representation. A reading of the assemblies' minutes, as well as inter-
views with historical actors, leaves little doubt that the haphazard seems to have been the rule: ad hoc criteria
for participation evolved throughout the 1970s and varied from one assembly to the other, with local mission-
aries liberally interpreting instructions from the central authority. The emphasis on indigenous chiefs was orig-
inally a strategy to prevent the destabilization of the political balance in villages amid rapid changes, but par-
ticipants were labeled "chiefs" or "leaders" rather liberally—many were neither. And, as CIMI soon learned,
there was often a tension between its objective to support the traditional leadership and the need for educated
participants able to master Brazilian cultural codes. The ability to speak Portuguese became an important cri-
teria when it became clear, after the first assemblies, that some participants could not understand each other.
Thus, education took over political legitimacy as the primary criteria for participation.
710 HISTORY, MEMORY, AND UTOPIA

known as the "Secretariat to the Indians," with Lourenco von Sonsbeeck,

O.P., as its first director.6 Until the creation of the National Secretariat, the
state not only had a monopoly on indigenous affairs but also enjoyed in that
work the collaboration and orientation of elite sectors, particularly missionaries
and intellectuals. The driving force behind the founding of the National Sec-
retariat was a prominent and multifaceted Jesuit, Adalberto Holanda Pereira.7

The following year in 1968, a group of progressive Jesuits from tlie Diaman-
tino mission closed down Utiariti, the most important boarding school of the
Jesuit mission complex in Mato Grosso, an event that in local Jesuits' collective
memory marks the symbolic beginning of a new mission.8 Inspired by incul-
turation theology, this group, led by Holanda Pereira, Egydio Schwade, Anto-
nio Iasi, and Thomaz de Aquino Lisboa called for die inclusion of lay mission-
aries, the anthropologization of missionary knowledge, the end of the
traditional mission structure that was based on the separation between the
world of the missionaries and the world of the Indians, and—most notably—
an explicit valorization of indigenous cultural identities. Joao Pedido Bosco
Burnier, also a Jesuit from the Diamantino mission, would later give to this
effort the name Misio Indigena.9 As we will see, the ambition to protect
indigenous lands and communities ran counter to the positivist state ideology
and indigenism that saw indigenous cultures as transient and acculturation as
inevitable.10

This study closes with the year 1988, when the new Brazilian constitution, in
its eighth chapter, granted indigenous peoples the legal right to form their own
organizations. The proliferation of indigenous NGOs after 1988 quickly ren-
dered die Assembly-of-Chiefs model obsolete, and eventually proved a more

6. Benedito Prezia, Caminhando na luta e na esperanca: restrospcctiva dos ultimos 60 anos da pastoral
indigenista e dos 30 anos do CIMI (Sao Paulo: Edicoes Loyola, 2003), p. 47; Moura e Silva, Jesuitas em Mato
Grosso, p. 143.
7. Moura e Silva, Jesuitas, p. 178; Thomaz de Aquino Lisboa, interview by author, Cuiaba, Mato
Grosso, 2009; Egydio Schwade, interview by author, Presidente-Figuereido, Amazonas, 1999.
8. See Jean-Philippe Belleau, "The Ethnic Lives of Missionaries: Early Inculturation Theology in Mato
Grosso, Brazil," Social Science and Missions 26:2/3 (2013), pp. 131-166. On Utiariti, see Joana A. F. Silva,
Utiariti. A ittlima tarefa. Missionaries e indios na ocupacao do Mato Grosso (Bachelor's thesis: Federal Univer-
sity of Mato Grosso, Cuiaba, 1999). For a call to an anthropological approach to the mission system and the
vast changes it underwent in Brazil, see Judith Shapiro, "Ideologies of Catholic Missionary Practice in a Post-
colonial Era," Comparative Studies in Society and History 23:1 (January 1981), pp. 130-149; and Paula Mon-
tero, "Indios e missionarios no Brasil: para uma teoria da mediacao cultural," in Dens na aldeia: missionaries,
indios e a mediacao cultural, Paula Montero, ed. (Sao Paulo: Editora Globo, 2006), pp. 31-66.
9. J. B. Burnier, Proposta de elementos para a reformulacao do relacionamento Provincia & missao
dependente, July 12, 1976.
10. On state indigenism, see Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Urn grande cerco de paz: poder tutelar,
indianidade e formacdo do Estado no Brasil (Petropolis: Vozes, 1995). On the conflict between state indi-
genism and the emerging indigenous actors, see Alcida Rita Ramos, Indigenism: Ethnic Politics in Brazil
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).
 JEAN PHILIPPE-BELLEAU 711

efficient vehicle for action.11 Thus began a new chapter of the indigenous
movement.

A NEW JESUIT UTOPIA: CREATING A PAN-INDIAN ACTOR

CIMI was founded in 1972 and replaced the National Secretariat for Mission-
ary Activities as the sole indigenist arm of the National Conference of Brazilian
Bishops. Seven bishops, four sisters, and 16 priests from various sectors of the
Catholic Church participated in its creation; of these, the most progressive and
instrumental actors were the inculturation-theology Jesuits mentioned
above.12 The previous year, Latin American and European anthropologists
meeting at Barbados had presented the Declaration of Barbados I, a text that
vehemently denounced ethnocides committed by the Church and die state.13
According to theologian Paulo Suess, tlie text electrified progressive mission-
aries willing to transform the Catholic institution's relation to indigenous com-
munities.14 Within three years, the progressive missionaries took control of the
new institution, marginalizing the conservatives such as Jose Vicente Cesar, a
prominent missionary of the Divine Word congregation who had been CIMI's
first president.15 The progressives then installed the liberation-theology bishop
Dom Tomas Balduino as CIMI's new president and the inculturation-theology
Jesuit Thomaz de Aquino Lisboa as its vice president.

Inculturation theology, called incarnation by its Brazilian protagonists until the

late 1970s, represented a dramatic change in the Church's relation to indige-
nous peoples and their cultural identities.16 Since the late 1950s a new genera-

11. Bruce Albert, "Territoriality." There were indigenous organizations prior to 1988, but they were
very few and not legally recognized. The first pan-Indian (and short-lived) Union of Indigenous Nations
(UNIND) was founded in 1980; just as short-lived was the monoethnic General Confederation of the Tikuna
Tribe (Confederacao Geral da Tribo Tikuna, CGTT), founded in 1982. In 1984, two more organizations
were created in Manaus. By 1987, only five such indigenous organizations existed.
12. On the foundation of CIMI, see Paulo Suess, A causa indigena na caminhada e proposta do CIMI:
1972-1989 (Petropolis: Vozes, 1989), p. 15-19. On CIMI's ideologies, see Shapiro, "Ideologies"; and "From
Tupa to the Land Without Evil: The Christianization of Tupi-Guarani Cosmology," American Ethnologist
14:1 (February 1987), pp. 126-139. See also M. P. Rufino, "A missao calada: pastoral indigenista e a nova
cvangclizacao," in Entre o mito e a historia, Paula Montero, ed. (Petropolis: Vozes, 1996), pp. 137-202.
13. The text is the Declaration of Barbados I, 1971,
http://www.nativeweb.org/papers/statements/state/barbadosl.php (accessed January 10, 2014).
14. Paulo Suess, Em defesa dos povos indigenas (Sao Paulo: Edicoes Loyola, 1980), p. 11.
15. See Prezia, Caminhando, p. 61-62, on what he called "the first crisis of CIMI." See also E. Pissolato
and R_ A. de Souza, "Missao e ciencia: os verbitas e o anthropos no Brasil," Revista CES(2008), pp. 103-122.
16. For studies on the historical roots of this theology in Brazil, see Deus na aldeia, Paula Montero, ed.;
Marcos Pereira Rufino, "O c6digo da cultura. O CIMI no debate da inculturacao," in Deus na aldeia, pp.
235-275 ; and Jean-Philippe Belleau, 2012, "Dieu est-il multiculturaliste?" in Le multiculturalisme au concrct,
D. Dumoulin and C. Gros, eds. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2012). Belleau argues
that inculturation theology has distinct historical roots from liberation theology and preceded it in time. In
her early articles, "Ideologies" and "From Tupa," Judith Shapiro also uses the term "incarnation" and pro-
vides evidence of the "radical reorientation away from proselytizing and toward political advocacy." Shapiro,
712 HISTORY, MEMORY, AND UTOPIA

tion of progressive Jesuits had been elaborating inculturation-theology prac-

tices: advocating anthropological training, an antiiropologization of missionary
categories, and the conservation of "culture." The progressives were based at
the Anchieta mission, at the time the center of vast network of Jesuit missions
in Mato Grosso, which hosted a church, chapels, rectories, a school, dormito-
ries, and farms, and held extensive pieces of land.17 This group of missionaries
drove CIMI's first decade of existence, leading and orienting it through their
representation and activism. These actors were the same who first promoted and
practiced proto-inculturation in Brazil, and several of the indigenous leaders
who participated in the first Assemblies of Chiefs were from villages where
inculturation missionaries lived.18 Mostly deceased, the few who remain, now in
their eighties, hold in their memories an important corpus of knowledge for the
study of the new missionary Church in late twentieth-century Brazil.

The young Jesuits of the Anchieta mission gradually articulated a framework

that gave a central place to the protection of the micro-societies among which
they lived, and their land. For a missionary Church that had for most of its exis-
tence in Latin America worked relentlessly at erasing native cultures and reli-
gions, this change was considerable. Dom Tomas Balduino, who was president
of CIMI from 1975 to 1994, called this "the Church's Copernican revolu-
tion," an unusual reference for a clergyman.19 Over time, indigenous societies
had undergone dramatic social changes—even anthropological extinction—
many times over. However, to a new generation of missionaries this fate sud-
denly appeared unbearable. While acculturation and the various ideologies
attached to it had long been accepted and implemented by Church and state,
a new consciousness empowered by inculturation theology led to a refocused
missionary indigenism that came to envision the preservation of land, commu-
nity, and culture as inseparable.20

"From Tupa," p. 133. Shapiro was, to my knowledge, the first scholar who saw in the contemporary mission-
ary appropriation of indigenous cultural elements a radical refounding of missionary practice rather than a
strategy to convert.
17. The mission's legal name was "Diamanrino," and it is revealing that these missionaries instead used
the name of the sixteenth-century century lesuit Jose de Anchieta.
18. The participants also included Marcos Xako'iapari, cacique of the Tapirape village, who attended
most of the assemblies in the 1970s. The Tapirape Indians were an anthropologically extinct people until a
group of French nuns and a Dominican bishop, in a rather unprecedented enterprise of anthropological engi-
neering, gathered 47 dispersed Tapirape in 1952 to "jump-start" a new community. The Sisters of Foucault
have been living incultured since then in the Tapirape village. They are also part of the CIMI network, as their
bishop after 1969, Pedro Casaldaliga, maintained strong relationships with both the sisters and CIMI. See
Irmazinhas de Jesus de Charles de Foucault, O renascer do povo Tapirape, 1952-1954 (Sao Paulo: Salesiana,
2002); and Shapiro, "Ideologies," pp. 130-140.
19. Tomas Balduino, "A acao da Igreja Cat61ica e o desenvolvimento rural," Estudos Avtmcados,l5-A3
(September/December 2001), pp. 9-22.
20. See Paula Montero, Deus na aldeia, for important ethnographic contributions on the effects of these
notions on specific indigenous communities where missionaries have worked in the late twentieth century.
 JEAN PHILIPPE-BELLEAU 713

On a day in late 1972, Thomaz de Aquino Lisboa and Egydio Schvvade were
conversing in the Anchieta mission about a Salesian publication they had
received from Colombia that reported on an indigenous assembly in the
Vaupes region. 21 What most intrigued the two Jesuits was the fact that individ-
uals from very different indigenous societies were put together. Lisboa then
proposed the "do the same in the Anchieta mission," an idea to which
Schwade immediately agreed. The first Assembly of Chiefs, introduced at the
beginning of this article, took place a few months later at the Anchieta mission
itself. Thus, it could be said that the caput nili of the indigenous movement
lies entirely outside of indigenous agency.

At the same time, any assertion that what CIMI and the Jesuit activists had in
mind in the early 1970s was an indigenous movement would be a stretch. Such
categories as "movements," "actors," and "agency" emerged and became pre-
dominant in the Latin and North American academic worlds in the late 1970s
and 1980s, but personal communications from the historical actors themselves
suggest that they had a relatively vague idea of what they wanted and how to
get there. For the first years of its existence, CIMI seemed to operate more on
intuition than planning. A study of the talks at the first five assemblies reveals
that the themes and organization typically arose on the spot. The lack of con-
nection between the talks presented by the various indigenous representatives,
the overall lack of organization and the disparity of themes, and the linguistic
misunderstandings (some participants expressed themselves in their own lan-
guages) betray the ad hoc manner in which missionaries attempted to build the
indigenous movement. As he recalled the first assembly in his history of the
Diamantino mission, Jose Moura e Silva bluntly stated that the missionaries
had hoped for "a real indigenous assembly and not an imitation," but candidly
expressed his own doubts: "Were the chiefs interested [in it], or was it just an
opportunity to chat and pass time? ... They wasted a lot of time getting to

Artionka Capiberibe, "Sob o manto do cristianismo: o processo de conversoes paliku," in Deus na aldeia, pp.
305-342, finds that missionaries now orient indigenous communities toward "culture" rather than toward
God. See also the spectacular historical and ethnographic study by Jan Hoffman French, "A Tale of Two
Priests and Two Struggles: Liberation Theology from Dictatorship to Democracy in the Brazilian Northeast,"
The Americas 63:3 (January 2007), pp. 409-443. Hoffman French makes the important argument that if the
indigenous communities associated with CIMI were to disappear, the very flocks that priests tend to would
cease to exist. Since these communities rely on their traditional territories for social reproduction, the defense
of indigenous land became central to CIMI; the preservation of cultural identities was essential to the preser-
vation of faith. Sylvia Caiuby Novaes, The Play of Mirrors: The Representation of Self as Mirrored in the Other
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), finds that missionaries, who used to demonize native cultures, now
embrace them.
21. This conversation was first narrated to me by Egydio Schwade when I interviewed him in Presidente
Figuereido, Amazonas, in 1999. The story was later confirmed by Thomaz Lisboa, in an interview by the
author in Cuiaba, Mato Grosso, in 2009. Jose Moura e Silva, Jesuitas, p. 238, asserts that Lisboa made this
proposal during an informal meeting of CIMI.
714 HISTORY, MEMORY, AND UTOPIA

know each other [but then] each talked about what concerned him only."22 By
1976, the assemblies had become more structured and CIMI had developed a
clearer plan of action, but the lack of direction up to that time did not support
a strategic framework. There was an action before there was a project.

The missionaries' broad objective was to halt the dramatic anthropological

degradation and extinction of indigenous communities that was occurring in
Mato Grosso and to impede the same kinds of destructive events throughout
the Amazonian basin. Engineering an Indian or pan-Indian response was only
one of several sets of actions they planned to undertake. Specifically, the reflec-
tions prior to the decision to hold an indigenous assembly centered on several
important developments that affected the structural situation of the many
indigenous micro-societies of Brazil and the conjuncture of economic events
that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the same time, other key
factors were ignored. The structural situation of indigenous peoples in Brazil
was not, and is still not, conducive to collective action. Demographically, rad-
ical atomization characterized these micro-societies. There were 83,000
indigenous people in 1971, of which there is no ethnic breakdown available.23
Some 200,000 indigenous people were identified in Brazil in the 1980s, but
77 percent of the indigenous societies in which they lived had fewer than 2,000
individuals.24 Of these, 37 percent belonged to groups with fewer than 500
individuals, and another 29 percent were members of groups with 500 to
2,000 individuals. Fewer still, 22 percent, belonged to groups with as many as
2,000 to 7,000 members; another 4 percent were in groups of from 7,000 to
15,000 individuals; and only 8 percent were within groups with 15,000 to
35,000 individuals.25

In comparison, the highland indigenous societies such as the Aymara and

Quechua in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, where social movements developed in
the early 1960s, number more than 10 million people.26 Linguistic diversity is
also an impediment to collective agency in indigenous regions of Brazil; there
are about 170 languages spoken in the Brazilian Amazon, although there exist

22. Moura e Silva, Jesnitas, p. 143.

23. Benedito Prezia, (no title) in Porantim 21:216 (June/July 1999), p. 10. According to the national
census of 2010, there were 817,963 individuals who identified themselves as belonging to 230 indigenous
peoples. This figure represents about 0.44 percent of the Brazilian population, according to the IBGE census,
in Marta Azevedo, "O Censo 2010 e os Povos Indigenas," Povos Indijjenas no Brasil (Sao Paulo: ISA, 2011),
pp. 45—48. The increase of the indigenous population can be explained by a set of factors, ranging from better
counting methods, to better health to ethnogenesis (more people identifying as indigenous than before).
24. C. A. Ricardo, "Debate," Cadernos de Pesquisa, 4 (June 1996) CEBRAP, p. 32.
25. Serge Bahuchet, Situation despopulations indigenes desforets denses et humides (Brussels: Commis-
sion Europ£enne, 1993), p. 100.
26. Y. Le Bot, Violence de la modernite. Indianite, societe etpouvoir (Paris: Khartala, 1994).
 JEAN PHILIPPE-BELLEAU 715

vehicular languages such as Tukano in the upper Rio Negro, Patiia in the
Oiapoque region, and Macuxi in Northeastern Roraima.27 The diversity of his-
torical experience within the nation-state creates important differences, and the
many communities that have survived epidemiological blows and conquests are
highly dispersed over a vast territory. Finally, the radical cultural diversity
among Brazil's indigenous peoples, with their highly distinct social and politi-
cal forms of organization, further increases the distance among groups.

To the weight of this data, we must add the extreme fragility of Brazilian
indigenous societies at the time that the social and cultural movements already
discussed were initiated. At the very time that the Brazilian government and
the World Bank joined together to sponsor deadly mega-development projects
in the Amazon basin in the 1970s, following three decades of frontier expan-
sion and internal migrations, many indigenous societies were on the verge of
extinction.28 The Gaviao Indians in Maranhao, for instance, lost 70 percent of
their population in the 1970s.29 The Waimiri-Atroari in northern Amazonas
state nearly became extinct after the government sent the military to back up
a road construction team in their traditional territories. In Mato Grosso, the
Tapayuna, decimated in 1969 by ill-intentioned white agents who gave them
contaminated meat, dropped from more than 400 persons to 41 traumatized
survivors in one week.30 Anthropologist Alcida Ramos has recognized that the
combination of anthropological factors—the existence of micro-societies,
many of them hunter-gatherers, the very size of Brazil, and the dramatic
impact of a fast-moving frontier—impeded the formation by Indians of a pan-
Indian movement, and their local efforts as well.31

N A M I N G , N U M B E R I N G , AND C H R O N O L O G I Z I N G ASSEMBLIES
AS H I S T O R I C A L P R O D U C T I O N

It was CIMI that created the first "Assemblies of Indigenous Chiefs," and it was
CIMI that would over time produce their history. The documents of the
Catholic organization, whether internal or intended for a greater public, pro-

27. On indigenous languages in the Brazilian Amazon, see "Linguas Indigenas da Amazonia," the data-
bank offered by the Emilio Goeldi Museum (Belem, Para, Brazil),
http://saturno.museu-goeldi.br/lingmpeg/portal/Jpage_id-205 (accessed January 27, 2014) , pp. 81-86.
See also Ayron Rodrigues, Linguas brasikiras: para o conhecimento das linguas indigenas (Sao Paulo: Edicoes
Loyola Rodrigues, 1986). Portuguese is more widely spoken today in many parts of the Amazon than it was
in the early 1970s.
28. See Shelton Davis, Victims of the Miracle (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
29. Iara Ferraz, "Resistance Gaviao: d'une frontiere l'autre," Ethnics 11/12 (1990), p. 81-86.
30. Adalberto Holanda Pereira, "Os Tapayuna (Beico-de-pau)," Revista de Antropolojjia 15/16
(1967/68), pp. 212-216.
31. Alcida Rita Ramos, "O Brasil no Movimento Indigena Americano," Anuario Antropolqgico 82
(1984), pp. 281-286.
716 HISTORY, MEMORY, AND UTOPIA

moted the view that indigenous political events were continuous, growing in
strength, inevitable, consequential, and chronological. There was thus the "First
Assembly of Indigenous Chiefs" in 1974, the "Second Assembly" in May 1975,
and so on, the names themselves giving the events a narrative and a history lay-
ered with meaning and progression, with those assemblies in turn leading to
and explaining the greater indigenous mobilizations of the 1980s and 1990s. In
this chronology, 1974 stands as Year Zero of the indigenous movement.

The practice of numbering assemblies so that they appear to make a progres-

sive list was eventually borrowed from CIMI by students of the movement and
journalists, but discrepancies in the numbering sequence underline its subjec-
tivity. Historian Maria Helena Ortolan Matos counted 53 assemblies between
1974 and 1984, but Benedito Prezia found 16 assemblies between 1974 and
1983 and the anthropologist Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira just 14 between
1974 and 1988.32 Prezia and CIMI list the 1977 Assembly in the Tapirape
Indian village as number 9, while the Boletim do CIMI and Poliene Soares
Bicalho identify that meeting as assembly number 10.33 The lack of structure
is also evidenced by a lack of consistency. For instance, the Boletim sometimes
uses the term "Assemblies of Chiefs" and at other times "Indigenous Assem-
blies." This discrepancy illustrates the unanswered, problematic—and
modern—questions of legitimacy in the context of political representation.

The post-hoc and heroizing narrative was an essential part of the political dis-
positive gradually constructed by the missionaries to assert the existence of a
powerful indigenous opponent in the public space, set against the overwhelm-
ing economic and political forces coveting indigenous territories. Thus, the
production was not created whole at inception, but rather progressively. The
idea that the assemblies constituted an entity was reified by 1980 when the
July/September issue of the Boletim for the first time evoked "the first indige-
nous assemblies." The "first" and the use of the plural provided both a heroic
dimension and a chronological base for the indigenous movement, as shown
by the following excerpt (Figure 1), taken from a 2001 book authored by the
Indigenist Missionary Council.

A second document (Figure 2), an excerpt from the acts of the electoral assem-
bly of an indigenous organization in 1994, was an assessment of the history of

32. Ortolan Matos, O processo, p. 132; Prezia, Caminhando, p. 333; Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira, A
crise do indigenismo (Campinas: Ed. UNICAMP, 1988), p. 35.
33. Prezia, Caminhando, p. 333; CIMI, Outros 500: construindo uma nova historia (Brasilia: CIMI,
2001), p. 127; "10a Assembleia de Chefes Indigenas," Boletim do CIMI, 6:43 (Brasilia: CIMI, 1977); Poliene
Soares Bicalho, "As assembl&as indigenas: o advento do movimento indigena no Brasil," Revista OPSIS 10:1
(2010), p. 112.
 JEAN PHILIPPE-BELLEAU 717

FIGURE 1
"Assemblies of Indigenous Chiefs, the Awakening of Consciousness"
ASStMBlflASPICHEFES
' l«NU>fOFXAS.ODESPERTAR
DACONSClfiNCIA

Source: Conselho Indigenista Missionario (CIMI), Outros 500: construindo ttma nova historia (Sao
Paulo: Editora Salesiana, 2001), p. 127. Title is taken from the picture caption that appeared in the
original work.

the indigenous movement by an advisor of CIMI's Manaus branch. It presents

the assemblies as both the matrix of the indigenous movement and the histor-
ical foundation of the Union of Indigenous Nations.34 Even if prevalent today,
the notion that the Assemblies of Chiefs were the foundation of the indigenous

34. This was contradicted in every interview I conducted. The foundation of the Uniao das Nacfles
Indigenas (UNI) took CIMI by surprise and brought about, in the words of one interviewee (Renato Athias),
"an earthquake" within the Catholic institution and throughout indigenism in general. That Indians resorted
to a formal, bureaucratic organization rather than the assembly model favored by the missionaries represented,
to a certain extent, a disavowal of missionary policy.
718 HISTORY, MEMORY, AND UTOPIA

FIGURE 2
"Official" Chronology of the Indigenous Movement

A p i U v r o I'icou a < t i s | > o s i ; i o da A s s c s s o r i a qu# £»s t s e g u i n t e c x p l i

Assemtklalas - I n d i g e n t s
1974 - 1980
,.
UNIND - 1973
W l - 1980

Regional!! 1

I AssemblSia H a c i o n a l - 1984 |
i
I I A s i f m b l e i a N a t i o n a l - 1985
400 l i d e r a n s u
i
C o n s t l h o - b0 Cense l h c i r o »
EscrJterio
Sao P a u l o

F o n m i o de QuadrQS

Source: Coordenacao das Organizacoes Indi'genas da Amazonia Brasileira (COIAB), proceedings of the
1994 COIAB meeting (Relatorio da COIAB), Manaus, 1994.

movement and the cause of subsequent mobilizations—even mobilizations

conducted by indigenous communities who did not participate in the assem-
blies and, like the Kayapo, have somehow remained outside of CIMI's influ-
ence—emerged only after the fact, in the course of the 1980s.

Although anthropologists have had complicated, if not antagonistic, relations at

times with missionaries in regard to the indigenous question over the past four
decades, many of them have adopted this narrative basically as is. Alcida Ramos,
for instance, cites the numbering of the assemblies along with the idea of pro-
gression, thus locating them as the launching pad for later, full-blown, organic
indigenous mobilizations.35 A recent government school textbook written by
prominent anthropologists also abides by this narrative.36 That CIMI imposes
its narrative in the face of considerable and powerful opposition in the arena of
public policy and media coverage reflects its level of control of the counter-indi-

35. Ramos, lndigmism.

36. J. P. de Oliveira Filho and C. A. de Rocha Freire, A presenfa indigena na formafao do Brasil
(Brasilia: MEC/UNESCO, 2006), p. 188.
 JEAN PHILIPPE-BELLEAU 719

genist field, as much as the contradictions or heterogeneity of a Brazilian state

that still relies on missionaries and anthropologists for various tasks.

Also left out of this narrative are the mobilizations undertaken by various
indigenous groups in the 1970s; instead, "the First Assemblies" are depicted
as the sole actor of, and die only model for, indigenous collective action for
the entire period. It is true that there were few mobilizations dien in compar-
ison with today, but they did exist, and diey existed outside the Church's influ-
ence. The Kayapo and the Xavante carried out various collective actions
directed at state institutions.37 Indigenous leaders in die Northeast also
brought territorial demands before state institutions.38

For anthropologist and historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot, naming, numbering,

and chronologizing are inherent in the process of historical production.39 The
numbering of the indigenous assemblies produces a phenomenon endowed
with coherence, linearity, logic, and inevitability that evokes and seems to
reflect the historicist tradition. Not only were the national assemblies num-
bered and endowed witJi historicist meanings, but so were later sets of assem-
blies that were regional, monoethnic, professional, or gender-based.40 The hes-
itations, fragmentations, ad hoc decisions, or even chance occurrences that are
always part of the historical process yield here to die teleological contingency
of historical production, with die result diat the initial, highly empirical char-
acter of the indigenous movement seems lost.41 As Trouillot wrote, "chronol-
ogy replaces process." Even a number of assemblies organized by CIMI itself
disappeared from the "official" lists; how many is unknown. A typed document
written by Vicente Cesar, president of CIMI from 1972 to 1975, makes refer-
ences to two assemblies never mentioned in other documents.42 According to
CIMI member Egon Heck, die context of military repression may explain die
effort to conceal such assemblies.43 Concealing events and occurrences that

37. Seth Garfield, Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the
Xavante Indians (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
38. Jose Mauricio Arruti, "A arvore Pankararu:fluxose meriforas da emergencia etnica no sertao de Sao
Francisco," in A viagem da volta, Joao Pacheco de Oliveira Filho, ed. (Rio: Contra Capa, 2001).
39. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1997).
40. For example, the "First assembly of Oiapoque," gathering a polity of three indigenous societies,
organized in 1984; the "First Tupi assembly" in 1986 in Altamira, Para; and the first, second, and subsequent
"assemblies of indigenous teachers." More recently, there was the "Second Assembly of Indigenous Women
of the Northeast, Minas Gerais, and Espirito Santo" in March 2011.
41. Not to mention the identities produced by such events ("Tupi People" [sic], "Indigenous Peoples
of the Northeast," and others.). On imagined communities created by the indigenous movement, see Jean-
Philippe Belleau, he mouvement indien an Bresil. Du village aux organisations (Rennes: Presses Universitaires
de Rennes, 2014).
42. Os Indios e as missies (undated), CIMI Library, Reference br/00.00.8c.
43. Egon Heck, interviews by author, Manaus, 1999, and Campo Grande, 2009.
720 HISTORY, MEMORY, AND UTOPIA

may undermine the linearity of this historical process again evokes Michel-
Rolph Trouillot: to produce history entails the production of silence.

In Trouillot's account, political power may decide to erase historical figures

from historiography. King Christophe I (1807-1820), monarch of the northern
kingdom of Haiti, thus expunged the revolutionary general Sans-Souci from
official historiography and from Haitians' collective memory of the Revolu-
tion.44 The case of CIMI is more complicated because it is only a relative power,
itself an underdog to the Brazilian state. It was then, and to a large extent still
is, engaged in an unequal batrie with that state, the nation's conservative media,
and the powerful economic and military lobbies whose interests run counter to
those of indigenous communities and their claims to land rights. CIMI sees
itself, and to a large extent is, at the service of what is possibly the most politi-
cally marginalized sector of Brazilian society; thus, it is concerned with breaking
the silence about violations of indigenous rights. CIMI nonetheless produces
silence as well, for its own role in this narrative goes unmentioned.

SILENCE, SELF-CENSORSHIP, AND THE INDIGENIZATION

OF HISTORY

The central component of the CIMI narrative is that the assemblies were pro-
duced by indigenous communities and their leaders. CIMI publications and
the scholarly publications mentioned in this article have pointed to indigenous
chiefs and communities as the planners, organizers, and protagonists of such
events. A larger public takes CIMI's narrative at face value—even though mas-
sive evidence, primary sources, and interviews of those who lived through the
period point to CIMI as the institutional host of the indigenous movement in
Brazil. The diffusion of stories about indigenous initiatives was rendered pos-
sible by the conscious and constant effort to slough off—by disowning its own
role—CIMI's part in indigenist initiatives. This cryptic practice would remove
CIMI from the limelight and promote the notion that the indigenous commu-
nities were the true producers of action, with no acknowledgment of the mis-
sionaries' role nor, later, that of the anthropologists.45 Consequently, there are
few explicit texts that attest to the real policy and political orientation of CIMI

44. Trouillot, Silencing, pp. 31-69.

45. Many anthropologists, Brazilian and foreign, who have had an important role in indigenous mobi-
lizations have rarely, if ever, produced scholarship on their own involvement. Anthropologist Janet Chernela
is a rare exception in taking credit, on her website, for founding the first indigenous women's NGO in Brazil
in 1984: http://janetchernela.outfoxing.com (accessed January 17, 2014). The disparity between what some
actors know and what they say in private, or what they write as scholars, is often striking. If historian Benedict
Anderson in Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso,
1983), believed that narratives must reproduce some "collective amnesia" to be successful, this one relies on
silence and disappropriation.
 JEAN PHILIPPE-BEIXEAU 721

in the early 1970s—thus our reliance on the corpus of oral memory tapped by
talking with a group of historical missionary actors.

The terminology used by alternative indigenists when talking about their own
role in respect to indigenous mobilizations—"alliance," "support," assis-
tance," "helping" (assessoria)—reflects self-disappropriation, the removal or
obscuring of one's role in an event. Anthropologists Joao Pacheco de Oliveira
Filho and Carlos Augusto da Rocha Freire, following an established discursive
and analytical practice of the indigenist field, talk about the help (apoio) the
assemblies received from CIMI. 4 6 Above all, the recurrent term 'allies' fails to
define the verticality of the relationship between the actors involved here: since
no indigenous movement existed before CIMI's activities, there is no entity on
the other end of a supposed "alliance." There are several reasons for such prac-
tices. To begin with, the indigenist movement emerged and took on its origi-
nal modus operandi in a period of dictatorship. The military regime's repres-
sion of its critics was itself conducive to an ethos of silence and concealment,
worsened by conservative media campaigns coordinated around a recurrent
discourse that continues to this day, in effect: "Whoever helps Indians manip-
ulates them." 4 7 Dom Balduino, CIMI's president from 1975 to 1980, had to
destroy several tapes of indigenous assemblies in 1976 and 1978 for fear that
the government would seize them and use them to intimidate participants. The
widespread nationalist and positivist anti-Indian bias in some of the main-
stream media, and among economic, military, and political lobbies, that por-
trays the Church as a sinister manipulator of Indians, an obstacle to progress,
and a transnational organization that cannot be trusted not to undermine the
state, has reinforced the narrative of self-disappropriation.

Concealing missionary involvement can thus be considered a security strategy.

Repression against progressive missionaries, CIMI, and indigenous leaders was
an objective threat in the 1970s and 1980s. One participant in the first indige-
nous assembly, Rodolfo Lunckenbein, S.D.B., was assassinated in July 1976,
together with the Bororo Indian leader Simao, by gunmen hired by local cattle
ranchers. 48 In October 1976, the regional coordinator of CIMI for northern
Mato Grosso, Joao Burnier, S.J., was killed by two policemen. 49 Vicente Canas,
S.J., was killed in 1987 by land prospectors who coveted indigenous territories. 50

46. Filho and Freire, A presenca, p. 189.

47. For an example of such a campaign against CIMI by mainstream Brazilian newspapers, see CEDI,
Povos Indtgenas (Sao Paulo: CEDI, 1991), pp. 20-27; and Ramos, Indigenism, pp. 104-117.
48. Novaes, The Play ofMirrors.
49. Jose Coelho de Souza, O sanguepela justifa (Sao Paulo: Loyola, 1978).
50. J. L. Terol and J. C. Pardo, Kiwxi. Tras las huellas de Vicente Canas(Albacete, Spain: Terol, 2002),
pp. 167-182.
722 HISTORY, MEMORY, AND UTOPIA

One national indigenous assembly organized by Italian missionaries of the Con-

solata was disbanded by force by military police in 1977. In addition, there were
recurrent threats from frontier agents and occasionally from local officials.
Thomaz Lisboa, S.J., vice president of CIMI from 1975 to 1979, describes in
detail a situation in which members of local oligarchies and officials in a small
town in Mato Grosso threatened him with impunity.51 Such circumstances sup-
ported a practice, if not an ethos, of self-censorship tJiat survived the democrati-
zation of the Brazilian political system (1985-1989). Threats and dirty tricks
against pro-Indian missionaries indeed continued after the return of civil govern-
ment and the ratification of the new democratic constitution of 1988. In addi-
tion, the military kept some level of administrative control over the Amazon
region for most of the 1990s through the National Security Council (Conselho
Nacional de Seguranca, CNS), which maintained high tension over indigenous
questions. The situation did improve with democratization, but not, apparently,
enough to alter the long-standing practice of self-disappropriation. Missionary
discourse continued to attribute past initiatives to indigenous peoples, a notion
whose resilience raises other hypotheses.

Since the early 1980s, informal accusations of irremediable paternalism and off-
stage ventriloquism have also been leveled at CIMI from progressive sectors of
society, notably intellectuals and anthropologists, although this charge is rarely
made in public. In the name of the indigenous cause and their bond in facing
common adversaries, missionary and anthropologist indigenists rarely express
their disagreements in a way that could be exploited from the outside. Yet,
anthropologists rarely miss a private opportunity to express their irritation at
missionaries' interference in indigenous political affairs. Facing suspicions and
criticism, and fearing that indigenous actors' legitimacy could suffer from it,
CIMI's strategy has been to deny authorship of its own projects. Consequently,
self-disappropriation, I believe, is both an aftereffect of having been the "insti-
tutional host" of the indigenous movement and a direct effect of precautions
taken to avoid delegitimizing the emerging actors they have nurtured.52

Finally, the relation between indigenist hosts and Indians was for a long time
so vertically imbalanced that it was psychologically uncomfortable. Up to the
late 1990s, alternative indigenism was everything the indigenous movement
was not: institutionalized, well-financed (in at least some instances), populated
by intellectuals whose networks went deep into civil society, and well versed in

51. Thomaz de Aquino "Jauka" Lisboa, Os Enawene-Naive: primeiros contatos (Sao Paulo: Edicoes
Loyola, 1985). See also Ramos, Indigenism, chapters 2 and 3, on state repression against both indigenous and
indigenist actors.
52. The expression "institutional host" is from Peter Houtzager, "Collective Action and Political
Authority: Rural Workers, Church, and State in Brazil," Theory and Society 30:1 (February 2001), pp. 1^5.
 JEAN PHILIPPE-BELLEAU 723

the Brazilian cultural codes, even to some extent producing them. Self-disap-
propriation can thus be seen as an unconscious defense mechanism of progres-
sive individuals fighting for greater justice in a society that has an inhibiting
legacy of inequality and paternalist practices.

U T O P I A INTERRUPTED A N D RENEWED: PLACES OF MEMORY

AS P L A C E S OF A G E N C Y

The location of several assemblies stands as evidence of missionary dominion

over the symbolic dimensions of die early indigenous movement. Blurring the
indigenous and missionary realms, CIMI has used Jesuit 'places of memory' to
launch indigenous mobilizations. In other words, the missionaries did not seem
to distinguish their own institutional memory from what they perceive as
indigenous etJinohistory. The role of die Society of Jesus in die evangelization
of Brazil in die sixteendi century is often read as inseparable from die nation's
early colonial history. 53 That very history, with its events, defeats, and victories,
is also "maintained" widiin the congregation; missionary orders' propensity to
conserve institutional memory has often been noted. Historian Bernard Domp-
nier dius describes die transmission of habitus and traditions widiin such orders:

Elite organizations (societes d'election) are constrained to make their members

internalize a common culture, which allows for the formation of a common body
and for individual behaviors to conform with a specific collective habitus. Refer-
ence to the Order's past, that is, its traditions and history, is thus promised to play
an important role in the community's self-awareness or, in other terms, in the
Order's "lived identity."54

In this regard, the Jesuits order has been an organization whose past events
and historical figures are inscribed in the socialization of new recruits and used
to shape their worldviews—to use Pierre Nora's expression, a "memory-
milieu." 55 In Mato Grosso, the inculturation-theology Jesuits who played an
instrumental role in both CIMI's foundation and the conception of an indige-
nous movement were the very members who have been prone to reference
their actions to their Order's memory, thus rooting their apparendy revolu-
tionary endeavors in historical and religious continuity. The surprising link
between memory—or rather the accumulation of historical strata, subjectivi-
ties, and changing interpretations that form a group's imaginary, which in turn
becomes the ground for processing information and generating action at par-

53. Serafim Leite, Historia da Companhia de Jesus no Brasil (Sao Paulo: Loyola, 2004).
54. Bernard Dompnier, "Les capucins francais et leur passe," Revue Mabillon 5 (1994), p. 230.
55. Pierre Nora, ed., Leslieux de memoire, tome 1 (Paris: Gallimard Quarto, 2009).
724 HISTORY, MEMORY, AND UTOPIA

FIGURE 3
Indigenous Participants, "Eighth Indigenous Assembly>/} Sao Miguel, RGS,
April 1977

Source: Courtesy of CIMI.

ticular moments—and the framing of indigenous mobilization serves as evi-

dence of CIMI's worldview and prominent role. The first contemporary mis-
sionary indigenist NGO, albeit a small one, was funded in 1968 and named
after Father Jose de Anchieta: the Anchieta Operation (Operacao Anchieta,
OPAN).56 A prominent center for training indigenous leaders is named after
Vicente Canas, a Jesuit friar assassinated in 1987. Several books by missionaries
or scholars close to the Church are dedicated to fallen missionaries.57

Similarly, the choice of the ruins of Sao Miguel das Missoes in Rio Grande do
Sul to host several indigenous mobilizations, from the 1970s to the present
day, illustrates the force of memory underlying CIMI's contemporary actions.
The photograph in Figure 3 shows participants at what was called the Eighth
Indigenous Assembly of Chiefs in April 1977.

56. This NGO was founded by Egydio Schwade, a member of the Diamantino Mission and an eventual
cofounder of CIMI. Keeping its acronym as it followed trends, this organization changed its name in 1994 to
Native Amazon Operation (Operacao Amazonia Nativa, OPAN). Father Anchieta, remembered in Brazilian
school programs as one of the most important historical figures of the country, was beatified in 1980. See
among others J. Koenig and B. Domingues, eds., Anchieta e Vieira: paradigmos da evanjjelizacao no Brasil
(Sao Paulo: Loyola, 2007).
57. See for example Prezia, Caminhando. The book is dedicated to Sister Cleusa Coelha and Vicente
Canas, both killed in the defense of indigenous communities. Paulo Suess, Em defesa, is dedicated to the
Bororo Indian Simao and the Salesian Rodolfo Luckenbeim.
 JEAN PHILIPPE-BELLEAU 725

FIGURE 4
Guarani Mobilization, Sao Miguel, RGS, November 2005

Source: Mensageiro, December 2005. Copyrighted material courtesy of Memajjeiro.

Figure 4 shows a mobilization of Guarani Indians, also organized by CIMI, in

2005. Like the previous photograph, it was taken in front of the mission ruins.

This choice was not based on demographic logic—there is no indigenous com-

munity living nearby. CIMI was thus obliged to transport indigenous partici-
pants over long distances, even thousands of miles, as evidenced in Figure 3.
Among them were two Xavante participants (third and fifth from left, recog-
nizable by their traditional haircuts) and one Pareci (Daniel Matenho, sixdi
from left); both groups lived in northern Mato Grosso. Nor is there evidence
of any indigenous society "appropriating" these ruins as part of its own
history.58 Yet, when questioned later about the choice of location, Egydio
Schwade, then a Jesuit and a member of CIMI, responded (as if stating the
obvious): "It is not a missionaries' place, it is their place."59

The mission of Sao Miguel Archangel was built in 1687, one of about 30
reductions in a region today divided among Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay.60

58. Furthermore, none of the indigenous leaders I interviewed between 1996 and 2009 mentioned
Sao Miguel. Typically, the more recent locations of indigenous mobilizations (such as demonstrations in
front of Brazilian institutions) appear to have been chosen in a very strategic and political manner. Often they
are in areas allowing for a maximum number of indigenous demonstrators to attend, such as Altamira, Para,
since 1989.
59. Egydio Schwade, Interview with author, 1999.
60. Rafael Baioto and Julio Quevedo, Sao Miguel. A saga do povo missioneiro (Porto Alegre: Martins
Livreiro, 2005). See also Luis C. B. Lessa, Sao Miguel da Humanidade: uma proposicao antropologica, (Porto
Alegre: Alcance/Tche, 2005).
726 HISTORY, MEMORY, AND UTOPIA

Jesuit missionaries practicing a form of the aldeamento system attracted various

communities, reshaping their political and social organization. At the time of
the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1762, 80 years after its foundation, Sao Miguel
was catering to several thousand Indians, possibly of the Guarani culture.
According to historian Bartomeu Melia, S.J., the Guarani Jesuit reductions
represented a Jesuit Utopia, isolated from the rest of the colonies and shaped
to their taste.61

Of interest to our study is how these reductions are remembered today among
Catholic missionaries and past and present members of CIMI. The expulsion
of the Jesuits from the Portuguese territories in 1759 signified the end of a
unique experiment; following it, the missions and the Jesuit project in South
America were turned into ruins by the colonial state and creole oligarchies.62
The Jesuits forgot neither the social experiment nor the expulsion. The ruins
of Sao Miguel continue to remind them not only of past glory but of a place
and a story of defeat, of Utopia interrupted and martyred by the exigencies of
political power. Thus, in the words of Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga, Sao Miguel is
nothing less than a "defiant monument-wound."63 CIMI's choice of Sao
Miguel to organize indigenous mobilizations is thus based on the accumula-
tion of Jesuit realms of memory in the ruins: the reduction, the martyrs, and
the figure of the Indian, particularly the Guarani, who remains a place of
memory in himself for the whole Church in Brazil. As Paula Montero has
shown, the Church also developed a new reading of its own past, thereby inter-
vening not only in the realm of "culture," but also in the realm of history.64
Today's indigenist Church has, "a relation that is lived through an eternal pres-
ent." 65 Choosing to organize indigenous events in such places makes it appear
that the missionaries have an ongoing score to settle with the state, turning the
location and memory of defeat into a place and a moment of political victory.

In the 1980s, the southern branch of CIMI, based in Porto Alegre, Rio
Grande do Sul, and the National Association for Indigenist Action (Associacao
Nacional de Acao Indigenista, ANAI), based in Salvador, Bahia, published a
short, militant book: 1978, Ano dos Martins. T-Juca Pirama. Indio, aquele que

61. Bartomeu Melia, "Y la Utopia tuvo lugar. Las reducciones guarani-jesuiticas del Paraguay," in Un
oamino hacia la Arcadia, Concepci6n Garcia Saiz, ed. (Madrid: AECI, 1995). See also Frederick Reiter, They
Built Utopia: The Jesuit Missions in Paraguay, 1610-1768 (Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 1995).
62. In 1759, the marquis of Pombal, minister of the Portuguese king Joseph I, ordered the expulsion
of the Society of Jesus from Portugal and its colonies, for geopolitical reasons as much as for colonial policy.
In 1763, after Guarani troops had succeeded for several years in repelling Portuguese and Spanish troops,
notably because of the Jesuit reductions, the expulsion became effective.
63. Pedro Casaldaliga, "Yvy mara ei . . . Terra sem males. Mem6ria, Remoros, Compromisso!" Missa
da terra sem males (Sao Paulo: Verbo Filmes, 2002), p. 1. (This is an article that appears before the libretto.)
64. Paula Montero, Entre o mito e a historia.
65. The expression is from Pierre Nora, Lieux, p. xix.
 JEAN PHILIPPE-BELLEAU 727

deve morrer.66 This book explicitly presents the (peaceful) contemporary

indigenous struggle as the continuation, or renewal, of the eighteenth-century
war. Sepe Tiaraju, a chief of the Sao Miguel rebellion, who was killed on Feb-
ruary 7, 1756, by Spanish and Portuguese armies, is brought back to life to be
compared to contemporary indigenous leaders.67 The "Eighth Assembly of
Chiefs," as it has been named, in the ruins of Sao Miguel is thus the continu-
ation of the indigenous fight against the state. It is difficult to determine for
what audiences this publication, with its cartoon-like drawing of warriors on
the front page, is intended.68 The Indian presented here is not identifiable with
an ethnic group, but rather generic and heroic. He is an actor of history. The
leaders of the Eighth Assembly "made a proclamation ... : the call of the Indi-
ans in the Manifesto of the ruins."69 Sao Miguel is constructed as the inspiring
shrine of Indianness, heroism, and martyrdom, while Indians themselves are
"the [sic] martyr people."70

Sao Miguel figures centrally in a musical piece of some renown among indianist
and Catholic sectors: the Mass of the Land without Evils, composed in 2002 by
Martin Coplas, with a libretto by Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga and Pedro Tierra.71
This Mass is both an homage and a call for action, with reference to indigenous
nations from throughout the American hemisphere. Its title is a reference to a
Guarani prophecy, widely used for its polysemy by missionaries.72 However, "the
land without evil" is taken out of its Guarani context to be applied to various
Amerindian societies (who are not known to have asked for that much), and then
adopted and amplified by the missionaries as evidence of the correspondence
between Indians and the Church. In other words, it constitutes a missionary
Utopia, adaptable to addressing the precarious situation of indigenous peoples
today. For the missionaries, the land without evil is a land populated by Indians
and far from the frontier, with the missionaries close and the state far away.

The CD box for the Mass also contains a booklet with several texts (including
those by Tierra and Casaldaliga) that evidence the relation to Sao Miguel by
including a picture of the mission's ruins to evoke collective memory and the

66. Associacao Nacional de Ac5o Indigenista, 1978, Ano dos Martins. T-Juca Pirama. Indio, aqucle que
deve morrer (Salvador da Bahia: n.p., n.d.; probably published between 1980 and 1986).
67. The death of Sepe Tiaraju is reported in ibid., p. 2.
68. CIMI journals are sent to missions, where they are read by both missionaries and an indigenous
public.
69. Associacao Nacional de Acao Indigenista, 1978, ano dos martires, p. 3.
70. Ibid.
71. Casaldaliga, A missa da terra sent males (libretto), Verbo Filmes, 2002, CD. Judith Shapiro, "From
Tup3," provides an early analysis of this mass. For this anthropologist, its message is that "the Church must
face up to its past sins and compensate for them with a new commitment" (p. 135).
72. Helene Clastres, The Land-Without-Evil: Tupi-Guarani Prophetism (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1995).
728 HISTORY, MEMORY, AND UTOPIA

Indian cause. In the libretto, Sao Miguel appears as the embodiment of the
Jesuit mission. For Pedro Tierra, the ruins represent nothing less than "a
temple." 7 3 Interestingly, both the libretto and booklet evoke missionaries and
Indians as an inseparable unit, as evidenced by their joint martyrdom (at the
hand of whom, the texts do not specify).74 For Casaldaliga:

Here in Brazil, 1978 was "the year of the Martyrs" of the indigenous cause. We
celebrated the 350th anniversary of the three Martyrs from the Rio Grande, Roque
Gonzalez, Afonso Rodriguez, and Joao Castilho. CIMI thought it was fair to com-
memorate not just the death of the three Jesuit missionaries, because there had
been many more deaths. We had to commemorate also the death of thousands of
Indians sacrificed by the Christian empires of Spain and Portugal. All were Martyrs
of the Indigenous Cause.75

The booklet does not specify that these three Jesuits were killed by Guarani-
speaking Indians, possibly resisting evangelization. 76 Here, the churchmen are
turned into victims of colonization, a role usually reserved to Indians. The
years 1626 and 1978 collide, as the past and the contemporary often do in
exercises of memory, but subjectivity too—and just as often—can entertain
interdependent relations with reality.

CIMI did not invent blood and assassinations: as we saw above, two prominent
missionary actors of CIMI were themselves killed with impunity and in broad
daylight in 1976, highlighting the indigenist clergy's vulnerability. The termi-
nology of martyrdom and the reference to the Jesuit martyrs may also be an
attempt to make sense of a process and an endeavor built, as we suggested ear-
lier, in an empirical manner. Thus, martyrdom, which occupies a central place
in the Church's traditional representations and worldviews, becomes also a pri-
mary ideological recourse for progressive missionaries inspired by liberation
theology and inculturation theology. Vicente Canas is depicted in CIMI jour-
nals such as Porantim and Mensctgciro as a martyr. 77 In his very modest house
in Sao Felix do Araguaia, Bishop Casaldaliga used to display the bloodied shirt
of Father Burnier, and he has also kept relics of several fallen missionaries.

73. Pedro Tierra, "Missa da terra sem males," in Missa da terra sent males, p. 4. This is an article by the
composer with the same title as the composition.
74. Joint martyrdom, referring to instances where an Indian and a missionary were killed together, is a
subject of recurrent discourse. To expand on a note above: Paulo Suess, Em defesa, is dedicated "[t]o Simao
Bororo and Rodolfo Luckenbeim, who fulfilled their Mission."
75. Pedro Casaldaliga, "Yvy mara ei . . . ," p. 1.
76. Paulo Rogelio Melo de Oliveira, O encontro entre osguarani e osjesuitas na Provincia do Parajjuai
e oglorioso manirio do venerdvelpadre Roque Gonzalez nas tierras de Nezii (Ph.D. diss.: Universidade Federal
do Rio Grande do Sul, 2009).
77. See for example "Nossos herois. Kiwxi Vicente Canas, martyro da causa indigena," Mensageiro 98
(1996), p. 6.
 JEAN PHILIPPE-BELLEAU 729

An ambitious book on the history of indigenous peoples since the conquest,

Outros 500: construindo uma nova historic, was sponsored by CIMI and pub-
lished in 2001. 78 It presents contemporary indigenous leaders who have been
killed, also with impunity, by gunmen hired by land prospectors, as "martyrs
of resistance." In the booklet accompanying the recording of the Mass,
Casaldaliga, evidencing a daring blend of epochs, locations, figures, and inten-
tions, concludes: "The Mass invokes its saints, from the legendary Montezuma
to the missionary Joao Bosco [Burnier], executed at my side by the military
police."79 The martyrs' slot, now occupied by both Indians and missionaries,
both seemingly the victims of the same atemporal ills, has become a horizontal
unity that usefully contradicts the perceptions of paternalism and manipulation
among the missionaries that we have already discussed. It is also the identifica-
tion with martyrdom that allows for the amalgamation, evoked at the begin-
ning of this article, between the figures of resistance to sixteenth- and seven-
teenth-century colonization and the contemporary indigenous leaders
assassinated by agents of frontier expansion.

CONCLUSION

From the start of the Portuguese conquest, the Catholic Church has largely
avoided stepping heavily into the political affairs of the state, restricting itself
to St. Mark's "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." In
the late twentieth century, however, CIMI and the standard-bearers of libera-
tion theology resolutely sent Caesar an opponent. This profound political rup-
ture was especially daring in its emergence under a military regime, as proven
by the human price paid by missionary congregations. Yet, progressive mis-
sionaries felt an urgency to address what they saw as the imminent demise of
the very communities in which they were working. To address and reverse this
situation, CIMI gathered indigenous leaders in an empirical manner. They had
a broad political goal but had to learn and adapt with the process.

The Assemblies of Indigenous Chiefs, regardless of how well or poorly the

name fit, were a tentative response by missionaries with the will to prevent fur-
ther indigenous disintegration in the face of the fast-moving frontier and other
mega-development projects. With the creation, and eventually the support, of
a fledgling indigenous movement came unexpected predicaments. Elaborating
a narrative of indigenous assemblies was an effort to provide the movement
with a history—giving that history to the indigenous movement was part of
engineering its existence. However, political circumstances impeded overt mis-

78. CIMI, Outros 500.

79. Casaldaliga, "Yvy mara ei ... ," p. 3.
730 HISTORY, MEMORY, AND UTOPIA

sionary ownership. Because few explicit texts describe the policy and political
orientation of CIMI in the early 1970s, we rely on a corpus of oral memory
held by the survivors of the group of historical missionary actors. The choice
of locations for the assemblies betrays a mix of enthusiasm, naivete, and mis-
sionary-centric views. If the ruins of Sao Miguel resonate in the Jesuit's imag-
inary, nothing indicates that they have the same effect among indigenous peo-
ples, whether or not the two groups share some of the same history. The
locations also highlight the obvious paradox of this new missionary project:
envisioning Indians as subjects of their own history, even as the process itself
was marked by intervention and intercession.

Yet, this new missionary project was realized. Delivered with political forceps
by its missionary host, indigenous political actors slowly developed the ability
to affirm themselves as a strong presence in the public space. Today, there are
several hundred indigenous organizations—local, regional, and national, both
monoethnic and multiethnic—that populate the interface between indigenous
communities and the Brazilian state and the international world. Eventually,
dissensions arose between the host and the nurtured, proving that the latter,
by stressing their sovereignty, had reached maturity. In 2000, one of the main
indigenous organizations, born slowly between 1989 and 1994 with consider-
able financial, legal, and institutional support from CIMI, publicly and
strongly criticized the missionary organization for being overbearing.80 By fail-
ing to keep this organization within its sphere of influence, CIMI, paradoxi-
cally, was facing the opposition of the indigenous agency it had once sought
to build.

University of Massachusetts JEAN PHILIPPE-BELLEAU

Boston, Massachusetts

80. The various texts of the polemic are available in ISA, Povos inAigcnas no Brasil, 1996/2000 (Sao
Paulo: ISA, 2001), pp. 72-74.