What, then, are the cultural criteria of Indianness à la the law of the white? As has been a typical feature of the discourses of dominance throughout the Western Hemisphere, Indians are imagined as ‘‘primitive/traditional’’ in the sense of being outside of and in binary opposition to ‘‘civilization/modernity.’’ It is a representational order ‘‘predicated upon a structure of opposites’’ in which ‘‘the ‘savage’ [is] defined against what the perceiving’’ non-Indian Brazilians ‘‘[understand] themselves to be.’’ If Indians participate in professions, use technology, wear clothes, and inhabit urban geographies (which denote modernity), then they are not considered Indian [...] As Eliane Potiguara, a Potiguara Indian who resides in Rio de Janeiro, notes,
Many people in Brazil were once torn away from their communities, and they later suffered much discrimination trying to recover their loss. For example, we spend most of our lives trying to reaffirm that we are Indians, and then we encounter statements like, ‘But if you wear jeans, a watch, sneakers, and speak Portuguese…’ Society either understands Indians all made-up and naked inside the forest or consigns them to the border of big cities.
Indians, then, are not imagined as catching the subway, drinking soda, piloting airplanes, using credit cards, watching television, and so on. They are also not thought of as being doctors, college students, janitors, maids, factory workers, or lawyers. Indians are not considered to be residents of urban shantytowns, beachfront resorts, suburban homes, or plantation estates. To live in these so-called civilized spaces, to be in these allegedly modern occupations, to possess the latest consumer goods of the global economy, renders someone non-Indian. […] To be an authentic Indian, one must live like a primitive in a traditional manner. One must embody the antiself of civilization, which in Brazil means living in a hut in the middle of the forest, naked, and with no contemporary technological conveniences.
[...]
Posttraditional Indians live in the rubble of tradition. Many, if not most, of their tribal traditions, epistemologies, languages, religions, stories, and philosophies have been crushed by conquest rather than water. José, a forty-four-year-old subsistence farmer and Xacriabá leader I interviewed in 1995, quantified the degree of this fragmentation as having ‘‘lost 90 percent of what we were.’’ Thus, the traditions of posttraditional Indians are not complete languages but sometimes only sets of words, not intact religions but only the memory of a sole trickster figure or ceremonial dance, not a comprehensive knowledge of all the vegetation in an area but the understanding of the medicinal use of a few local plants, not a family heirloom but a pottery shard found in an abandoned field or the story of a battle lost.
Salvinho Pataxó, a subsistence farmer and community leader, described the posttraditional condition in the following manner:
The Indian from the east and northeast is an Indian who has always endured massacres. […] But still the people say that we’re not real Indians because we wear shorts, sneakers, put a watch on our arms. But in reality, all of this is meaningless. What matters is the root that comes from there [he points to the ground], underneath our community, the root that comes from our ancestors.
[…] Posttraditionality is not simply a question of living in the ruins of tradition, for such an individual might be nontraditional or antitraditional. There is instead another component to posttraditionalism: the meanings that one ascribes to these ruins. To be a posttraditional Indian is to regard these fragments and shadows of tradition as relevant or important, to embrace, privilege, and value them. It is to define one’s indigenous ancestral roots as essential to one’s identity, to make them the anchor of one’s dreams and future, and to work toward their recovery. In Salvinho Pataxó’s words:
Our dream is always to fight to defend our parente [kin], to unite our community. To try and recover my language, my culture, and my history, this is the future that I’m working toward. This is the future of my dreams.
My use of tradition, then, is not meant to invoke this notion of static, timeless, primordial Indians positioned in opposition to the most current constructions of modernity. Nor do I wish to imply that posttraditional Indians are inauthentic or less authentic Indians. In other words, I am not suggesting a view of traditional that implies an underlying schema in which real Indians are only those who have putatively remained ‘‘securely located outside modern societal boundaries’’ and as such, are able to be considered biologically and culturally ‘‘pure.’’
Racial Revolutions, Jonathan Warren.
