Geography and Indigenous Peoples: Struggles of Resistance

Abstract

This study aims to analyse the processes associated with indigenous struggles, particularly in relation to the Guarani and Kaiowá in Mato Grosso do Sul state, Brazil. Such processes embody the advancement and intensification of the contradictory movement of class and non-class antagonism, expressed by capitalists and land owners against indigenous peoples. In America, the processes of commodification and incorporation of labour around the axis of capital emerged from racial division and other structuring elements, such as patriarchalism and religion, which became dominating powers, closely linked to the socio-spatial relations that have (re)produced them. In Brazil, the process culminated in the constitution of privately owned land, expropriation and violence, consolidating windfall profits as a result of turning nature into a monopoly and commodities—a specific class power unfolding in the production of value, either by expropriation or by the violent proletarianisation to which indigenous peoples have been subjected. This process fosters capital territorialisation and impacts the life of the indigenous peoples, whose individuals contradictorily re-frame their (re)existence. Indigenous labour has been incorporated into the axis of capital, from overexploitation to the capital-centric focus, while the indigenous workers contradictorily refer to their ancestry and cosmology, taking a stand as indigenous people. In these struggles, the indigenous identity becomes an identity of resistance, and the socio-spatial practices aim towards the preservation of knowledge. Such knowledge and practices gain relevance and reaffirm the state of being and living in the world, opposing the metabolic rift between man and nature, even if the commodification of life and common assets leads to the self-destruction of humankind.