August 10, 2021

00:08

Victória Sales – From Cenarium

MANAUS (AM) – The International Day of the Indigenous Peoples, celebrated this Monday, 9, was created with the main objective of raising awareness and highlighting the importance of inclusion of indigenous people in society and to protect their rights, culture and identity. In an exclusive conversation with CENARIUM, the indigenous leader of the Marubo ethnicity, Eliésio Marubo, highlights the importance of the fight for the rights of these people.

According to Eliésio, with the passage of time and the marked position of the organizations of indigenous leaders within society, some issues were resolved and, among them, the issues of indigenous rights. “Although the right to all this framework that guarantees and enforces the rights of these people have already been recognized, the society still didn’t really know about it from an interpretation of the indigenous population itself,” he highlighted.

The leader also reaffirms that these tools arrived to contribute and make a series of rights prevail, and to make the decision of these communities prevail. “These rights are essential to guarantee our existence and fundamental to guarantee our way of life, that is, they are fundamental for us to continue to exist,” he emphasized.

The 1988 Constitution

The Federal Constitution of 1988 ensures important updates in the rights of indigenous people. With Article 231, indigenous people have their customs, traditions, way of life, and especially their autonomy recognized, so that they no longer need to be “integrated” and can live together in society according to their ethnic self-perception. This right to self-identification is also reinforced by Convention 169, of the International Labor Organization, of 1989.

Indigenous movements see in the 1988 Constitution a break with the system of guardianship and the guarantee of autonomy for indigenous people, according to which they have the right to define their own life choices. With this recognition, indigenous peoples now have access to differentiated rights, since the brazilian State has the obligation to preserve the different ways of life of the people that form society.

The day

The definition of the day as a historical landmark was created by the United Nations Organization (UNO), whose aim was to guarantee, even if only minimally, the basic conditions of dignified existence for indigenous people. Founded in 1995, it was after the action of indigenous representatives that the day began to be taken into consideration. The actions of these representatives aimed to create conditions for the attacks that these people had been suffering in their territories.

On July 29, 2006, the Human Rights Council approved the text of the United Nations Declaration on the right of these peoples. But it was only a year later that the UN General Assembly approved the declaration.

Achievements

It was after the publication of that declaration that the native people began to make progress in their fights, mainly in relation to the attacks they suffered. Around 850 thousand indigenous people, divided into more than 200 ethnic groups living in Brazilian territory, gained support after the publication, according to information provided by the Demographic Census carried out by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) in 2010.

Historical Process

The guarantee of the right to autonomy, land, education, health, and other rights of indigenous people is the result of a historical process that is intertwined with the history of Brazil itself.

During the invasion of the Europeans to the Americas, the purpose of the conquest was to decimate the indians of the “New World”, because this population was not even considered to be human beings by the colonizers, and should be eliminated.

This vision was being replaced by the idea of assimilation of Indians, which seeks no longer to eliminate them, but to make them stop being indians, becoming “civilized” and serving as docile labor for the heavy work of exploiting natural resources.