Paper short abstract:

Mercury contamination due to mining activities on kayapo land and its impact on the other. For this presentation, we will focus on different ideas of territory and territorialization/deterritorialization processes which impact places and lives within and beyond indigenous borders.

Paper long abstract:

“Study us, we are being poisoned”: Indigenous rights, deterritorialization, and engaged anthropology

When one of us spoke with Patkore Kayapo, one of the Mebemgroke people’s representatives, and with Bekwaja Kayapo, another local leader, one sentence was repeated almost in unison: “study us, we are poisoned.” Mercury contamination due to mining activities on their land has gone through and beyond their lands, reaching the regional fish market. The demands for territorial protection are not only linked to the protection of their lives as an indigenous community but, given the ecology of the Kayapo’s lands, also of the eastern Amazon urbanized areas.

The Kayapo case in Sao Felix, south of the state of Para, Brazil, is an example of how supranational organizations’ actions converge two subjects: the ghost of colonization, always present on indigenous lands, and an effective type of exploitation of the poor, now through a global division of labor system. Machado Araóz (2011) recovers mining history in order to demonstrate, within it, the continuity of systematic violence since colonial times. Fernando Coronil writes that the international division of labor implies a global division of “nature” (2002).

These conflicts are characterized by an effective form of deterritorialization that undergoes within and beyond indigenous land borders. According to Santos (2006, p.328), deterritorialization means strangeness, “deculturation”. Strangeness refers to a foreign production system imposed.

For this presentation, we will focus on different ideas of territory and territorialization/deterritorialization processes which impact places and lives within and beyond indigenous borders.