A agência indígena em questão do Brasil colonial à queda do céu

Abstract

This article draws a parallel between two historical processes: the Fair War declared by the Portuguese Crown against the Kayapó people at the south of Goiás captaincy (with the military assistance of the Bororo people, fighting for the colonial forces), between the 18th Century second half and 19th Century first decades; and the invasions of Yanomami lands by illegal miners, intensified from the mid-1970s onwards and especially violent in recent years. We present a reflection on the indigenous agency as the emancipation capacity of historically subordinated subjects. This concept of agency is based on decoloniality, a concept created by the Modernity/Coloniality group, which was formed by Latin American intellectuals who carried out an essential political/epistemological movement for the critical and utopian update of the social sciences in Latin America in the 21st century. We cautiously interpret/appropriate “agency,” a concept coined by the British sociologist Anthony Giddens in social, political, and cosmological contexts that are radically different from the indigenous conjunctures of both Colonial Brazil and the recent Amazonian reality.