As margens vão à luta: o modo Maíra como resistência tentehar nas relações da T.I Cana Brava/Guajajara com a BR-226 no Centro-Sul do Maranhão

Abstract

This thesis deals with interethnic relations within the Cana Brava Indigenous Land, crossed by BR-226 in the Center-South region of Maranhão. In this context, the Tentehar-Guajajara present themselves as producing a policy of approximation to control and resist the impacts of the highway as a developmental project, in the face of changes and transformations in the world system. A set of agencies and strategies are presented that were established on a cosmological basis in the mythical times of the creation of their people, matured in four centuries of contact with colonization and national society. In this process of indigenous agency in the present, the Tentehar carry their references to the struggle in the myths of the founding of their people by the demiurge Maíra and his twin sons, Maíra’yr and Mucura’yr. Tentehar historicity is based on ancestry, valuing the struggles fought by the ancients, following a chain of historical times conjectured by the indigenous people themselves to the detriment of linear and dominant Western chronologies. This tentahar way of being-doing brings together all the plasticity of these people, weaving a policy of resistance, moving between retreats and controlled approaches under the Maíra way, observers of the limits with the karaiw (non-indigenous), from the first colonial contacts, through the conflicts in the demarcation of land and the expulsion of invading villages, until the establishment of the pe pihun – black road, the highway in the 21st century, a time in which the margins are fighting