Situation of Indigenous Peoples in Mato Grosso do Sul
INDIGENIST MISSIONARY COUNCIL - CIMI
tume
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THE KAIOWA AND GUARANI CONTINUING TO
PRACTICE THEIR MODEL OF SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
Levi Marques Pereira?
Today the Guarani and Kaiowá reserves in Mato Grosso do Sul
constitute artificial demographic and ecological configurations,
forged by the need of governmental agencies to collect this
population into small areas to free the remaining land for
colonization fronts to develop agricultural activities. Prior to the
economic occupation of the
region these indigenous peoples lived in small local nuclei,
named according to extended family or kinship ties, whose
population faced difficulty when numbers exceeded one hundred
persons.
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Documents produced by functionaries of the Service for
Protection of Indians SPI, and ethnographic studies by
researchers who passed through the region (like Professor Egon
Schaden), conducted in the first decade of the 20th century, attest
to the resistance of the indigenous peoples to abandonment of
their ancient occupations to be gathered into the reserves. These
also recorded the difficulties of coexistence between the kinship
groups gathered into the reserves, yet originating from distinct
tekohas, not always allied.
The reserve, as space for artificial and compulsory gathering
of several kinship groups, only became marginally functional and
viable through the presence of external agents (functionaries
of the government or missionaries), with relative capacity for
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9 Anthropologist, professor at Federal University of Grande Dourados (UFGD), Dourados-MS. Access the full article at: http://www.cimi.org.br/pub/MS/Viol_MS_2003_2010.pdfView entire presentation