Divisions between Visions and Implementation in the City 79

The question of Indigenous identity is an important, contentious, and contested issue both for the inhabitants of São Gabriel and for the city itself. As the sign pictured in Figure 1 and discussed in the introduction to this chapter shows, the local government consistently draws attention to Indigeneity and the claim that it is “the most Indigenous city in Brazil” in establishing their vision of the city’s identity. At the same time, however, a range of symbolic practices establish São Gabriel as a transitional space between the Indigenous world and the world outside (‘de fora’), and as a place that, while

it is occupied mainly by Indigenous people, is defined by identification with the Brazilian state. In this space, language policy and attempts to engage with language management, are particularly revelatory of this pattern. FOIRN’s statements quoted above specify that, in the view of many of the supporters and originators of the idea of officialization, this change was designed to support Indigenous languages in the urban area. Cultural and linguistic protections, specifically represented in terms of the right to “differentiated education” (the theory and practice of which I will discuss in Chapters 3 and 4), are already available for the Indigenous territories based on the 1988 Constitution and subsequent national level documents. São Gabriel therefore constitutes an interesting context in which to examine the relative prevalence of the two sides of one of the philosophical debates regarding language rights that Réaume and Pinto (2012:51)

describe, namely, “whether official language rights should be territorially based or attach to persons”.

The debate about the extent to which each of these positions is most valid is more prevalent in the urban area than in rural territories, as no language has a clear claim on authoritative ownership of the former space, while the various river systems of the region are marked by a clear connection to a particular ethnolinguistic group. As discussed in Chapter 1, in addition to their role in defining ethnic identity, local linguistic ideologies include a strong association between language and place. As women move to their husbands’ communities following their marriages, the children resulting from that marriage belong to their father’s community in addition to being defined by his ethnolinguistic identity. The patrilect further becomes the default language of

father’s language is emblematic of an individual’s ethnolinguistic identity, patrilocality helps to define a particular place as belonging to that ethnolinguistic group (Chernela 2003; Lasmar 2009). The origin myths of the Tukanoan peoples also work to emphasize how each ethnolinguistic group came to occupy certain territories along the river as they emerged from the body of the cobra-canoe, and the knowledge of sacred places is especially vital cultural and linguistic information that is highlighted in conversations about what is being lost with language shift (FOIRN/ISA 2006; Chacon 2013). In this context, then, the historical establishment of São Gabriel as the locus of settlement for migrants from other parts of Brazil (including missionaries, military personnel, and miners) has led to its conceptualization within the system of linguistic territoriality as belonging to the Portuguese language. This historical and ideological background, along with a discursive dichotomy between urban/rural and Indigenous/non-Indigenous, creates conditions for the use of the official language legislation – and the concomitant increase in the public use of Indigenous languages – as a symbolic means of (re)claiming the urban area as part of the Indigenous territory.

The dichotomy I refer to here forms an important part of understanding the challenge of revitalizing the languages of the region and of maintaining the level of diversity that is currently present. At a very basic level, the fact that such a dichotomy exists serves to reinforce a position for Portuguese that is fundamentally different from any one of the Indigenous languages, which are grouped together as an undifferentiated mass that is contrasted most frequently against the single national language. At the same time, this ideological connection is also related to an association between Indigeneity and rurality. Indigenous languages are indexically associated with the rural communities,

Portuguese is the language of the rest of Brazil, and Spanish and English are the languages that offer mobility and access to the rest of the world. The issue of mobility, both social and geographic, constitutes a major part of the challenge facing Indigenous language revitalization advocates. Pedro Machado made note of this question in his speech at the UEA, emphasizing that strengthening Indigenous languages has to take place at the local level, because this is the only place in which they are important:

Eu não vou dizer levar para fora, por que veja bem, o mundo é um mundo branco, o mundo la fora. As linguas mais procurada, voces sabem quais são? Inglês, Espanhol. São duas linguas que – se você fala Inglês, você vai pra qualquer lugar. Espanhol, você vai. Português você vai quase nenhum, não vale em nenhum lugar.

I won’t say take them outside, because it’s very clear, the world is a white world, the world outside. The most sought-out languages, you know which ones they are? English, Spanish. These are two languages that – if you speak English, you can go anywhere. Spanish, you go. Portuguese you go almost nowhere, it doesn’t matter in any place.

Indigenous languages are understood in relation to the limitations of geographic mobility that accompanies them, and the question in the city of São Gabriel becomes whether or not the boundaries of their usefulness can be extended to include the city or whether they should remain in the rural territories. The concern here is not merely about the languages, but also about the city, as the question of whether or not Indigenous languages are being publicly used and affirmed by public institutions shapes the view about whether the city is “Indigenous” or not. The pushback against the possibility of strengthening the

Indigenous language legislation, by Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors alike, can be seen, in part, in the same terms as individuals’ reluctance to perform symbols of

To a significant degree, the motivation for learning Indigenous languages

continues to be expressed in terms of the potential for youth to live traditional Indigenous lifestyles and to be comfortable in the rural area. The use of Indigenous languages is primarily associated with a subsistence agricultural lifestyle. As people question the utility of learning them, they frequently use terms invoking the concept of mobility and directionality, rooted in discourses of modernization and its establishment of a unilinear trajectory of progress (Bauman and Briggs 2003). For example, people highlight criticism of Indigenous language activism as moving Indigenous people “backwards” (‘para atrás’), and in both positive and negative assessments, the languages are suggested as necessary only in order for people to “return” (‘voltar’) to the rural territories and ways of life. This linking of Indigenous languages with rurality, and rurality with the old status of “Indian”, further illustrates a process of “fractal recursivity” (Irvine and Gal 2000) in establishing these ideologies. Donato Vargas, director of the municipal department of Indigenous education, spoke about the backlash that his proposals for Indigenous schools in the urban area have faced:

…no começo só por que tava palavra ‘indígena’ foi uma briga doida que a gente conquistou. Jovem, o alunos, pai, mãe – ‘Poxa, Donato, em pleno 2000, você quer trazer os povos por atrás?’ ‘Vai como, o que?’ ‘Cê quer levar para trás, voltar ser índio?’ Não, pô. Não é isso que a gente quer. A gente quer pelo contrário mostrar para eles que tambem nos somos povos. Nos temo nossa língua, nossa cultura, tal, tal, tal.

…at the beginning, just because it had the word ‘Indigenous’, it was a crazy fight that we had to win. Youth, students, father, mother – ‘Geez, Donato, we’re in the 2000s, you want to take the peoples backwards?’ ‘How’s that, what?’ ‘You want to take [us] back, go back to being Indian?’ No, man. That’s not what we want.

On the contrary, we want to show them that we are peoples too. We have our language, our culture, all of that.

[interview June 20, 2012]

Donato’s comments emphasize not only the conceptualization of social mobility mapped onto non-Indigeneity (and restrictedness mapped on to Indigeneity), but also the ways in which the use of Indigenous languages in these modern spaces – both educational centres, and specifically, in the city – is tied to an assertion not of the value of traditional

Indigenous ways, but of the possibility of civilizing the Indigenous, because “we are peoples too”. This pattern of advocacy and activism on behalf of Indigenous peoples and their languages that works to ensure that they are presented in such a way as to be

acceptable and adaptable to non-Indigenous outsiders is one that recurs in various ways throughout the examples of language revitalization efforts considered in this dissertation.

Even those who support increasing the presence of Indigenous languages in the city tend to draw attention to elements of tradition/rural ways, the past, and the

connection to older generations in explaining their importance – saying, for example, “they [Indigenous youth] need to understand the language in order to understand their parents’ culture” (“eles precisam entender a língua pra entender a cultura dos pais”). The city of São Gabriel becomes, in this conceptualization, a transitional space between rural Indigeneity and non-Indigenous Brazilian lifestyles, a place that provides access to both sides of this equation. Youth residing in the urban area, in particular, are encouraged to embody this transition, as in the quote above that labels Indigenous culture as one that they should understand, but as one that belongs to the preceding generation. While the co-officialization law represents an attempt to strengthen the Indigenous side of the city’s identity, discourses about the languages themselves reveal that many of the city’s

residents continue to see migration to São Gabriel as part of a linear trajectory towards modernization and the abandonment of Indigenous cultural practices, including

languages.

Creating a policy for recognizing urban Indigeneity in actual practice is

extremely complex, as the deterritorialization of ethnic identity in the urban area means that, as in diasporic contexts the world over, “we are seeing new forms of identification practices” (Canagarajah 2011:77). The officialization of three representative languages acts as part of the reification of a political Indigenous identity, rather than an

ethnolinguistic one. This situation is similar in some ways to the ideological debate occurring within the Mayan movement, the two poles of which Nora England (2003:739) describes as “localist” and “unifying”. In the case of São Gabriel, proponents of the official language legislation and “unifying” linguistic initiatives draw attention to the traditional significance of language for ethnic identity in arguing for the need to protect them, but their political and performative acts ultimately reveal ideologies that focus on the construction of new types of language-identity relationships. In the urban centre, especially, the nature of Indigenous identity is immediately recognizable as different. The official language policy works to counter the dominant perception that the city – and indexically, modernity and urbanity in general – are not Indigenous, but does so by transforming the nature of Indigeneity more than by questioning the terms of modernity. This effort serves both to connect the urban space to the Indigenous communities and to suggest the possibility that Indigenous languages can be removed from their traditional, localized contexts of use. Significant debate among Indigenous people in the region, however, concerns the degree to which this shift is possible, and contestation of the claim

from within the Indigenous rights movement will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4.