The (Il)legal Indian

Abstract

The article traces different aspects of the present-day juridification and judicialization of indigenous lives using the example of the Tupinambá Indians of the Brazilian northeast. The Tupinambá's identity is being increasingly bureaucratized by public administration and is constantly being questioned by public and private agents, in order to deny the Tupinambá's constitutional land rights. In the course of the still ongoing process of the demarcation of the Indigenous Territory Tupinambá de Olivença, indigenous inhabitants are facing a plethora of civil actions, and Tupinambá leaders are being persecuted and criminalized by the Federal Police and the judiciary. The article exposes the legal intricacies of possessory actions against indigenous people in Brazil, and discusses the different acts and attitudes of the actors of the Brazilian "juridical field" as regards indigenous rights. It suggests a view of law, law enforcement and law suits as means of social sense-making, that is, a public staging, interpretation, imagining and "mapping" of Brazil's "indigenous question", which has, ultimately, to be legitimized by society at large. Brazil, indigenous identity, indigenous rights, legal anthropology, territorial disputes, Tupinambá Indians One day while I was "hanging around", yet again, at the local office of the Brazilian Bureau of Indian Affairs (FUNAI) in the city of Ilhéus, northeastern Brazil, a middle-aged man showed up, asking one of the officials on duty for a "declaration" of Indianness for his daughter. Being used to such demands, the official gave her stock response, saying that such declarations did not exist, nor was there a local "register" of indigenous people, but that the man's daughter could always, if she deemed it necessary, fill in one of the "auto-declaration" forms which the Bureau provided. As the man insisted on receiving a "declaration" from the Bureau itself, the officials started to inquire as to his family's origins and the indigenous village he belonged to. It turned out that the man was not actually living in one of the Tupinambá villages close to Ilhéus, but in the city itself, and that it was the university administration in Salvador, the state capital of Bahia, 400 km by road to the north, that was demanding proof of Indianness from his daughter. As the FUNAI officials started to entertain