Myths of pacification: Brazilian frontier settlement and the subjugation of the Bororo Indians

Journal of Social History, Summer, 1999 by Hal Langfur

Introduction

Upon the founding of the Brazilian Republic in 1889, hundreds of thousands of indigenous people continued to inhabit the nation's vast interior. These natives rarely gamer more than a passing reference in histories of the period, as though they had ceased all action of any consequence.(1) Those historians who do concern themselves with the persistent presence of scores of distinct indigenous groups tend to stress their final pacification under republican auspices. According to the most prevalent formulation, numerous groups would have been virtually exterminated by land-hungry settlers had it not been for a handful of dedicated activists, intellectuals, and government authorities, first among them the army engineer - later, general - Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon, who in 1910 became the first to head the Servico de Protecao aos Indios (SPI),(2) a federal agency charged with protecting indigenous survivors. Emphasis falls on the conduct of the state, even in more critical assessments, rather than on that of the natives.(3) But as the history of the Bororo Indians of Mato Grosso demonstrates, more than state action was required to convince natives to abandon violent resistance to the expansion of national society into their ancestral lands. The state represented but one part of a much broader frontier dynamic at work, a dynamic complete with its own mythology that cloaked the federal government's behavior in the guise of benevolence and largely ignored the role of settlers of both substantial and meager means, missionaries, other indigenous groups vying for Bororo territory, and, most importantly, the Bororo themselves.(4)

In the forests and on the savanna of central and eastern Mato Grosso, the Bororo confronted a devastating assault on their land and labor by the state, settlers, and missionaries, who pursued their objective in concurrent, albeit often contradictory, ways. The result was anything but the amicable accommodation described by Rondon and those who championed his cause.(5) Rather, violent conflict intensified between the Bororo and ranchers, subsistence farmers, and neighboring indigenous groups. The violence irreparably disrupted what remained of traditional Bororo nomadic life; but more than that it nullified profound changes the Bororo had made to adapt to what already was a far from traditional world. Some Bororo - a minority whose actions would provide the basis for competing myths of pacification - chose the route of direct cooperation with and subordination to government officials and missionaries. The majority, however, chose another course: to resist or adapt to the seizure of their land in ways that confound those myths. Having prolonged their independence for nearly two centuries, both groups continued to shape the terms of their contact with and entrance into Brazilian society, even when surrender became the best hope of preserving their culture or assimilation the only choice to save their lives.

Euphemistically referred to by Rondon and his contemporaries as "pacification," at stake instead was Bororo subjugation, but a subjugation that remained even after some Bororo accepted settlement in missionary colonies - partial and contested. Placed in the context of conflicts characteristic of a frontier region on the periphery of a consolidating nation state and market economy, the Bororo response parallels that of nomadic indigenous groups in similar regions elsewhere in Brazil and the Americas.(6) Since the frontier constitutes precisely that remote geographic zone where such consolidation is not yet assured, and where the outcome of cultural encounters remains in doubt, it is perhaps not surprising that the Bororo conducted themselves in ways that rarely corresponded to the neat distinctions made by those who sought to subdue them.(7)

"Strictly Humane, Purely Peaceful": The Republican Pacification Narrative

It would be difficult to overstate the stature with which turn-of-the-century Brazilians invested their army hero Candido Rondon. Credited both at the highest levels of government and in the popular press with nothing less than the triumph of civilization over savagery in Brazil's unsettled frontier zones, Rondon acquired a reputation of national scope that made him the all but undisputed choice as the SPI's founding director in 1910.(8) One account in the national press heralded Rondon and the agency's leadership as "twentieth-century liberators," determined in their relations with Indians to seek "redemption" in the face of past abuses, motivated only by a determination to contribute to the "greatness, honor, and glory of the fatherland." Others praised Rondon for shifting the onus of Indian incorporation from the church to the state, for transforming the wilderness and its indigenous inhabitants, and for employing a scientific method inspired "by a fraternity that tends to unite the entire human species, no longer distinguishing between race, religion, language, etc."(9)