I am an Indigenous woman from Karipuna people and an anthropologist living in Belém, one of the largest cities in the Brazilian Amazon in the state of Pará. However, my Indigenous community is based elsewhere. The Karipuna people live in the Uaçá, Galibi and Juminã Indigenous Lands in the municipality of Oiapoque, in the northern part of the state of Amapá, on the border between Brazil and French Guiana. The Palikur, the Galibi Marworno and the Galibi Kali’na people also live here. This context is important for understanding the themes I will explore. My identity as an Indigenous woman and anthropologist informs my writing, offering insights into the connections between Indigenous Karipuna women, anthropology, empowerment, the women’s movement, and feminism.
My childhood was marked by growing up as an Indigenous girl in the city. An anthropologist friend suggested that she couldn’t imagine what my childhood would have been like in a school outside an Indigenous village. I told her I didn’t identify with how Indigenous peoples were represented in my school, as it didn’t reflect the Indigenous communities I knew. I also told this friend that the Indigenous peoples in the school where I was a child and adolescent were “generic Indians” from the 16th century. A being from the past, nonexistent in the present and equally nonexistent in possible futures. When I think back to that time and recall Indigenous women in school, these are the Indigenous women who appeared in paintings in textbooks that were just illustrations, with no agency or history. They went unnoticed and, when they were represented, it was through the lens of essentialism and hypersexualization. After my friend asked me this question, in the following days at home, I began to remember that during my childhood and adolescence I was always the only Indigenous person in a private school. When I said I was Indigenous, people either kept quiet and looked at me as if I were a being from another world or questioned whether I was really telling the truth. Even though the private school provided me with some social advancement through my studies, it was also perverse for my Indigenous identity. The ethnic reaffirmation of my mother, also an anthropologist, was important in stopping the processes of forgetting and invisibility regarding my origins. I bring up those questions today in my anthropological research.
Collage by Ana Manoela Karipunaa
As a child, the references I had about what it meant to be Indigenous came from women and from what these women transmitted to me. I remember my maternal grandmother, who spoke only the Karipuna language Kheuol. She knew Portuguese, but responding to others only in the language of her people was her form of empowerment and resistance, whether in the Indigenous village or in the city. I remember my mother, who taught me that we came from a place called the Curipi River and the Santa Isabel village, telling stories of how her father, my maternal grandfather, was an Indigenous leader. Almost every weekend, my mother took me to meetings of the Indigenous movement in the metropolitan region of Belém. When she couldn’t take me, I waited for her to return, when she would tell me about the issues that were discussed. Thus, my body as an Indigenous child was shaped by the movement. From my grandmother, I learned the importance of the native language and that Portuguese is a language of the other and foreign to the Karipuna. From my mother, I learned the importance of organizing and fighting for our rights collectively.
My mother was born in Santa Isabel, an Indigenous village in the Uaçá Indigenous Territory. She reports that she spent her childhood with her mother and siblings. She played at making necklaces, kuhun, which are hoops with bird feathers that Karipuna men and women wear on their heads; and played at jumping in the river (López Garcés; Santos Karipuna, 2023). Curipi is a river named after a baby Cobra Grande, an important part of our perception of the world. My mother came to the city with the desire to study anthropology. She wanted to know why anthropologists were always in her village. How and why did they study Indigenous peoples? My mother, Suzana Karipuna, was a field companion of anthropologist Eneida Correa de Assis during her childhood. Her father, the village chief, assigned her to take this anthropologist wherever she wanted to go, to talk to her and teach her about the ways of life in the territory. If the anthropologist observed our people for academic purposes, my mother had the mission of carefully observing what that anthropologist said and did so that the leaders would know how far our knowledge would go. Suzana explains that she was studying the anthropologists. She analyzes the methodologies of how anthropologists construct research about Indigenous peoples. An Indigenous anthropologist like my mother brings a unique perspective rooted in her own experience and traditional Karipuna knowledge. Her approach differs from that of non-Indigenous anthropologists, as it is based on direct experience with Indigenous issues. She lives the territory, conducting anthropology from within the territory outward, rather than from the outside in. Suzana Karipuna is one of the first Indigenous anthropologists from the Brazilian Amazon and one of the first Indigenous curators in a museum in the Brazilian Amazon. My mother and I had childhoods in different territories, but we were both led to anthropology. If I am in anthropology, it is so that we do not fall into a single story that is always told by outsiders and never by us (Adichie, 2019). Mainly, by us, Indigenous women.
This same mother, in her anthropological studies, continued a creative process that she brought from the Indigenous village. She carried out extensive studies and conservation practices applied to Indigenous artifacts. In the village, my mother learned about the applicability of crafts in the territory, which for us is related to a ritual called turé, in which, through the shaman, we interact with beings from other worlds called karuãnas, thanking them for the manioc plantations and cures for illnesses of the body and spirit. In the city, she studies the agency of Indigenous objects in museum spaces. For three years, I visited countless times and extensively photographed Indigenous artifacts from an exhibition that she curated. What I photographed were gourds made by my maternal grandmother, Delfina; necklaces and maracas with feathers made by my maternal grandfather’s second wife, Dona Xandoca; butxies, which are cotton threads with beads and sun mother beetle wings that we use in our hair. I also took extensive photographs of a hat from the Galibi Marworno people, which was given by a maternal aunt, Estela, to a famous historian from Pará. These objects are part of an exhibition that connects to the Indigenous women who made them or to whom they belonged. I write incessantly about these women in my family in scientific research that relates anthropology, gender, and feminism.
Living with these women shaped the research that I have been doing for 10 years. These studies are based on collective knowledge, many voices, and trajectories. A collective research that ethnographs the experiences of countless generations of women from the Karipuna people, seeking to reverberate and somehow strengthen their knowledge, roles, and movements. I witness Indigenous anthropologists affirm that our books are the elders of our people, transmitting knowledge through experiences, oral traditions, and memories. I witness and learn from countless relatives who, wherever we are, establish territories and bring with us those who preceded us in the struggle. The women who preceded me in the struggle and whom I bring in this research are Delfina, Xandoca, and Suzana. From generations close to mine or in the same generation as me, Janina, Luene, and Alcimara are references in the struggle in the Karipuna movement. It is important to name these women and recognize their leading roles.
When I entered university to study anthropology, we didn’t read Indigenous anthropologists. It was as if anthropology spoken and written by Indigenous peoples didn’t exist. We mostly read European, North American, and non-Indigenous Brazilian male anthropologists from outside the Amazon region. I discovered the references that shaped me as an anthropologist during moments of interaction and reading outside the university classroom. On my own, I discovered the oral and written works of Francy Baniwa, who writes about ancestral technologies of women in agriculture and with clay, as well as menstrual care (Fontes, 2020); Braulina Aurora, who writes about what gender means in her people and about her experiences as a Baniwa woman in the university and in the Indigenous movement (Aurora, 2019); and Elisa Pankararu, who writes about Indigenous feminism and sexualities (Ramos, 2019). The absence of these women in anthropology curricula expresses racism and the invisibility of knowledge spoken and written by Indigenous peoples. During my master’s degree, after talking to feminist researchers, texts by Indigenous women began to be included in the bibliographies of their courses.
Returning to the Karipuna, the process of empowering Indigenous women from Oiapoque (this includes the Karipuna, Palikur, Galibi Marworno, and Galibi Kali’na) in the past involved the creation of spaces where they could dialogue and carry out training together. These meetings organized by the Indigenous women of Oiapoque were the “Mutirão de boas novidades” and “Mulher com mulher” meetings. These spaces grew stronger and later gave rise to the Associação das Mulheres Indígenas em Mutirão (AMIM) (Santos; Machado, 2019). Mutirão means women’s collective effort, in a translation that diminishes the original power of the word “mutirão”—the term originates from the Tupi language, where “moty’rõ” signifies “common work” and is used to describe cases in which, for example, family and friends collaborate in the construction of a house or a collective community space. Today, women reverberate their voices in instances inside and outside their territories. They exchange knowledge among themselves, whether between villages or different peoples of Oiapoque. Therefore, decisions concerning women are made together in the collective spaces of AMIM. The women of Oiapoque are chiefs, are in the university, in the Indigenous movement, and in politics.
The main issues of the Indigenous women’s movement in Oiapoque include debates on the valorization and care of cassava plantations; concerns about climate change and the exploitation of fossil fuels; sustainable management of animal and plant species; and the recovery of culture and economic management through beadwork. It is very important to educate women about indigenous rights and create spaces where they can come together to exchange knowledge, laughter, and even their pain.
People often ask me if there is such a thing as Indigenous feminism, which is an interesting question. If there is such a thing as Indigenous feminism in Oiapoque, it is not called that. Perhaps we could refer to it as ‘women in a mutirão’, words that refer to collectivity, to being together and holding hands. The anthropology research I am doing with the Karipuna, before being a feminist anthropology, is an anthropology in a mutirão. This is because the knowledge I bring to anthropology is based on the oral traditions, memories, and experiences of the women in my ethnic group, articulating the past and present of the Karipuna people. It’s about connecting the ways they help each other. Mutirão is about being together, helping. Mutirão is collectivity. But it’s also a form of empowerment and sisterhood for Indigenous women.
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Clarissa Reche
References
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. O perigo de uma história única. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2019.
Aurora, Braulina. “A colonização sobre as mulheres indígenas: reflexões sobre cuidado com o corpo.” Revista de Estudos em Relações Interétnicas | Interethnica 22, no. 1 (2019): 109–15.
Fontes, Francineia Bitencourt. “Minha escrevivência, experiências vividas e diálogo com as mulheres indígenas do Rio Negro – Amazonas Brasil.” Cadernos de Campo (São Paulo – 1991) 29, no. 1 (2020): 179–86.
López Garcés, Claudia Leonor, e Suzana Primo dos Santos Karipuna. “Curadorias do invisível: conhecimentos indígenas e o acervo etnográfico do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi.” Museologia & Interdisciplinaridade 10, no. 19 (2021): 101–14.
Ramos, Elisa Urbano. Mulheres e lideranças indígenas em Pernambuco: espaço de poder onde acontece a equidade de gênero. Dissertação de Mestrado em Antropologia, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, 2019.
Santos, Ariana dos, e Tadeu Lopes Machado. “As mulheres no movimento indígena de Oiapoque: uma reflexão a partir da Associação das Mulheres Indígenas em Mutirão.” Espaço Ameríndio 13, no. 1 (2019): 67–. Porto Alegre.
