Notes on “indigenous guardianship” in Brazil (legal and real), with some particularities of the Southern Mato Grosso do Sul

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the indigenous people guardianship, observing its historical traces and the remanence of its idea in the relationship between indigenous people and civil and governmental institutions. It will be checked how this relationship starts to characterize an institutional racism, with the institute acting as a hindrance to the indigenous people seeking their rights, even though the current Federal Constitution had extinguished the indigenous guardianship, recognizing the full civil capacity of the Brazilian indigenous people. There are also suggestive inquiries, both from the “indigenisms” in our country and the civil capacity of “indigenous”, as well as those relative to the local indigenist organ, the National Foundation of the Indigenous (Funai). It will be demonstrated that ethnic prejudice and institutional racism go together, the second as a consequence of the first, in a process of subtraction of indigenous citizenship. For such demonstration, it will be analyzed an experience from the Regional Coordination of Funai, at an indigenous community that is served by this institution in the city of Dourados/MS, about the issuance of a Declaration of Aptitude to the National Program to Strengthen Family Agriculture (Pronaf). It is suggested that the indigenous guardianship can decharacterize indigenous protagonism, relegating indigenous people to the circular bureaucratic ways of denying the responsibility that prevents them from reaching full citizenship.