Cultura, identidade e memória dos índios Parakanã: os impactos no processo transitório de recomposição territorial

Abstract

The Awaeté Parakanã are people of recent contact who keep alive the most important marks of their culture: dances, language, paintings, economic and political organization, and autonomous educational structure. Thus, the research aims to understand the culture, identity and memory of the Parakanã Indigenous people, their losses and gains in the transitional process of territorial new composition. The historical and cultural aspects that guide the construction of knowledge passed on through generations will be analyzed by the research. At the point of this discourse is the scientific problem we arise, that is the transitional housing process of the current Parakanã Indigenous Land, inhabited by the Awaeté Parakanã. In southwest region of Pará, on the banks of the Pucuruí, Bacuri, Direita and Pacajazinho rivers, between the cities of Novo Repartimento, Itupiranga and Jacundá, is settled the Parakanã Indigenous Land. The Parakanã began a new style of life in the 1970s, quite appropriate to the logic of nature, but concentrated in an area that the Brazilian State at the time had called Reserva Indígena. In this sense, our scientific question concerns the current cultural, identity and memorial stage of the Awaeté Parakanã people, inquiring about losses and gains since the departure from the previous region to the present location. The research is justified on account of the need for more in-depth studies and more appropriate investigations of how abrupt changes in places and ways of life that interfere with the continuity of the traditional model of culture of a given original society. The research is shown to be complex due to the fact that these abrupt changes, in the case of our research focus, occurred under white intervention in a space already ancestralized by the Awaeté Parakanã. It is therefore appropriate to record how the Awaeté Parakanã perceive themselves in current times in relation to the period prior to the implementation of their territory by Funai. We investigated the historical contexts of the Awaeté Parakanã since the period prior to the contact with the white people in search of an understanding of the cultural significance of the territory for the Awaeté Parakanã; as well as to verify how the identity and memorial formation of the Awaeté Parakanã have occurred in a new composition of their new territory. It is important to affirm that the research was made from historical, documentary records, avoiding face-to-face contact, due to the problem of biosafety in relation to the researched indigenous community at this time of the New Coronavirus Pandemic. We hope that this research shall serve as a basis for the studies on cultural reconstruction of native people’s lives.