Governo Karodaybi: o movimento Ipereğ Ayũ e a resistência Munduruku

Abstract

This research discusses the emergence and trajectory of the Munduruku Ipereğ Ayũ Movement (MMIA), which, by employing different tactics, has engendered resistance vis-à-vis the Brazilian state’s development model. This model is based upon the construction of hydropower dams and other large-scale associated enterprises. Besides leading to a series of negative impacts upon the ways of life that exist in the region, the establishment of these dams would flood significant areas that have been inhabited since immemorial times by indigenous and by traditional forest communities. The hydroelectric projects are not new – their justification is based upon recycled images of Amazonia previously propagated by the military dictatorship. Meanwhile, the MMIA can be thought of as a recreation operated through Munduruku culture: its social organisation is structured in close connection with Munduruku cosmology. Therefore, contrary to the classic studies about this people, which understand processes of change primarily through the prism of acculturation and cultural loss, this research aims to show how creative strategies of action are informed by the Munduruku people’s history and collective memory, which narrate countless warfare expeditions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If, on the one hand, the government says it will not give up on developments in the Tapajós region, by banking on a plurality of strategies of territorial defence in the face of governmental attacks and of processes of territorialisation of capital – the MMIA guarantees it will not give up on the rivers and forests.