Territorialidade Korubo no Vale do Javari – AM

Abstract

This dissertation is the result of an interdisciplinary study of the territorial configuration and territoriality expressed by the indigenous people Korubo in the last 50 years. The indigenous people named by us Korubo are speakers of a language of the Pano family and live in the Indigenous Territory Vale do Javari, in the far west of the Brazilian state of Amazonas. They are currently local groups that present different levels of interaction with the national society, from situations of isolation to relationships of permanent contact. Over the last decades, the Korubo have acted with deep resilience and resistance, mainly in reaction to the onslaught of developmentist fronts over their territory. During a part of the second half of the twentieth century, these people occupied a territorial unit based on the interfluvial rivers Ituí and Itaquaí, this last tributary of the Javari river, and explicitly showed the intention of not establishing permanent contact with the surrounding society. It is estimated that from the late 1980s processes of dispersion of local Korubo groups have been developed. This caused a geographic isolation between some of them, interrupting flows of contact due to new social and territorial arrangements. The contact consolidation events between the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) and some of these local groups in the last 21 years revealed, among other things, the close kinship relations between individuals of the newly contacted groups and still important aspects that served to understand the aspects of their splits and dispersions. The methodology of this research is based on the cross-referencing of the information collected by the bibliographic and documentary investigation, the Korubo narratives and the work that I performed as a field indigenist by the Vale do Javari Ethno-Environmental Protection Front (FPEVJ), a unit of FUNAI that investigates and protects the territory and the culture of the isolated indigenous peoples and recently contacted of the Indigenous Territory Vale do Javari. As a result of this investigation, I present the forms that the Korubo appropriates their territory and the dilemmas that the indigenous of this ethnic group have been facing in the contemporary context.