Histórias intercruzadas: Projetos, ações e práticas indígenas e indigenistas na Província do Amazonas (1850-1889)

Abstract

This thesis discusses the relations between the Indigenous and Brazilian society in the Province of Amazonas, between 1850 and 1889. In this study, two reading axes are in conflict and complement each other: on the one hand, the indigenous policy conceived, elaborated and executed by the State and its agents, and on the other, the indigenous policy developed and executed by different people and indigenous groups. However, far from being two parallel reading axes, these two aspects made it possible to see indigenous and indigenousness history in the Province of Amazonas, not as a one-way path, in which the State and non-indigenous society were the protagonists, but as a field of tension, alliance and dispute in which the state and society, "Indians" and "whites", write an important and singular page of Indigenous and indigenousness history in this part of the Brazilian Imperial. In this field of dispute, the projects of the Brazilian State thought of in the offices had their execution mediated by the local reality and, therefore, by the participation or the rejection of the Indigenous at different levels. Likewise, the political actions of each ethnic group or indigenous group, as well as the indigenous reactions in response to the official policy or to the localized actions of private individuals (regattas, travelers, rubber tappers, etc.), were not carried out without consent, support, convenience, disagreement and even violent retaliation of the State, its agents and the national society. In contrast to what part of historiography proposes, the Indigenous were not only helpless victims of the politics and economic interests of the State and of Brazilian society sectors, but they were active agents in the construction of their history and of important part of the history of Brazilian society itself in the Amazon in the 19th century. Based on these premises, the different moments, instruments and practices of both the Indigenous and the State and their agents in the construction of this indigenous and indigenousness history in this part of the Amazon and imperial Brazil are analyzed in this thesis.