Heritagization and Coloniality: When Protection Captures Worlds

Abstract

Heritage is a policy of forgetting. This article problematizes the Western paradigm of cultural heritage in Brazil, demonstrating how its normative criteria, based on materiality, monumentality, and authenticity, promote the systematic exclusion of Indigenous forms of memory and territoriality. By analyzing the railway heritage listings carried out by the Council for the Historical, Archaeological, Artistic, and Tourist Heritage of the State of São Paulo (CONDEPHAAT), it is argued that such policies reinforce hegemonic narratives of progress, while the absence of recognition of Indigenous places of memory contributes to the historical and territorial erasure of these peoples. Drawing on theorists such as Laurajane Smith, Rodney Harrison, and Catherine Walsh, and especially Ailton Krenak and the counter-colonial thought of Antônio Bispo dos Santos (Nêgo Bispo), the article contends that state-led heritage practices may operate as a continuation of coloniality. Finally, it argues for the urgency of a heritage paradigm that recognizes the inseparability of culture, territory, and life, thereby ensuring the continuity and future of Indigenous cosmopolitics.