Discontinuities in Indigenous Policy and Guarani Lived Spaces

Abstract

The Portuguese Empire’s indigenous villages (1845-1889) are an instigating anomaly in colonial indigenous policy records and in the action of Christian missionaries: they precede the elaboration of the Land Law (1850) and, through the Amerindian programme of Catechism and Civilization, they instituted a governmental regime based on State tutelage and a new definition of territory. Fruit of paradoxical indigenous policies, the indigenous villages inclined Amerindians towards living together much like national and foreign settlers. In this article, an attempt is made to follow Guarani village mobility and territorial use. It is proposed that the Guarani territorial dynamics and patterns of use described in missionary records can be better qualified on comparison to contemporary ethnographies that are attentive to the cultural elements that guide Guarani land occupation in the southeasterly region of São Paulo and western Paraná. What historians apprehend as the squalid vestiges of the Capuchinha mission in the nineteenth century — the monastery and cross — the Guarani narratives identify through a cartography of places inhabited by kin in which topography is a relational reference.