The Civil Society
The Government's precarious work is one of the important factors
that contributed for the participation of many other civil society
agents in the indigenous policy. Many of them take advantage of
the gaps left by official policies and the frequent omission of
the Government in responding to demands.
Summarizing the scope of the activities performed by these civil
society agents is a difficult task. These organizations, especially
the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), named the 'third sector',
engage in a complex array of activities and public policies, acting
in several directions. From economical self-support projects to
technical qualification programs, indigenous teacher formation,
protection and recovering of socio-cultural characteristics, territory
marking and surveillance, only to mention a few (see partnerships
and projects).
The several catholic and protestant missionary agencies are,
along with the NGOs, quite present in the indigenous affairs.
The anthropologist Marcos Pereira Rufino (ISA), has written
about that subject pointing out how Christian missionaries are
involved in educational, health and self-support projects, as
follows:
Not only preaching makes the mission
The presence of Christian religious missions among indigenous
peoples in this country is, as widely known, an ancient reality,
which started with the Portuguese colonization of Brazil. The
present scenery in which this presence occurs is rather complex
and involves a very heterogeneous set of missionaries.
The teaching of Christian principles to indigenous peoples is
not an exclusive concern of the Catholic Church, but also of a
myriad of protestant religious agencies. Those, on their turn,
reproduce their characteristics of relatively independent religious
agents in the context of the mission, multiplying into various
churches and denominations, with differences in terms of their
theology and ways of acting and converting.
The participation of the Catholic Church does not hide its diversity
either. Apart from the work each religious order and congregation
carries out, each one with their own charisma and missionary project,
there is a widespread presence of missionaries who are directly
committed to the pastoral plan of the ecclesiastic hierarchy in
the country. The latter are mostly connected to the Missionary
Indigenous Council (CIMI), attached to the Brazilian National
Bishop Council (CNBB). The CIMI was created to coordinate the
missionary actions in a national context and fine tune it with
contemporary concerns of the Catholic Church.
As opposed to the missionaries who belong to orders and congregations,
the 400 CIMI missionaries, distributed in 112 teams, are more
distant from the religious proselytism and concentrate their efforts
towards indigenous politics, carrying out some work in the areas
of health, education, native Brazilians' movements, legal assistance,
etc.
In the last years, some projects for the creation of economical
alternatives have been developed, as for example, the territory
occupation and self-support project among the Mura tribe, whose
goal is the production and commercialization of local fruit, or
the project of development and dissemination of apiary and fruit
industrialization techniques among indigenous and non-indigenous
communities in the state of Amazonas. Both projects are supported
by PDA - subprograms from the Brazilian Tropical Forest Protection
Plan (PPG-7).
In the 90's, the importance of this discussion made the organ
build up the National Self-Support Articulation (Anas), which
joins missionaries and assistants in a common forum for a deeper
discussion on the topic and for support to the missionary teams
and indigenous organizations. CIMI's work with self-support of
indigenous groups is carried out in a peculiar way: their projects
elaboration is oriented by a clear anti-capitalist and anti-liberal
spirit, in a way that avoids the formulation of proposals that
carry any traces of a business enterprise or profit making. Roughly
speaking, the self-support proposals devised by CIMI aim at a
low impact over the socio-economical conditions of the indigenous
groups they benefit. These proposals also point out the community
sense within these activities.
Still on Catholic organizations, it can't be ignored that in some
places, CIMI directly participates, through the local diocesan
indigenous pastoral, in the management of the Special Indigenous
Sanitary Districts, along with indigenous organizations and NGOs.
It is the case of Boa Vista diocese, in the state of Roraima,
whose missionaries work in partnership with CIR, and the São
Gabriel da Cachoeira diocese, in the Amazon northwest, which works
along with Foirn and the municipality representatives.
The action of protestant missionaries is even more complex. Besides
hundreds of groups which are often said to carry on practices
of sheer disrespect to cultural diversity, imposing strange values,
cults and cosmologies to Native Brazilians, there are also groups
of protestant missionaries directly involved in indigenous politics.
Most of the activities these groups, which are not religious exactly,
engage in are related to education and health. Their work on linguistic
and grammatical systematization is widely known, and its results
are used not only for the translation of the Bible to the native
tongue but also to structure indigenous schools and literacy groups.
The work with health care is frequent in many protestant missions,
many times filling the gap left by the government. In some places,
this health care work is the most important way to legitimate
the mission's presence among the Native Brazilians and to justify
their getting into isolated indigenous areas.
The most important protestant groups in this scenery are the Evangelical
Missionary Work Group (GMTE) and the Indigenous Peoples Mission
Council (Comin). These two missionary agencies are very close
to each other. Although they are explicitly committed to evangelization,
both emphasize the missionary involvement in education, health
and Native Brazilian movements. Sometimes they work in partnerships
with NGOs and CIMI catholic missionaries. Their joined participation
occurred for example in the Popular, African-American and Indigenous
Resistance Commitee, and in the '500th Anniversary Indigenous
March', an event that proposed a 'counter-celebration' of the
official events realized by the government and the Catholic Church.
