Challenges and Risks Faced by Indigenous Peoples in Today's Brazil: Unpacking Vulnerability and Multiple Reactions

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The long trend of environmental degradation and the socio-cultural impacts of mainstream development in Brazil have undergone a giant rise after the election of President Jair Bolsonaro, leading some organisations to denounce the unacceptable intensification of violence and conflicts (e.g. New York Times, 21 Sep 2019). In that context, the fate of indigenous groups constitutes one of the most serious political and economic questions in the country. These developments directly contradict the tendency to recognise indigenous rights initiated in the re-democratisation period in the late 1970s, which led to the inclusion of explicit articles in the 1988 Constitution. Whereas the indigenous population is trying to resist and react using all possible channels and opportunities, there is still limited understanding of barriers, prospects and feelings about the new adverse context.The research will address the impacts, perceptions and reactions of indigenous groups to the aggressive advance of conservative policies and social reforms by the new Brazilian administration. It will assess and theorise the combination of past legacies and new trends behind the intensification of violence affecting indigenous peoples. The project has three main phases: 1) analysis of pro- and anti-indigenous discourses, launch of a website to capture violence occurrences and elite interviews; 2) case studies in three hotspot areas in the states of Amazonas, Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, targeting selected indigenous communities, involving indigenous researchers and making use of participant observation, interviews and focus groups, and in particular various artistic expressions (music, dance, drawings, drama, videos and pictures, etc.) that communicate suffering, the impacts and the perceptions of community members; 3) workshops, a national meeting and talks to communicate and problematize the empirical results and raise recommendations. Those combined research activities will all foster a dialogue between indigenous communities, allied organisations and researchers to shared experiences to better comprehend past legacies, mounting pressures and the diversity of responses.Its methodological approach means conducting academic work with and for the indigenous communities, allowing the expression of their own voices and direct involvement in the interpretation of findings, rather than the conventional research on those communities for the benefit of non-indigenous scholars and government agencies. The approach is inherently coproduced and will continuously engage relevant stakeholders in both the research design and its operation. It will encourage a 'relational reflexivity' between the interdependent actors through an incremental methodology and research design with interrelated phases.The research team will deal with the national state of affairs and also focus on selected indigenous communities in three areas particularly affected by the action of public agencies and private entities. In addition to external pressures, there are also internal community factors that influence indigenous reactions and that need to be examined, such as internal disputes and hierarchies among indigenous communities and extended families, gender inequalities and domestic violence, intergenerational mechanisms of support or competition, forced adoption of indigenous children, and specific public service demands. In addition, the project will have wider theoretical and empirical repercussions considering that the specific situation of indigenous groups is certainly an integral part of the wider erosion of labour rights, the rule of law and democratic freedoms in many parts of the world, as well as an element of the international maelstrom associated with persecution of migrants, economic and political instabilities, global environmental risks and climate injustices.