ABSTRACT
This essay historicizes the indigenous populations of Brazil’s relationship to the natural environment, understood herein as “the collective, historically contingent identities, ideologies, and environmental knowledge systems” that indigenous peoples establish to maintain territory through interactions grounded in relationships of power. After providing the reader with an overview of the varied historical experiences and human ecologies, cultural heterogeneity, and the demographic make-up of Brazil’s indigenous population, the essay maps indigenous political ecology according to the coordinates of capitalist development, global environmental history, as well as native peoples’ symbolic, affective and ontological realms. In this sense, the essay offers both a structural approach to understanding indigeneity and the environment in Latin America while highlighting the agential capacities of indigenous peoples as both historical actors and articulators of alternative cosmo-visions. The essay’s case studies focus on discrete historical contexts and contests surrounding Native Brazilians’ ties to the natural environment that are critical to their social and cultural reproduction and the contemporary challenges facing their communities.
