The (il)legal Indian: The Tupinambá and the juridification of indigenous rights and lives in North-Eastern Brazil

Abstract

This article traces different aspects of the present-day juridification and judicialization of indigenous lives using the example of the Tupinambá Indians of north-eastern Brazil. The Tupinambá’s identity is being increasingly bureaucratized by public administration and is constantly being questioned by public and private agents to deny the Tupinambá’s constitutional land rights. In the course of the still ongoing process of the demarcation of the Indigenous Territory Tupinambá de Olivença, indigenous inhabitants are facing a plethora of civil actions, and Tupinambá leaders are being persecuted and criminalized by the police and the judiciary. This article exposes the legal intricacies of possessory actions against indigenous people in Brazil and discusses the different acts and attitudes of the actors of the Brazilian ‘juridical field’ as regards the indigenous rights. It suggests a view of law, law enforcement and law suits as means of social sense making, that is, a public staging, interpretation, imagining and ‘mapping’ of Brazil’s ‘indigenous question’, which has, ultimately, to be legitimized by society at large.