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House 1: Terezinha, the oldest sister in her sibling set, an adolescent man José and his younger sister Madalena Telles describes the living situation as follows: The result was a painstaking, but especially painful, exercise with the most senior woman, Terezinha, of one of two households, a woman who is still the most senior Latundê: One of these efforts concerned the reconstruction of the group’s history at the time of contact. Impressed by the plight suffered by this people she tried to gather some data about their history. Stella Telles, the linguist working with the Latundê language started her visits in 1997 and established a firm rapport and empathy with the group and some of its members in particular (Telles 2002). The only anthropologist to pass four days in the village commented on the distinct difficulty among members to speak about the dead and to take stock of the ravages of population decimation. The havoc caused by this small scale genocidal tendency of non interference after primary contact left a strong imprint on the survivors. Doubtlessly, the measles epidemic was avoidable, especially so long after contact and considering that the effects of contagious diseases on indigenous populations are notorious. I emphasized the example of the Latundê captain’s death and the Mané’s ascent to command. The damage done was tremendous in these first years of pacified relations as most of the older generation perished, particularly after the measles epidemic. It was only with marriage and new children that the population began to approach a number closer to pre-contact times. From 1977 to 1981, the absolute lack of medical assistance caused the death of nearly 60% of the entire group, diminishing it from about 23 Indians to 9 at the lowest point, not counting Mané. What is apparent from the reports aligned before is that the impact of the euphemistically labeled contact was devastating in its population effects. They are not just victims, but are the foremost interpreters and, in their own way, agents of their history.
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The Indians were more object than subject of these constitutive processes. Overall, the dossier reflects bureaucratic inconsequential attention, inefficiency, negligence, and sometimes criminal collective and individual behavior and responsibilities. As said, this derives from the restriction and subordination of anthropological work within the bureaucracy. It is noteworthy that the process so far had very little to do with consultation of the group directly concerned, even the anthropological reports rarely succeed in gaining some insight in the conceptions and opinions of the Indians. In turn, FUNAI occupies a subordinated place within the state when conceived of as an arena of competition between different federal agencies. The state delegates to FUNAI the function of the authorized mentor of land and population management of previously uncontrolled people. The result is the formally named and grounded Latundê, a distant appendage in the bureaucratic dominant and dominating structure put into place to exert state control over a land and people previously uncontrolled. A small and hardly known group of people, even in specialist circles, suffers immensely from the process of internal conquest. In current fashion, the local and the global, and between (unsurprisingly this is not always very well represented in the case itself and a point not fully dealt with in this chapter). Historical contingencies of context play an important role in the specific structure of conjuncture (in the words of Sahlins) where local time and place are relevant and national and international factors prevail. From this examination of the file, two major points are especially salient. This corresponds to a dialectal process of what evidence really exists and what was thought to exist or should exist. In effect, the history examined so far grounds and socioculturally fabricates the people and their land as a reified object. It becomes obvious that it concerns a legal, bureaucratic, and social fiction that presupposed the recognition of concepts and objects – of people and materials – postulated pre-existing. The prior history reconstitutes the trajectory of observations, research and intervention materialized in the paperwork of a file generated to constitute a bureaucratic dossier that documents the way to the final legal act of creating an Indigenous Territory in accordance with presidential decree. First times: another view of Latundê history