'The way I am is an outrage': the Indigenous Brazilian musicians taking back a burning country
As Brazil’s world-acclaimed biodiversity turns to ashes, President Jair Bolsonaro has praised the country as an environmental role model. “It is not only in environmental preservation that the country stands out,” the far-right leader affirmed in a UN speech on 22 September. “In the humanitarian and human rights fields, Brazil has also been an international reference.”At the same time, the New York Times has reported that a team of Brazilian lawyers are drafting a complaint to the International Criminal Court in the Hague with a view to bringing Bolsonaro to trial for crimes against humanity, for removing environmental protections for indigenous peoples. Bolsonaro has not responded, but has said: “Where there is indigenous land, there is wealth underneath it,” and in February proposed a bill to legalise mining in Indigenous lands.In April, Brazil’s National Indian Foundation (Funai) – whose remit is to defend Indigenous peoples – legalised the takeover of rural land in 235 Indigenous areas. In July, Amazonian Indigenous communities saw a 76% rise in illegal fires on their lands compared to the same month in 2019, and, according to Indigenous rights organisation APIB, coronavirus has been three times more lethal to Indigenous peoples than to the rest of the population.So, amid the dangers and the violations to their overlooked rights, Indigenous people are taking a stand – with music. A long-existing scene, still little-known among non-Indigenous audiences, is gaining visibility with lyrics and videos that address Brazil’s alleged ecocide and ethnocide. By bridging ancestral and urban music with technology, Indigenous musicians are advocating for themselves and fighting for their existence.When the president assumed office, the singer and composer Kaê Guajajara worried she was “going to die” as a result of his hostile actions and rhetoric. Kaê belongs to the Guajajara ethnicity, located in the Amazonian part of Maranhão state in north-eastern Brazil. Merging hip-hop, traditional instruments and elements from her mother tongue Ze’egete, Kaê makes music about the reality of urbanised Indigenous peoples and the erasing of Indigenous identities.“I couldn’t get a job because of the Indigenous paintings on my skin,” Kaê says. “Being in the city, walking on the streets just the way I am, is already an outrage. My music communicates my reality: half of me is Indigenous tribe, the other half is the city.” She grew up in the Rio de Janeiro favela complex of Maré, having left Maranhão when she was seven because her mother’s living conditions were, she says, no different from slavery. The land where her mother comes from is not demarcated – a process that secures the already constitutional right for Indigenous people to own their land, making it less vulnerable to illegal mining and logging. “My family from Maranhão is more concerned with having food on their table than claiming for land demarcation,” she says.While Kaê’s work evokes hip-hop, she evades labels. A brilliant example is Essa Rua É Minha, which fuses the funk carioca-style with Indigenous flute; her second EP, Wiramiri (Birdie, in Ze’egete) revolves around self-care, self-love, Indigenous resistance and the coronavirus pandemic.I am afraid of whitening myself. I have to be careful to keep my roots and accomplish my mission: infiltrate power structures that say Indigenous peoples no longer existKaê doesn’t rule out signing with a big record label, as long as she can keep singing about the Indigenous cause: “I am afraid of whitening myself. I have to be careful to keep my roots and accomplish my mission: infiltrate power structures that say Indigenous peoples no longer exist.” Her songs are already being used as learning material by dozens of school teachers.The sociopolitical perspective driving Kaê’s music connects with a recent cultural movement gaining popularity among urban Indigenous artists, known as Indigenous futurism. Kaê says it is about “daring to envision ourselves in the future, and using new technologies to enhance Indigenous visibility”.The term was coined in 2012 by Portland State University’s Dr Grace Dillon, who is descended from the Anishinaabe people from Canada and the US. According to Klaus Wernet, an ethnomusicologist at the University of São Paulo, it was also around 2012 when Brazil’s Indigenous communities started buying smartphones and built “strategic music partnerships” via WhatsApp and social media. Journalist Renata Tupinambá, organiser of the Yby festival – Brazil’s first for contemporary Indigenous music – says Indigenous futurism uses technology to make “art, music and literature tools of cultural survival. It defies the racist mindset that Indigenous peoples are stuck in the 16th-century colonial imaginary.”
