This text is the result of intense work from the Ocupação Psicanalítica [Psychoanalytic Occupation¹] research and extension project, linked to the Graduate Program in Psychoanalytic Theory at UFRJ in partnership with LaPTE - Transcultural Psychiatry and Ethnopsychanalysis Laboratory of the Institute of Psychiatry (IPUB/UFRJ) in conversation with the indigenous authors who co-sign with us the written result of a work that relied on the strength of orality and ancestral transmission. We also counted on the participation of the Psychoanalytic Occupation Nucleus in Bahia, located at the Federal University of Recôncavo Baiano. In the following pages, we bring fragments of the transcription of interviews we conducted with leaders or members of indigenous peoples, Indigenous Health and Mental Health workers, and also with an indigenous person from the Guajajara people and the Maraka’nà village who shared the importance of her encounter with Psychoanalysis through her psychoanalytic process. Despite the loss of the richness of orality in writing, we sought to extract on the following pages the strength of our encounter and our learning from the different people we came into contact with.
As a research field, we start with the psychoanalyst’s involvement in the political struggles of Brazilian indigenous peoples, in addition to participation in public Mental Health care centers for the indigenous population. Currently, we have also built a clinic that begins in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, providing online services to the Tupinambá population of Ilhéus and recently starting a face-to-face clinic with non-village indigenous people in Rio through the construction of an outpatient clinic for this population in partnership between the teams coordinated by Prof. Bruno Reys and Prof. Mariana Mollica, from both projects. We have visited villages in the greater Rio area, alongside the public defender’s office, and engaged with the Maraka’nà Village².
We begin this compilation with conversations with interviewed indigenous individuals, such as Cacica[chieftain]* Maria Valdelice, leader and elder of the Tupinambá people in southern Bahia, the first recognized cacica in Bahia and the second in Brazil; Geana Baniwa, a psychologist who completed her master’s degree from the perspective of her people, from the Baniwa people inhabiting the Amazon rainforest region in the northwest of the state of Amazonas and the countries of Colombia and Venezuela. Next, we present parts of the interview with Dilmar Puri, from the Goytacá people, belonging to the Puri nation located in the southwest region of Brazil, who became a member of the Maraka’nà village in the city of Rio de Janeiro. We also include Itaynara Rodrigues Silva, from the Tuxá people in northern Bahia, along the São Francisco River, the first indigenous psychologist of the Brazilian Federal Psychology Council (CFP). She works with the Tupinambá population, integrating an interdisciplinary Indigenous Mental Health team. We also compile fragments of our conversation with Chief Juvenal Payayá, a writer and leader of the Payayá people in the Chapada Diamantina region of Bahia. Following these accounts, we present the interview with Thaiany Santos Araújo, an indigenous person from the Guajajara people, a student and professor at the Maraka’nà Indigenous University, who speaks about her analytic experience. Finally, we have the interview with Nurse Rebeca Antunes Nascimento from SESAI-BA, one of approximately 37 professionals in the Ilhéus base, consisting of 6 multiprofessional teams, plus the Indigenous Health Care Center team, which includes 4 Mental Health professionals. The teams serve 23 traditional villages and 11 reclamation regions (occupied by indigenous people whose lands had previously been invaded). Both Rebeca, the nurse, and Itaynara, the psychologist, present the suffering of the Tupinambá people based on direct listening to the people of this region, addressing their testimonies to the psychoanalysts of our project in the form of a demand for assistance for these traditional peoples and also for supervision and follow-up of clinical cases. A request for help was also made to act politically with public Mental Health institutions and the Psychosocial Care Network in the region, which is quite precarious. They represent a large number of workers from multiprofessional teams, many of whom are indigenous from various ethnicities, with very workingconditions to face the complexity and lack of public investment that involves their task.
The interviews are presented in the following way; some follow a sequence of questions and answers, such as those with Cacica Valdelice, Nurse Rebeca, and Thayane Guajajara, as they bring something very specific. The others, with Geana Baniwa (conducted by interviewers Bruno Reys and Mariana Mollica), Cacique Juvenal Payayá (by Mariana Mollica, Marcelo Fonseca de Souza, and Ana Paula Galdino), and Dilmar Puri and Itaynara Tuxá (both interviewed by Mariana M.) were arranged differently: excerpts from the interviews were grouped by common themes addressed by the interviewees, allowing the reader to check similarities and differences in the history of each people, their political struggle, psychological suffering, the issue of suicide, temporality, the handling of dreams, ancestry, and ways of self-care and well-being that are transmitted through speech and transcribed for reading. The attempt to decolonize our knowledge and ways of conducting the following interviews is recognizably more of a collective desire and ongoing effort than something effectively accomplished.
INTERVIEW WITH CACICA MARIA VALDELICE AMARAL DE JESUS
Interviewer - We are here with a great Tupinambá leader whom we had the opportunity to visit along with other members of the indigenous community and the Ocupação Psicanalítica [Psychoanalytic Occupation] Rio and Bahia. I would like to thank you very much for the partnership and for granting this interview. Could you please talk a little about the Tupinambá people and the importance of your leadership as a woman? Feel free to introduce yourself.
Cacica [Chieftain] Valdelice - My name is Maria Valdelice Amaral de Jesus; in Portuguese language, Florescer (to flourish). I am still Chieftain, the first Chieftain of the territory and the second Chieftain in Brazil. Our territory is not yet demarcated. I try to help my people; I am the chieftain of 13 communities, without limiting myself to a specific community because we need the unity of the people. We face difficulties because every human is flawed, but I continue struggling. I have been arrested and went to prison, but all of this did not make me give up the fight. It’s a whole history of being peoples of first contact, where the Portuguese first invaded this region. So, there is a great Tupinambá wisdom regarding this political resistance.
Interviewer - Can you tell us a little about this history, about your arrest, which I imagine happened due to significant resistance?
Cacica Valdelice - Olivença³ was a Jesuit village. In 1536, there was a massacre of our people. Every year, we organize a big march in memory of the Cururupe massacre. It’s a story that Ilhéus doesn’t know or tell; they don’t the reason why these indigenous people march. They march because they have a goal; this landmark stayed outside the territory demarcation, but we continue to pay tribute to our children who died so that we can be here today. There were seven kilometers of indigenous bodies spread on Cururupe beach, and Cururupe means “sea of blood,” the water turned red from relatives’ blood. We need to live our history, or we perish. They suffocate us, and we cannot assert that the history is ours, that the Tupinambá people exist. They say: how is it that the people are now being indigenous? Our elders, some were still alive, and when the anthropologist sought them for the ethnic survey, they were there telling our history, that we are Tupinambá and whatever we want to be. So, the historian who was here a long time ago cannot tell a story that does not exist. We are telling the story of our people, which is resistant to all of this. My great-grandmother lived in Olivença, and we still have her little house there. But when the landowners came to Olivença and said, “Look, you cannot build houses with wood and thatch, only with tiles and bricks,” my great-grandmother resisted. She died at 105 years old and said, “Anyone who goes into the woods brings a stick, and anyone who goes into the river brings clay.” She built a house in our way, with the bricks on the outside. When it rained, the old structure on the outside, which was old, collapsed, but the new one we had built remained. They went after her, and she said she would only leave there for the cemetery. It’s a story of resistance from a woman who had three children, all with disabilities. So, this is the resistance of women within a territory that was theirs, and she said, “This is mine,” and it continued to be hers until today. They took it from us, and we took it back.
We have this house in Olivença. An elder said that a mantle had disappeared from Olivença, gone to another place. The mantle here was made of Guará feathers, used in weddings and festivals. This mantle disappeared, and the village weakened. When an exhibition came to São Paulo, an exhibition at Ibirapuera with 3,000 indigenous pieces, one of our elders was invited by Folha de São Paulo because there was already an anthropologist here, Susana Viegas from Portugal, who was a good friend of my mother. My grandmother said that this mantle was made of Guará feathers, and she said that this mantle was the strength of the people, and the strength of the people ended because all the landowners came to Olivença and started saying, “Look, you’re mestizo; mestizo ends here.” There was even a nickname given, “little mestizo with a shapely butt,” they called us to belittle us. We were almost crucified by the Jesuits. And who built the church in Olivença? It was the indigenous, our relatives. They carried stones from Cururupe to Olivença. And when they arrived at Olivença, there was still a wall that was made of stone, still with whale oil. When they arrived, they were very tired, very destroyed. They couldn’t even speak anymore, and maybe some even died. There was a lot, a lot of massacres of the people. In 1999, we managed to make a stand. Mr. Alício and Paulino went to Brasília, met Juruna, and talked.
Juruna thought that the Tupinambás had been extinct, but they said they were alive, that the story was alive. There was something special there, of legitimacy and recognition of our existence by the Brazilian government. Then, he gave them some boxes of medicine. They came back here and were highly persecuted because the landowners didn’t want them to claim territory. They went back to the fields. Here, they were very persecuted and then fell ill. Today, only Mr. Alício is alive; the others have passed away. Today, we are here with so much lack of assistance. But we managed to reach the retaking of the land by our people. We were recognized in 2002, and they signed the order that came out. This order went to the municipality, the state, and finally, here. We wonder how we will do it; we can only believe in what we are doing when we put our feet on the ground and go there to gather to make our retake. We will show the Brazilian government that we need land. We have already made two retakes. But after three months, we had to leave because the police came.
The owner of Limoeiro was Portuguese, had a strong relationship with the judge, and he ruled that the land was not demarcated and nothing belonged to us. So, the people came to do the process of the territory limit with everyone. They did it, and only the signature is missing. We hope it will be signed soon for homologation and compensation for the people. As I was the first and only Chieftain , all the processes were against me. Then, the imprisonment of Chieftain Valdelice on the issue of territory came out. I spent nine days in the Itabuna prison and 120 days in another prison. With a medical report, they managed to get me out of prison for house arrest. But because of the land struggle, today, we have some land. There are still landowners challenging us. They challenge us, make the indigenous work, and don’t pay. Making the indigenous work and not paying, spraying pesticides on the land and the crops, destroying the river, depleting the fish, and diminishing the shrimp that my relatives consume. There is no way to fish, and there is no drinking water. This natural water, when contaminated with pesticides from the farmers, brings a different challenge every day. They are destroying the territory, taking all the minerals and the aroeira trees used for medicine. They remove various plants we use to make medicines. Large hotels were built here, owned by Portuguese individuals. We filed a complaint in Brasília. We want to go to the Embassy of Portugal. We had a whole Brazil, but we don’t want it all, just this little piece to live with dignity and respect for our culture, our way. Because we have our mangroves. The life of the little animals we have here, everything is life, and we preserve it. Why build a hotel in the mangrove?
Interviewer - I would like to hear from you about how the Tupinambá people have been addressing their soul’s pains or subjective suffering that we have heard about.
Cacica Valdelice - The lack of territory. I feel that the majority of our people lack the land! When they can visualize the possibility of land, they calm down. I live here on 3 hectares owned by a farmer. He has 100 or 200 hectares. My people know it was theirs, that it belonged to our relatives. Those lands belonged to someone’s cousin. Some relatives were slaves on that land that used to be theirs, working during the day, and the resources they received sometimes didn’t amount to anything. Another issue is the problem of drugs. Many get involved out of necessity. There is a lack of public policies for indigenous communities to address mental health. In my backyard, there is no seed to plant, no seed to make a necklace, something to sell by the beach. Sometimes, when you get to the beach, you are humiliated. And that affects us. Sometimes, when the State or the Municipality sends a professional for Mental Health care, they come, visit, and leave. Recently, a 13-year-old hung himself. Can you imagine a child doing that to themselves? There was something. Was he abused? No one knows if he had food every day, if he worked on the farm as a slave, or if he went to school. All of this needs to be asked, but no one answers.
Interviewer - We are receiving referrals from the nursing teams and the medical team from the Tupinambá villages, and we are listening to the cases, creating a report that describes the incidence of suffering to collaborate with amplifying your voices with the public Mental Health agencies in the region. Now, it is also very important that you can indicate who is suffering the most, sometimes young people, the elderly, or people of all ages who cannot reach a psychologist. They don’t trust. Your word as a leader is crucial for establishing trust. How can you participate in referrals to psychology so that the population has confidence and can avail themselves of this service?
Cacica Valdelice - We only have one psychologist, and I think she needs support. If she is not in a healthy environment, she cannot take care of anyone. So, SESAI4 has to provide the conditions for this person who comes to listen. They (SESAI) want the professional to stay for 20 minutes and then leave, as the other car is already leaving with the team. There is no time to listen, to visit that family to see where the problem is. When they come, the person has already committed suicide, mutilated themselves, or is in the most severe state, even running madly around. Unfortunately, our municipality is unprepared to assist our large population, and we know that spirituality is also strong. But some people don’t believe and, as a result, are mistreated. Our psychologist needs to engage with herbs, our natural remedies, and with baths. We need to seek alternatives. I would like to thank you very much for your work with Itaynara, our psychologist, and the health teams in our region. We are together to build reinforcement to pressure the regional governments for better Mental Health care.
INTERVIEWS WITH THEMES GROUPED BASED ON A COMMON QUESTION:
Interviewers - tell us a little about your story and the history of your people.
Geana Baniwa - The Baniwa people inhabit the Amazon region. We have Baniwas in the Amazon territory, in the Brazilian part, but also in Colombia and Venezuela. Many migrated to the Brazilian territory and took refuge due to contact with colonizers in the indigenous lands of the upper Rio Negro. Several still live there secluded, not close to the riverbanks. They lived more inside the forest. But due to this influence, this colonization, and this conflict, many Baniwas sought refuge in the headwaters. Some live closer to the rivers, more on the riverbanks, and emerge from within the forest. We are approximately 3 or 4 thousand only in the Brazilian territory. If we consider Colombia and Venezuela, the numbers increase. This is why we have many Baniwa relatives who speak Spanish as well as Baniwa and Nheengatu (a general language), besides Portuguese. And there is a significant difference. My family, for example, doesn’t speak Baniwa; we speak Nheengatu because of all those conflicts. During the colonization, they didn’t want us to speak our own language. And colonization has not ended. Although we have started decolonization and reclaimed our history and language, this process is still ongoing. [...] There is some movement in indigenous schools inside the territories. In the cities, there is a weaker movement. In the cities, lately, we talk about indigenous school education, and there are laws and guidelines. Among them is the issue of training students so that in indigenous communities, they encourage the use of the indigenous language. In my community, we studied Portuguese and the indigenous language. We sang in indigenous languages and learned about using plants as medicines in the indigenous language. In short, we practiced our tradition within the school. So, there is the issue of using the mother tongue and also the Western language, Portuguese. In the cities, some schools have the indigenous language as a discipline. Perhaps in elementary and high school, it may no longer be the case. In cities, younger relatives have sought to recover the language and reconnect with indigenous culture. [...] The prevailing one is Nheengatu. But in the communities, they privilege their language. If it’s in the Baniwa territory, the privileged language is Baniwa. Among the Baniwa, we have ‘model schools’ that prioritize the Baniwa language. In urban areas, there is a very weak movement for language recovery. Younger relatives have tried to reconnect to learn the language. Because the younger ones no longer prioritize the indigenous language. Among our parents and grandparents, 90% still speak the indigenous language. As for today’s youth, many are losing their language. And language is very important. It is connected to our history, everything.
Dilmar Puri - I am Dilmar Puri, from the Puri people, and I am from Goytacá. The Puri is a very large nation, and I am from the Goytacá Puri side. I participated in the Maraka’nà village for some years now. In Brazil, there are more than 305 known indigenous peoples. So, there’s a lot; these are worlds that exist, coexist, we do not know of; we don’t learn about them in school, nowhere, regarding these worlds that coexist with us every day. [...] The Puri is a people part of the Puri nation, which interacts and coexists with other peoples with very similar cultures living in other territories. As I mentioned, the Goytacaz, the Coroados, Coropós, the Goyanazes, and the Guarulhos were called Guarulhos but self-identified as Maromomi. There’s a whole range of peoples that, as they lived together with the Puris and had a somewhat common language, quite similar, the Puri language, are called the Puri nation. [...] The Puri nation is one of the largest indigenous nations in the country. We have more than 400 municipalities registered as Puri lands, spread across the states of Espírito Santo, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo, precisely where the base of colonialism was established. These were lands stolen from our people, and more recently, research has discovered that even in Bahia, several municipalities belong to our people, where Puri villages existed when Brazil was invaded by the Europeans.
Itaynara Tuxá - I am from Rodelas, Bahia. My name is Itaynara Rodrigues Silva, my civil name. But I self-identify as Itaynara Tuxá. I am also a daughter of the forests, the cosmos, the forces of the elders, of ancestry. [...] I will characterize my people; we are from Bahia, from the region of the sub-middle of the São Francisco, located in Northern Bahia, traditionally known as the territory of the Rodeleiros indigenous , who are now the indigenous Tuxá. Our people, since the colonization era, traditionally occupied this region of the São Francisco Valley, the sub-middle São Francisco. Our people were the second to be recognized by the State in the Northeast and historically known for our relationship with the São Francisco River and our relationship with these waters. We were called canoeing indigenous precisely because of these crossings, as we owned islands and islets. One common island in the recent memory of my people was the Sorubabé/Zorubabé Island, in the Subucuá language, in the Kariri family. We had to move due to a flood.
When we moved, the generation of my great-grandfather, my grandmother, and my father came to settle in this village that was the scene of the missions, known as Rodela. There was the Widow’s Island, among many others, but this Widow’s Island held great importance for my people—shared agriculture, shared rituals, our shared culture. When we planted and harvested, we were known in the region for taking this agriculture to trade. These crossings were done in canoes, and we knew more than thirty islands; it was a different kind of relationship. After the construction of the Itaparica Dam in the late 60s, during the military dictatorship, which initiated the process of expansion and “development” in the Northeast, such as the construction of this dam. In the 70s and up to the 80s, it took almost ten years for the construction and the whole process of forced relocation of my people and other traditional riverine populations who inhabited that region. It was a period that had an absurd impact on our way of life, subsistence, and subjectivity from territorial processes, mainly because in this planning phase, it was already possible to measure these impacts on the culture of the Tuxá people.
Cacique Payayá - We are a people with history. We are sitting in our history. And this history weighs heavily on us because we do not give it up. So, every time someone tries to interfere with us, we react — my wife says — like jararacas. Because we defend what we know and master today. There were several blackouts, but poorly done blackouts. Rubber did not erase everything. So, we went there and discovered several faces of history, and that’s what we base ourselves on today. Another thing is this issue of tradition. Our tradition has been lost a lot. And today, our role is to revitalize all the little things of tradition that remain. As for what we know and the language, it is still a learning process because the blackout was very strong. It came to destroy, as you can see in this marco temporal project. It is a proposal for a blackout. In fact, I think it’s the most perverse law I’ve ever known. [...] The Payayá spoke Tupi. These are things that we had to fight to discover. Initially, we based ourselves on the very few words that remained. All were Tupi, like ‘andaraí’5, ‘utinga’6. In words like these, we based ourselves. But then, we found documents from 1870 and had no more doubts. The colonizer who was with the great chief Sacanboasu made it clear and wrote without mystery: “They spoke Tupi.” We have no doubts that the language of the Payayá was Tupi.
Interviewers - Tell us a little about the subjective suffering of your people and the care methods that have been cultivated.
Itaynara Tuxá (responding from a professional perspective, not from the Tuxá people but as a psychologist, based on her work with the Tupinambá people) - In late 2020, I became the first psychologist to be placed in a base pole in the practice of the PNASPI7 policy, taking the work and psychology to the territory. I took on this role coming from a place because it was an achievement of the Tupinambá people to look at their suffering and say, “We need to organize ourselves,” because the justification for my going was the cases of mental health illness also occurred due to the context of the suicide of a young indigenous woman that had just happened. I arrived in late 2020 during the pandemic, with some restrictions on access to the territory to reach this population. But I will never forget the place that the psychologist symbolized for that population in distress. I also understood what my role would be, thinking about not reinforcing the logic of individual clinics, of individual appointments, which the vast majority of indigenous populations think is the work, the role of an indigenous health psychologist. We also talk about a policy that has been around for 22 years, and only a little over three years ago did the figure of a psychologist appear in these communities. How could we expect them to understand? I also had concerns about whether they would understand the work of a psychologist coming from a place where most could barely say the word psychologist. [...] I also thought about the shortcomings of the professional service in these spaces. I thought a lot about this place of expectation and this place of lack. [...] We know that listening is very important to identify demands, and then we identify flows. But in the first moment, as there was no such professional, the demands were very high. I seemed to be working in an individual clinic. One of the things that shocked me the most was that there was a lot of repressed demand, many things that I had to make mandatory notifications about. There were situations from a long time ago, grave things. [...] Basically, the current demands I still face are the same as before. There was a lot of violence against women and a lot of child abuse. In general, adult women recount the processes from the past. It was mutilation, self-harm, and suicide attempts that were never shared, that never reached the families or the team itself because some demands are located by professionals like the nurse or any other team professional identifies and refers. It also happens that this demand comes from the community. The community identifies an issue and refers, or this demand is spontaneous; the individual seeks this service. Another very different thing was the spontaneous demand because, frequently, the place I was in was that of confidentiality; neither the family nor the team professional knew about those situations. I also speak of demands in the sense of not only thinking about gender violence but also the place of these men in suffering because these men, despite being the ones who abused and violated these Tupinambá women, are the ones in the indicators, from the monitoring spreadsheet of this data, of homicide, abusive use of alcohol and other drugs, or also in the place of suicide.
Most people who committed suicide here in Ilhéus were men but the majority who attempted were women. Most of those who use psychotropic drugs I can consider to be women as well. So, there are sufferings and violence that are multiple, happening, of course, in proportions, contexts, and practices. They have been victims of homicide. When I talk about sexual abuse, it is among the indigenous themselves, indigenous men who abuse women, or also outsiders who commit abuse because, as here, it is not different from the reality of other indigenous populations; the Tupinambá territory is not demarcated. So, it is a territory in transit with many interests from trafficking and enterprises. We see an absurd increase in the construction of hotels and luxury condominiums near these communities that are more on the roadside and close to urban centers. But within the villages that are remote and have more difficult access, these situations are more frequent. There is a very high transit of non-indigenous people because there is monoculture within these lands, which are cocoa and piassava. Due to this territorial insecurity, many other insecurities are also questioned, such as housing, food, social, and cultural; so, it’s an interweaving of things when we think about violence in the indigenous population, we can never consider it a single violence because it will be linked to others.
We must respect the self-determination of these populations because, with this, we unlink from the tutelage this indigenous population has been subjected to for many years. What is violence for these people? What is suicide for these people? Is it a cultural practice? Do they understand, have this understanding, that it is a cultural practice? When we looked at these cases through the lens of individuality, we did not put in this lens a counter-hegemonic look, a look of deconstruction and construction of other knowledge. From the beginning, I speak of the importance of this place, this territory for subjective processes for indigenous populations, in which I also state we are constructed in these processes as an individual subject but also as a collective body. I want to say that everything that crosses this territory also crosses me; if this territory is crossed by hindrances, violence, disbelief, attacks, mutilations, and fragmentations, by the death of this territory, of biodiversity, of this collective memory because one of the strategies of coloniality for the colonization of our bodies, as mass production, is the deprivation of our culture. So, today there is also in a way, perhaps, more veiled or not so veiled, an ongoing deprivation of indigenous cultures that also comes from this place of technologies, this place of comparison, and the historical place of construction of indigenous bodies and territories: it has always been a place of pain, loss, so there are also these inter-generational and current conflicts of technologies, where there seems to be an ideal world because my real world is the construction we have and the experience due to all these violence and insecurities, income comes in, food comes in, access to some services and public policies come in.
We need to talk about these accesses, the construction of housing, this environmental racism, this construction that the city is better than the rural area, from this place of investment cities have, that rural areas and traditional communities will not have, all this also produces this symbolic death of the subjects in the territory who do not know if they are indigenous and are influenced to abandon their practices, rituals, and ways of living. There is the influence of churches within indigenous communities, where no other public policy and no type of service arrives. But the church is there and is inviting, giving a social place to that subject, giving function and meaning; why?
If the community is not in regiment and union, it is weakened. Our struggle, our weakening is not just physical; it is spiritual too; if I don’t feed this spiritual mine, this culture of ours with what comes from the land, with the land, I also don’t feed this body that is made up of this territory. We must think about these updates of coloniality and the forms of production of suffering and illness that also come with the advances of these agribusiness policies with neoliberalism and technologies in our territory. They are not responses as fast and immediate as the State has with public policies, as are these other means of access that enter our community.
Based on the statements of Itaynara Tuxá, we highlight this one in particular, which aims to guide us to a subjective horizon about the invention and solutions from clinical practices:
Itaynara Tuxá - I think that we have been building not just this clinic focused on individual care but also other perspectives of the clinic. We need to build ways of relating to this territory. We need to reinvent this care, adapt some aspects of this way of doing things, and understand how powerful these spaces are, including the political spaces we are constructing. Even speaking here, without having had formal training, even without having had direct contact, this is still a political space and can also be an educational space.
Thinking about these strategies that can be built and never isolated constructions is fundamental because in indigenous worlds, the focus is always on collectivity, and the responses to these therapeutic itinerants, clinical issues, and resolutions are within the community. So, this collective listening is often more important than individual listening. There is something in my work about mapping and knowing the territory, understanding the demands and strategies for empowerment because, as I mentioned, the territory will have both its life and death productions, often caused by external factors.
When we think about strategies for empowerment, well-being, and what kind of life the territory has, we discover why the territory is life. I didn’t choose to work only in the Tuxá village; I chose to work with the Tuxá indigenous school, with indigenous school education. Everyone asks: what do the Tuxás have? This comes from struggles and processes of reinvention we need to listen to, without having this physical territory but carrying only this symbolic, affective, body-territory. So, in the impossibility of living without that territory, we begin a struggle for Tuxá women in the 2000s to get the first classroom, the first class. But even before the 2000s, still young and not reaching adulthood, some women left their territories for other states in search of technical education, and today, some of them hold public positions in FUNAI, Public Defender’s Office, Ministry, and have succeeded in FUNAI competitions. [...] So, for us, it is a great achievement, and this is also due to the struggle for the territory since we don’t have the physical territory; this struggle also extends to other spaces and fields.
The issue of suicide, which is almost four times higher among indigenous youth than in all other youth in the country, caught our attention throughout the interviews, both from Chief Valdelice and Itaynara Tuxa. This is the theme of Geana Baniwa’s master’s dissertation, which addresses it based on research about her people but also comprehensively concerning other Brazilian indigenous ethnicities. Other interviewees also addressed it, and it has been the main reason for indigenous populations to be referred to the psychoanalysts in our project.
Geana Baniwa - We have a significant number of suicides in the territories [...] It’s a very high number. And when we stop to look, it happens more in certain locations. We have many in the Upper Rio Negro, in Mato Grosso - Guarani Kaiowá, among the Guararani, the Tikuna - Rio Solimões. It seems that there are specific locations. And why these regions? I studied the issue of suicide in the São Gabriel da Cachoeira region in the Upper Rio Negro, investigating the causes and how it happens. But why only there in Mato Grosso? Why in the Upper Solimões? Are they border regions where lands are not demarcated? Is it where there is a lot of contact with the Western world? These discussions deserve to be broader. There are already many studies addressing these issues more thoroughly, involving causes such as alcoholism, weakened family relationships, Western contact, mental disorders, and numerous other factors that are dissected to explain the issue of suicide.
But we do not understand in a general, global way for that region. We have to broaden our view to better understand the issue of suicide. From what I observe, the issue of alcohol consumption is closely linked among the Guarani Kaiowá and the Kuna as well. Many authors say that alcoholism cannot be directly attributed as the sole factor because there are various factors. There are cultural, social, economic, and historical factors. We know there was an initial conflict with the entry of colonizers where genocide occurred. And this is also one of the risk factors for suicide. There is a history of violence and destruction that somehow continues to this day. We know that the violence that occurred there at the first contact with colonizers persists to this day. In fact, it has been changing, and to this day, there are numerous outbreaks of violence that indigenous peoples suffer, contributing to such a high incidence of suicide.
Cacique Payayá - I would really like to say that everything is peaceful, but it’s not. We inherited something chaotic. Our relatives were happy. This thing about going to the city... almost all of them returned with heavy problems. And today, what we notice is that we have to live with this. Our elders, for example, are all here, disabled, with serious problems, with dementia problems. The young people returned with drug and alcohol problems. Some girls returned with unwanted pregnancies. On the other hand, we received a small group that welcomed these people, and we have been giving them support. My wife, sister-in-law, daughter, and I are having very serious problems with this. The elders here are all my age. We were children together. And today, they are demented. We have a very good house here to welcome our elders. Everything we have here was with help. I feel sorry for not being able to do more. I do more or less today the role of our last chief. He died helping people. And I seek that path. Indigenous ancestry was built like this. And what I preach here is this: if you have this relationship with others, this supporting arm, this breath, and if you don’t feel the smell of the other’s neck, you are not doing well. [...] Then comes my brother who works with herbs, with roots. And my sister also works with herbs. This issue has helped us a lot because each person who has followed their path and their guidance has improved a lot. The spiritual aspect and, for example, our mental health, we believe they are very connected to our spirituality and our worldview. In my book ‘Phenomenal,’ I tried to show you, white people, the phenomena of nature as a living thing, and in being alive, it can be understood and achieved by us.
Beyond psychic suffering and the theme of suicide, there were also other ways to respond to the question “What do psychoanalysts learn from indigenous peoples?” based on issues related to dreams and temporality. This presents the cosmogonies of each people from the perspective of the interviewees. Therefore, these statements, even though they are from individuals, do not reduce the experience of an entire people. Hence, we present the following statements that reveal these cosmogonies about dreams and temporality:
Interviewers - Tell us a little about dreams: what is their role in the processes of subjectivation in your community or the one you work with or have joined?
Itaynara Tuxá - When you talk about dreams, for example, it’s much more for us to think about all these constructions mediated by the territory. Because if we think about the dream for my population, it’s not just a manifestation of the unconscious or things that are conflicting or simmering psychologically. It’s important to say that the construction of dreams, the concept of dreams, is a construct of the Western world. So, possibly, if you are in dialogue with an indigenous person and you ask about dreams, they will say, “Yes, we dream” but it’s not the type of dream that might have a different meaning for us, which we might not label as a dream, as if it were something from the realm of ideas, imagination, as if it were not real. We have this collective construction that a dream is not a utopia or a construction of the imaginary. For indigenous populations, and I’ll speak from the perspective of a Tuxá indigenous woman thinking about this relationship with the territory, which implies this spirituality; if we think about this indigenous spirituality in this territory, the dream questions: “What indigenous bodies are these?” Because it often comes from a place of wisdom, guidance, and mediation with our enchanted beings, with integrity, with Mother Nature. Sometimes, this dream is about plants, which plants we will use for that care, from that cabocla, which is from the language of the ancients and the elders of my people; they still bring a lot of colonial residue in their language, but in many moments, I even reinforce it as a political question of what this “Pretuguese” would be.
They say that, in our language, in our knowledge, this dream would be connected to a question of producing Tuxá wisdom and guidance when the cabocla needs to take some baths, you go to the person who has the knowledge and say, “Look, I feel heavy, and it seems like my body is overloaded.” Often, these indigenous individuals don’t need to go and tell that person because they will have received the guidance and what they call a message; many of these processes are in the realm of the hidden, of secrecy. Many of these dreams cannot be verbalized because these bodies we call “devices” often don’t have permission to speak. This has to do with what we call the regiment of our science. The more dedicated we are to the regiment of Tuxá science, the more knowledgeable we will be, the more guidance we will have, and the more knowledge of the cosmos we will have. I’m not just talking about plants, but the knowledge of the rivers, just as our ancestors knew everything about the rivers, dreamed about the water mother, with guidance, saying where to fish to catch more fish, with our patron saint, who is Saint John the Baptist but for my people is the old [Kaneném], who is the owner of the Center. The owner of our science, compadre [Soá] as well. When we talk about dreams, we talk about many issues that traverse this place of territory, sacredness, and science. The science that produces our knowledge. [...] Today, after so many changes and the more limited the possibilities of our territory become, some of our care processes will be more limited because the dream is also in this care process; thinking about this dreaming body, who is this body? What is the role of this body for the community? I was reading some theses, thinking about writing about my people and these impasses of ethical-political suffering, the Tuxá people, and I came across a thesis that recounts a cabocla, in my great-grandparents’ time, who was a very resolved cabocla. In that passage, he also talked about some plants, fish, and the biodiversity of that territory that was flooded and the strength because there were also the ancestral cemeteries of our elders. This flooding caused a reduction of that knowledge, the territory because it’s another reality; thinking about this other reality, including the generations of the elders, who had all this deep, wide memory of that territory, was lost because our elders are also enchanting, ancestralizing. The knowledge of this new territory, the new generation, will be different. The care strategies for dreams will also be different, and the intensity and frequency of these dreams will also be different. It is very common for me to hear from this collective memory that we had more knowledge in the past, we had a much larger care network, and today, there is fragility. We need to think about these current strategies that we, as subjects of our time, have invented. I think it is no longer possible for us to think only about this knowledge and these dreams centralized in older bodies because our elders are leaving. There needs to be an adaptation in this culture. We need to think about these current strategies we invented as subjects of our time. We can no longer only think about this knowledge and these dreams centered on older bodies because our elders have been leaving. There needs to be an adaptation in this culture. We need to think about the specificities. They have always existed, even with many collective rituals, as they tell from the past of this territory, but have always also been micro-places of care, in which each family also had its own place to take care of the family that was not that larger care like that of the community. [...] For example, in my little room, which we call this sacred place of care, where not only dreams will enter but also baths and other guidance. My brother takes on this role today, including when I need guidance, baths, and collective care within the family. I’m talking about a boy, a young man of 23/24 years, who initiated himself very early into this calling because it is a calling and often comes as a dream. This social place we will occupy, thinking about the process of spirituality, often comes through, revealed in this dream. But we know it’s not a dream but an ancestral communication. There are many other young people like my brother occupying places in the traditional Tuxá knowledge. We also need to think about these places. After all, it is the cycle. Our elders are rising, becoming ancestors, and our younger ones are arriving because they need to arrive so we can govern. [...]
Geana Baniwa - Regarding dreams. We have many explanations about it. For example, if I dream a very intriguing dream, like dreaming that I was bitten by a snake. And when I share this with other relatives at breakfast, they would say to be careful because something may happen. The elders have explanations for almost all dreams. Some are very connected to spirituality. In fact, they can show us if we will get sick, for example, when we dream that we are very happy or that we lost a tooth. Or when we dream that we are traveling. The elders will say it’s dangerous because it’s a sign of death. Usually, most of the dreams we take to the elders or the wiser ones, and they always say that something will happen, and it often does. And I don’t know the origin of these explanations. In fact, depending on the dream, we don’t even leave the house. In the community, when we have a not-so-good dream, waking up with a very suffocating or distressing feeling, we don’t go to the fields, fishing, and stay home. Because it’s certain that when I have this type of dream and still go out, something happens; that’s why the wiser elders advise because the chance of something happening to the person is about 99%. [...] In indigenous territory, we pay a lot of attention to dreams. Because we know that when the dream is bad, for example, when it’s pulling teeth, fishing, or pulling cassava, we know that it has meaning, and it can be either bad or good. In the urban context, many no longer bring this; many things are valued in the territory, but in the urban context, it’s different. There’s a big difference between the two.
Dilmar Puri - For my people, dreams are also very important because, in reality, I have researched a lot about indigenous societies and peoples. To this day, I have not found a people where dreams are not important. This has a connection with psychoanalysis because Freud had a significant insight in his work. Concerning my people, we usually share our dreams, but they are often, for example, crazy dreams, full of things falling, emerging, disappearing, monsters or fairies, or whatever. I have to tell you, whether it’s clear or not, because even if it doesn’t make sense to me, you will have the key that will open that puzzle, and it can be a warning from the ancestors that something good or bad is going to happen in your life. Regarding dreams, we have these customs, not necessarily sharing them with the elders or having a public discussion as with other peoples but dreams as a spiritual, dreamlike thing, a contact with ancestry, with those who have passed but continue to work in spirit to help us because, in our view, there is a spiritual war greater than the material war. So, the ancestors, who have been enchanted, are waging a spiritual war in favor of our people and also for allied people. [...] Now I will talk about dreams in general. I think the best definition of dreams in the general sense of indigenous peoples is the one given by Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami, in his book. He said that the dream is the school of the indigenous , it’s in his book with Bruce Albert. When an indigenous wants to learn something, he sleeps, sometimes takes something to sleep, not a Rivotril, but a snuff, ancestral things that get much better, then he will dream and there he will have contact with his ancestors, and he will learn about what he needs to know to solve some things, a certain path to solve some area.
Cacique Payayá - This thing about our ancestry is still being built because this process of the Bible, of the priest, of the pastor, almost destroyed everything. So, it became very much about the connection of being with God, the soul, and the spirit. But there’s a problem. Kopenawa ends up reinforcing in us the belief that nothing dies, our spirit. What dies, in reality, is the body. If you don’t have a body, you imagine you don’t live. But when you think about ancestry, you think of a person who doesn’t have a body, a being without a body. But you don’t think, for example, of a being without life. The ancestor is that past time. We think the word time is not yet well-defined because time can be exactly that ancestor. Time can be both a passage and an element. And imagine that you have a grandfather, a grandmother. Imagine that your grandmother was contaminated with the semen of an Indian killer with blood-stained hands. Imagine that we are also the result of that. My ancestry only goes that far. She was abandoned. Because if you imagine that the death of ours means abandonment, we stop believing that life has a purpose. So, as we believe life has a purpose, we don’t learn to live with the ‘will’ to preserve the lives of others. The purpose of life would be to live better and for some time and then withdraw. This issue is fundamental. If you have a person whose physique was destroyed, and she preserved her soul to the point of giving life. And this life today recognizes that past, that existence. Probably, that person who ceased to exist has some relation in their time with some of us here. The most I can say is that we can call it a place. We believe that this place is on earth. We don’t believe that we will leave here and go to a certain place. We believe that there is a space, a place on earth, where our ancestors preserve a different life there and may be waiting for us to arrive one day. It’s complicated. It was more or less like this that we heard from our pajés (shamans). [...]
Interviewers - How do your people deal with temporality, given that we have noticed that time for traditional peoples is different from Western tradition?
Geana Baniwa - We are based on the knowledge and wisdom of our ancestors. What we have learned is what our parents learned from our grandparents. Each people, each region, and each ethnicity will interpret time in their own way, according to their history and worldview. For the Baniwa, the question of time is inherent in the lives of our ancestors. The lives of our ancestors were guided by all the knowledge from the elders. To this day, much has been lost. Even due to the lack of transmission of this knowledge, and lack of interest in continuing all these ways of knowing. And when we talk, as Aílton brings up, that the future is ancestral, it’s because we see ourselves as very lost and confused when we see that much of our life and knowledge is, in some way, blending with Western society, this issue of climate change, and everything that is happening. We are warning scientists that this will happen. And we, as indigenous people, think in various ways. I remember my grandparents already talking about this time we are living in. They said that, in the future, we would see things that would leave us frightened. They talked a lot about diseases and how people lost a bit of the sense of reality of the world we live in. [...] In terms of the issue of time, in some way, it became interconnected with the influence of the Western world, and many have lost their conception of their ancestors. We, Baniwa, believe that the time we live in today is a consequence of what we did before and now, as some scientists themselves say.
Dimar Puri - Some students from Unirio (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State) questioned how the indigenous people could take a poisonous seed, domesticate it, and turn it into an edible seed. We explained to them that this is a millennial work, from generation to generation, that the indigenous person doesn’t mind starting a task now and not finishing it in life; they rely on the next generations, they count on coming back as well, even if not as matter, their spirituality works too. Anyway, it’s a relationship of temporality. This colonial world we live in, we want everything for today, for now, so “little flour, my porridge first,” death for us has another meaning. [...] This phrase from Krenak that the future is ancestral is about us wanting, as indigenous people, to rebuild our society as it was 500 years ago. So, we are not talking about the past; we are talking about the future. Some philosophers, Europeans included, like the concept of eternal return, have a whole discussion about whether it is an eternal return of the same or an eternal return of the different. Because the world is straightforward, humans complicate things. Marx talks in the text of philosophical anthropology, where talks about how man is a creator of needs. So, he creates more and more needs. In the past, life was simpler and so much happier in the relationship with things that were so important. But with each generation and each mode of production, man created other needs. This world is very crazy because the worldview is still linear; you mentioned Cartesianism because Descartes was one of the main creators of the so-called modern philosophy. Our way of thinking is still very modern and backward; it is 500 years old. [...] It’s a very Cartesian world in terms of temporality; time is not linear but circular. After the great navigations, after they knew indigenous peoples and the whole world, they developed this modern concept of the earth as a ball. It is a circle; it is our geometric figure, if we can say so, more sacred, which is the sacred indigenous circle, the wheel, it is round. Our worldviews have always been circular; they have never stopped being. When you go forward, in reality, you are also going backward because it’s a circle. We don’t make a circular movement; we don’t draw, don´t dance, going back to the question of the body. You can’t dance through the land or do nomadism, something that is talked about a lot in science. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and the shortest path between A and B is a straight line. This is pure geometry; geometry does not exist in the earth, and it does not exist in matter; it is just a spiritual concept. You can never go in a straight line from one place to another. If you see a tree in the way, you can’t knock down the tree or a mountain. This is a spiritual question of this science, of this colonialist philosophy, of putting everything on a ruler. The world created several superfluous needs, and there will come a time when these things will be, as they said, denying the denial. All these denials of nature will be denied one by one; they will be conjured, and things will return to normal. Isn’t it normal that you said there is no total healing? Wouldn’t that be the end of history? But at least they will return to a healthier axis, and not by choice; no one thinks by choice, but there is something that pushes you out of necessity. You think out of necessity. Tragedy will make the human being think of a way to return to the axis, or they will be decimated. Things are already way out of the axis; they have gone too far and haven’t made the turn, are outside the worldview, outside cosmology, and haven’t made the turn [metaphor for the turn].
Cacique Payayá - Time. To think about time, we need to leave this notion of the body. The body you want to be your body, but time proves that the body is not yours. Each moment, the body is a being, an entity. By imagining it in this way, I think you can contemplate time. When you look at this thing of the past and the present, the way our indigenous intellectuals defend it, I can only think of time if I think very remotely. When talking about desire and wanting, I have to add a third [word]. I can only understand the desire and wanting with will. If you don’t include will in desire and wanting, it becomes only a thing of the present time. But when you talk about will, you retrogress. There are two wills. One is the immediate one of the body. And the other is a superior will that we indigenous people usually call Temimotara. It would be an element of such superiority that it is greater than time. It is undoubtedly an element capable of producing the collective. And without it, you can produce the individual but not the collective without the ‘will.’ So, when we retrogress some time ago, there was a time when time did not exist. There was a time when there was a ‘will’ for time to exist. So, if these two things clash, they clash head-on. If time did not exist and there is a will for time to exist, there is someone with that ‘will,’ who had the Temimotara. And then, let’s think of a great spirit, a brain. A super-initial nucleus that evolves and redeems itself, it self-produces. So, by self-producing, it is capable of becoming a giant because it builds itself, but in this case, it is still not collective. It is individual. Until its ‘will’ not to be just itself makes it possible for it to become individual or collective. In my imagination, as an indigenous person, this initial vector was able to multiply and replicate. And its multiplication may have given rise to everything that exists, the universe. And people, for me, confuse it a lot. Because people limit it to a being that says, “Let there be light.” And then, there was light. Rationally, it didn’t happen that way. Because if you say, ‘Let there be light,” and there was light, and the spirit of this powerful being hovered over the waters, then there was already water. If it hovered over the land, then there was already land. If it made a clay ox and blew, then the raw material already existed. When you think about time, either you think about it in the past, and now we are here discussing it in the present, or you think like Krenak and Kopenawa, who say that the future does not exist. There is an element called will that is above everything and above time. Because if we view time as an element, a being, then the time has ‘will,’ has Temimotara. And if you imagine the individual as an individual, it can also have the will to be collective. But being collective only with its fellow beings, time being collective with its own time, or time can be collective with other elements like space. But they need to be in harmony, and this is also called Temimotara. Let’s then descend to the level of the present, the level of transformation. There was a will to create the river and transform this whole process of life. Life is a process. And without the river, perhaps it wouldn’t exist. When you think like this, you end up realizing that what we are doing today, which we call ‘transformation’ vs. consumerism, is that we are destroying through a process that is production and destruction. Because we destroy and do not rebuild, and then comes the issue of consumerism. It is something of a very vulgar spirit of human beings that we have not been able to overcome or think about overcoming yet.
Here, we present an account of indigenous Thaiany Santos Araújo of the Guajajara people, going through an analytical process and conveying how she uses analytical experience by combining the knowledge of her people and diverse traditions sustained in the Maraca’nà village.
Interviewers - With all the attacks the Brazilian population has faced during the Bolsonaro government, considering the advancement of neoliberalism, necropolitics, and the destruction of biomes and forests, on the other hand, we have witnessed the indigenous peoples’ struggle for demarcation and land recovery to the point where we now have the first indigenous woman who assumed a ministry. What do you think about this?
Thaiany Araújo - Well, the others must learn to listen, especially to indigenous leaders; the Western world is so focused on speaking, on imposing. Learning to listen to indigenous knowledge is the first thing to do. Through listening, through sensitivity, learning to listen to others to improve our relationships, to have more sensitivity. I think the ethnicities want to convey a message, and people don’t want to listen. So, the way indigenous people deal with the land is so significant. Why can’t the white person learn that? Why do I always have to commodify instead of exchanging? Here, we are exchanging ideas, information, affection, and a gaze. That is an exchange; it’s learning to deal with nature. The best thing is observation. When you start observing natural processes, you kind of channel, internalize, and understand that the land is a living being that speaks to us all the time. I’m developing this sensitivity to listen to the land, to my ancestors who talk to me all the time...
Interviewer - And what do they say?
Thaiany Araújo - Oh, various things; it’s more in the realm of perception. I have noticed many things and learned to take care, take care of myself, take care of others, and take care of nature since we are here for that, you know, in brotherhood. It’s an exchange; we are constantly exchanging. Wisdom is about not withholding information but passing it on when the other is also willing to understand.
Interviewer - It’s no use speaking without someone to listen, right? The fact is that the psychoanalyst is the one who listens. We seek to listen to something beyond reason. So, in this sense, it’s interesting to be able to hear you because you have undergone analysis; you undergo a treatment through words, right? Can we suppose, for example, that the unconscious can be worked on among indigenous peoples?
Thaiany Araújo - My experience with psychoanalysis has been interesting because it’s about my blossoming, about my self-perception; I am becoming aware of myself. There’s a quote from Maria Sabino that resonates with what you said about healing through speech - when your speech is a song, and your walk is a dance, you are healed (...) It’s how we manage to heal, you know? In a gentler, calmer, subtler way, having this seriousness because indigenous peoples are not afraid of death, life continues. So, for us, we are all this - the mountains, the trees, the earth, the leaves - we are all this. Thus, for the indigenous person, life on earth is an experience, and taking care of it is an experience for me, to experience this. I am self-discovering, getting to know myself. I am very proud to be indigenous. So, especially my father was an incredible person, an incredible being. He, Guajajara, raised and educated me and is in connection with me all the time, this contact we have with our ancestors. Why in Mexico do they not mourn death but celebrate it? Because they taught us that we have to mourn our dead. Why did they teach us that? Why did the Western world teach us to be sad about our dead? While life is fleeting, it continues in another realm, another place, another extension of the cycle. It’s this dance; life is a cycle, death is a cycle, it’s a dance. So, psychology needs to learn to have this ear only for those who want to learn.
Interviewers - What can psychoanalysts learn from indigenous peoples?
Thaiany Araújo - Indigenous peoples are very light; I think it’s this lightness that we must have in life. You see, indigenous peoples are laughing all the time, playing all the time, living lightly, laughing, playing. The human essence is that; it’s pure, it’s lightness. Like we have our shadow aspects, I think we need to understand this aspect and understand our shadow to know; it’s the Tao as well, an Eastern philosophy seeking a balance between light and shadow. Not everything is light, and not everything is shadow; there’s a point of darkness in light and a point of light in darkness in the shadow. For example, here in the Village, it’s a university, a pluriversity.
Interviewer - How is that?
Thaiany Araújo - A pluriversity is where everyone is a teacher, and everyone is a student. It’s an exchange, a conversation, an experience, living. I have a big question because, you know, Western society imposes that I must work in the way they dictate. And what do I want to do? So, there’s this duality between the other and ourselves; we are collective beings (...)
Interviewer - You asked us about the unconscious, right, to talk a little about it, but I think you’re already talking about it (...). Did you know from a young age what your people were?
Thaiany Araújo - From a young age, my father, my uncles… I am the niece of the chief, Potira; I have this pulsating thing inside me. The importance of the Maraka’nà Village for me: this space has an exceptional way for us to have a place that welcomes various peoples, you, him, indigenous and non-indigenous people. So, it’s a place, the epicenter of great spirituality.
Interviewer 1 - In the middle of a city like Rio de Janeiro, so unequal, highly violent, with so much poverty, we have people of various races, and here in this urban village, many people gathered in one place…
Interviewer 2 - Remembering that we are on sacred ground here...
Interviewer 1 - This story is interesting because here is a space that was demarcated and not recognized as such, but that was effectively used, and as you just said sacred ground.
Interviewer 2 - It was already a traditional use... The indigenous people didn’t live here; they lived on the coast, but they came here to bury their dead.
Interviewer 1 - As Guajajara, can you maintain contact with members and relatives in other regions of the country and coordinate national political efforts, or is it challenging? How is this done?
Thaiany Araújo - In politics, we are more autonomous here (...)
Interviewer - Would you like to add anything about how your psychoanalytic process has been?
Thaiany Araújo - So, I am self-discovering; it’s a self-discovery, you know? It’s interesting because I am discovering myself and discovering others as well. This fascination with the other and indigenous people had a lot of that. Lucas, a great relative, said that the indigenous are curious about each other. Davi Kopenawa talks about it; indigenous people are curious about the other because it is you, you know, your essence.
Finally, we conclude our compilation of fragments from interviews, reports, and conversations with members of various indigenous peoples, with the conclusion of the conversation with SESAI-BA nurse Rebeca Antunes Nascimento. As a professional in Indigenous Health within the territory and responsible for the care of many Tupinambá villages, she voices the demand for interdisciplinary teams that refer us to indigenous individuals who are in intense suffering and have received assistance from students and professionals in the psychoanalytic occupation project with supervision, both at UFRJ and UFRB. Guided by psychoanalysis in search of decolonial and anti-racist ethics, we sought to address the issues of indigenous peoples and highlight public Mental Health policies focused on traditional peoples and their specificity.
Interviewer - What have you heard about the Mental Health of Tupinambá villages under your responsibility at SESAI during these eleven years of work?
Rebeca Antunes - The indigenous population has three times the highest number of suicide attempts, especially among young people. It passes through multiple causes, cultural issues, the struggle for territory demarcation, and recognition. If we observe and read about the history of the Tupinambá people, there is an erasure of this population, and this will only ease when they achieve the demarcation of the land that is in Congress to be voted on. There is a historical erasure of their existence.
Health begins the moment we have a territory with security, where you own it, live there, and don’t need to fight to survive to be there. For these people, it is assumed from the beginning that you need to suffer to be recognized. Mental suffering cases in this region were notified from around 2018. But we only managed to have these data more closely from mobilization and coordination with some agencies, the Psychosocial Health Care Network service of the municipality along with the local health council, leaders, coordination, and Health Department so we could give more visibility to this issue of mental illness within the indigenous territory. I realize that mental health care starts from within the communities; they have resources as a form of care. These are other resources than the welfare physician. Some communities, for example, with no active leadership, no cultural activities, and no regular meetings of elders or traditional caregivers, are worse off than those that do. We perceive that when these rituals and events happen within the communities, the promotion of well-being seems to treat psychic pain. It is essential to bring to the discussion the importance of other care methods, strengthening traditional means such as those that occur weekly within the villages, as a way of spiritual strengthening and building bonds between members of that ethnicity.
Rebeca Antunes - In 2018, we started to do some qualified listening approaches; we received the first indigenous psychologist a little later to think about our performance as a multidisciplinary team. We realized that there was already suffering for several decades. Some cases of adolescents began to appear that we needed to report. From then on, this intensified and gained visibility until Mental Health problems appeared. This work marked the beginning of the Mental Health technical area because, before that, there was no professional psychology. We had no resources or means to refer a demand. We started to set up some Well-Being groups within the communities. We mobilized all instances. Initially, there were only professionals with generalist training; there was no specific person responsible for the Mental Health program. The psychologist did not come to address individual demands, and that’s why establishing partnerships, like this one with you from Ocupação Psicanalítica, is fundamental for this population.
Interviewer - If possible, tell us a little about the suicide situations among young people that you have been following.
Rebeca Antunes - We lost a 20-year-old life, a young adult; this was not the first case, but the first reported within the territory since I started working. The impact was significant because we had been following up on this patient for a long time, and she did not indicate that she would do it that day. Last year, we had the suicide of a child, another case that was not supposed to happen because every life is precious. We need to hear what health, disease, and suffering mean to them.
Interviewer - Listening to you, other nurses, as well as psychologists, physicians, pharmacists, and other professionals in the team, we have the impression that this suicide issue is almost epidemic. We heard about an “aunt” who tried suicide, then the sister followed, the mother also tried, and then the little child is already simulating hanging. It seems almost commonplace and every day, something that can be resorted to when anguish appears. What do you think can be done in the face of this very serious situation?
Rebeca Antunes - The way to curb this is to bring it to the media and the competent authorities about the importance of looking at these communities. We need a lot of support from the competent authorities such as the Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Environment, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Justice - everyone needs to be involved so that we can see the forms of illness in these communities. We face a barrier, which is the issue of the Psychosocial Care Network in the region, completely inoperative, especially concerning the Psychosocial Care Centers (CAPS). The CAPS has not been meeting the assistance demands we have requested; we know that the indigenous population has a different context and needs to be assisted within the territory, not outside it.
Interviewer - How have you, as professionals from SESAI, dealt with the subjective suffering that comes to you without support from the network?
Rebeca Antunes - Together with the Indigenous Health Support team, we encourage and accompany each village to perform its rituals, cultural manifestations, and healing traditions, which have enormous importance to facing suffering and sustaining the ways of living well for the Tupinambá people. Often, tradition is lost due to the entry of Western culture, outsiders’ religious influences, invasions, and even the influence of the city, especially on the younger ones through the internet.
After various analyses and reports of Rebeca’s experience, which unfortunately cannot all be included here, the nurse concludes the interview by talking about the importance of having listening projects like ours. SESAI psychologists do not provide individual clinical care, as there are very few, and there is no suitable place for it. In addition, the territory is vast, and the villages are mostly located in areas with limited accessibility. Psychology among the Tupinambá villages works with the multidisciplinary team, thinking about collective interventions, encouraging the cultural organization of each village, helping deal with more acute situations, coordinating with the Psychosocial Care Network, the school, and leadership, and making referrals. Rebeca highlighted the space for case discussions, supervision, and listening to those who accept and trust in this new place that is opening up in the meeting between the Tupinambás and Ocupação Psicanalítica, as a perspective opened by Itaynara Tuxá, the indigenous psychologist who is gradually building this mediation that is growing and taking shape, but not without many complexities. One of them is the lack of space for face-to-face appointments in the territory, and for now, it only involves online modalities. With the support of a parliamentary amendment from Deputy Áurea Carolina, in partnership with UFMG (which manages the funds for the Ocupação Psicanalítica collective nationwide), we obtained resources for the teams to be present in the territory, not for weekly appointments but for more specific interventions involving health teams, leadership, the Mental Health network itself, and for conducting collective activities with the population.
REFERÊNCIAS
- GUAJAJARA, Potira et al (orgs.). Em nossas artérias nossas raízes Rio de Janeiro; Aldeia Marakà’nà: Cesac; I-motirõ, 2023.
- KOPENAWA, Davi; ALBERT, Bruce. A queda do céu: palavras de um xamã yanomami. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2010.
- PAYAYÁ, Cacique Juvenal; PAYAYÁ, Edilene. Fenomenal ou vento em fúria: história da cabeceira do primeiro. 2022.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
18 Mar 2024 -
Date of issue
2024
History
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Received
01 Nov 2023 -
Accepted
30 Nov 2023
