WHEN - Mapping Time, Space and the Body - page 51

creations of the people within whose culture they are found” (2002:156). Here's
Arturi Kayabi:

I've learned that there are different ways of making mathematics. When I go
to Bang-Bang, Brasília, or São Paulo, I know I have to think the way you guys
do. So then when I spend my money, give it to somebody else, I know I am not
going to get it back. So I use a minus. When, on the other hand, I am figuring
out how many macaw feathers I should give my father-in-law I don't think the
same way. Sometimes, however, I think both ways. So I've learned that there
are different ways of expressing mathematics, different ways of working with
numbers [June 1990].

FINAL THOUGHTS: MAP-MAKING AS A TOOL FOR LIBERATION

Solutions to the many problems posed in this chapter were resolved by working on
issues that proved and secured land rights for Indigenous Peoples in Central-Brazil,
and elsewhere. As shown in the following chapters, map-making activities empower
Indigenous Peoples to take control not only of their lands, but also of their social
and emotional well-being. The 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples (UNDRIP) takes these basic ideas into consideration when it states, in its
opening remarks, that the United Nations is:

Convinced that control by indigenous peoples over developments affecting
them and their lands, territories, and resources will enable them to maintain
and strengthen their institutions, cultures, and traditions, and to promote their
development in accordance with their aspirations and needs. 23

Indigenous leaders and writers, human rights activists and scholars insist that map-
making requires a shift to local realities that marks a movement away from Western
theories of space, time, and the body. Map-making allows for all of us to understand
our place in the world and in the universe; it is a pathway to the realization of the
dream we share of inner peace and solidarity with other peoples, species, and with
nature as a whole. Mapping Time, Space and the Body is a tool for the liberation of
Indigenous Peoples worldwide because it recognizes that “respect for Indigenous
knowledge, cultures, and traditional practices contributes to sustainable and equitable
development and proper management of the environment” (UN DRIP 2007).

NOTES

1

This Chapter was originally published in 1997 in the journal A merican Ethnologist 24(1): 132-147. It
has been updated for this volume. All photos by Mariana Leal Ferreira, unless otherwise noted.

The cruzeiro , the monetary unit of Brazil at the time, was replaced by the real in July 1994.

2

3

Funai expeditions to contact “isolated” Indians are still called pacification fronts. The image of
pacification derives both from the fact that Portuguese colonizers called Indians “beasts” and “pagans”
(i.e., creatures needing pacification [Perrone-Moisés 1992]) and from the natives' resistance to such