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and other South American countries (Carneiro da Cunha 1998, Viveiros de Castro
1987, Wright and Hill 1992).
The contradiction between Indigenous forms of land appropriation and juristic
property assessment is central to the litigations involving land tenure in Brazil today
(Lea 1997a,b; see also Ferreira 1999f). Here, I examine the knowledge and the
language that both shape and express jurisprudence in recent court cases at the turn of
the millennium. Anthropologists have been able to mediate between the knowledges
and languages used in such world-making processes, showing that while Indigenous
Peoples' cosmologies are intrinsically tied to a profound knowledge of the world
experienced, the non-Indigenous juridical discourse has no bearings on everyday
liberation practices. Non-Indigenous discourses expressed in court cases are fertile
grounds for the breeding of false allegations, corrupted statements, and falsified
evidence (Ferreira 2004; Peter 1987, cited in Lea 1997a:193-197).
As a judicial expert for the main court case considered in this chapter (
Hélio Salvador
Russo X FUNAI and Kuiussi Suyá
), I was able to prove, with documented evidence,
that Mr. Russo and other local landowners deliberately faked signatures; altered or
erased dates on various documents; forged evidence of land occupancy; distorted
property boundaries, and changed names of rivers on official maps; overestimated
and invented improvements erected on the disputed lands; and openly corrupted state
officials in order to be “compensated” for the alleged investments they had made on
“farmlands” - in this particular case, the Wawi Indigenous Land, which was named by
and has belonged to the Suyá people since time immemorial (Ferreira 1999f).
Figure 2.4. Kuiussi Suyá piloting his motorboat with his son on the Xingu River, 1999.
