Foto: Ripper/Imagens da Terra, 1994

Guarani Kaiowá

  • Outros nomes
    Pai-Tavyterã, Tembekuára
  • Where they are
    Mato Grosso do Sul, Paraguai
  • How many
    31.000 (CTI, 2008)
    13.000 (CTI, 2008)
  • Família linguística
    Tupi-Guarani

Localition and Tekoha

Inhabiting the southern region of Mato Grosso do Sul, the Kaiowa villages are distributed over an area that extends to the Apa, Dourados and Ivinhema rivers, to the north, going in a southerly direction, to the Mbarakaju mountains and the tributaries of the Jejui River, in Paraguay, covering approximately 100 kilometeres in its east-west extension, and also about 100 kilometers on both sides of the Amambaí mountain range(which defines the Paraguay-Brazil border), including all the tributaries of the Apa, Dourados, Ivinhema, Amambai rivers and the left bank of the Iguatemi River, which forms the southern border of the Kaiowa territory and the northern border of the Ñandeva territory, besides the Aquidabán (Mberyvo), Ypane, Arroyo, Guasu, Aguaray and Itanarã rivers on the Paraguayan side, covering nearly 40 thousand Km2. The Kaiowa territory to the north borders on Terena land, and to the east and south with the Mbya Guarani and with the Ñandeva Guarani (see. Meliá, 1986: 218). Several Kaiowa families also presently live in villages near the Mbya on the coast of Espírito Santo and Rio de Janeiro.

Present-day Ñandeva territory takes up part of the states of Mato Grosso do Sul and Paraná, extending also into eastern Paraguay. Ñandeva migrations from the beginning of the 20th Century coming from Paraguay crystallized settlements in the state of São Paulo, both in the interior of the state and along the coast, as well as in Santa Catarina, in the interior of Paraná and of Rio Grande do Sul. In Paraguay, they concentrated in the region covering between the Jejui Guasu, Corrientes and Acaray rivers, their neighbors to the south being the mbya , to the north, the paï-kaiowa and to the east, the Aché. The present-day territory of the Ñandeva includes the Jejui Guasu, Corrientes and Acaray rivers, in Paraguay, and, in Brazil, the Iguatemi River and its tributaries, although they are also found in the regions near the juncture of the Iguatemi and the Paraná. Bartolomé (1977) speaks of an “historical habitat" located to the south of the Jejui Guasu, along the upper Paraná and to the south of the Iguasu. There are also Ñandeva settlements in the interior of the states of Paraná and São Paulo, and on the coast of São Paulo.

Tekoha: Guarani territoriality

The Guarani today call the places they inhabit tekoha. Tekoha is thus the physical place – land, forest, field, waters, animals, plants, remedies, etc. – where the teko, or “way of being”, the Guarani state of life, is realized. It encompasses social relations of macro-familial groups who live in and are related in a specific physical space. Ideally this space should include the ka’aguy (forest), a values element of great importance in the lives of these Indians as a source for gathering of foods, raw material for building houses, production of utensils, firewood, remedies etc. The ka’aguy is also an important element in the construction of cosmology, being the scene for mythological narratives and the dwelling of numerous spirits. Areas for planting family or collective gardens and the construction of their dwellings and places for religious activities are indispensable in Guarani space.

It must be a place that has the physical (geographical and ecological) and strategic conditions that allow them to create a territorial-religious-political unit on the basis of relations among extended families. Ideally a tekoha, within its limits, should be an area where there is population equilibrium, that offers a good water supply, and cultivable lands for the planting of gardens, areas for the building of houses and the raising of animals. It should contain, above all, forests (ka'aguy) and all of the ecossystem that it represents, such as game animals, rivers good for fishing, raw material for houses and artifacts, fruits for gathering, medicinal plants, etc.

It is necessary to take into account the historical conditions in which the Indians construct their categories, including that of the tekoha. The situation of the different subgroups in the last 40 years in relation to the land demonstrates the need for negotiation of spaces to be demarcated. The lands, though legalized, are reduced in size which is the result of the difficulties of overcoming obstacles created by the non-indigenous society. In comparison with the territories occupied in the past, one can verify a drastic reduction in relation to the very social morphology of the group, with scarce lands and distortions in available family/space relation. In the constitution of a tekoha and in its native conceptualization, the historical factors or neocolonial intervention have been fundamental, for they have interrupted the territorial continuity which the Indians were used to.

The historical situation imposed by contact are typical of the relations between Indians and Whites from the first decades of the 20th Century on, when the State made efforts to territorialize the Indians (Oliveira 1998), confining them to fixed spaces with fixed boundaries. The Brazilian state’s imposition of rules for access and territorial possession, foreign to the specificities of territoriality of the Indians, had important consequences for Guarani spatial organization, their cultural elaborations and on the management of policies of interethnic relations. According to Oliveira, among the most significant factors resulting from territorialization, are the establishment among the Indians of permanent formal roles of mediating with the State and the re-elaboration of the memory of the past.

In the specific case of the Guarani, the plan to settle them led to the formation of control mechanisms and exercises of power that exacerbated the importance of the mburuvixa as political leaders, over which the role of “capitão”[captain] was superimposed, an authority recognized by the tutelary agency [the SPI and FUNAI] as mediator between the indigenous community and the State. With these changes, the extended families of a certain territorial space, while maintaining the same mechanisms of reciprocity, found it impossible to control conflicts since they could no longer freely move throughout the territory, having become encapsulated in places which they did not consider unchangeable.

Given the conditions of occupation of their territory until then, and given their characteristic feature of referring to places by geographical particularities or by the name of those who live there, there was no need for the Guarani to reflect on exact distances and frontiers in order to delimit the place of a certain number of extended families. Until the arrival of the whites, it wasn’t necessary to formulate measurements; the Guarani lived on the basis of their own custom; they respected and reproduced the rules of the teko (Guarani way of being).

As a result of the presence of the colonizer, the Guarani began to fix their attention on the rules of the whites and to consider spaces as a defined surface, which is expressed by the category of tekoha. In effect, this native category, connoting a territorial space, appears in relatively recent times in the anthropological literature, precisely at the beginning of the 1970s in Paraguay. Since then, the category tekoha has acquired great relevance in the social organization of these Indians, such that it is currently and widely used by the subgroups. Even so, it is inappropriate and restrictive to understand this important native category as a mere projection of a politico-religious unit in a defined geographical space, or think of it as an a-historical category the “essence” of which goes back to pre-Columbian times.

The tekoha has to be considered in light of the contemporary reality that has led the Indians to value it and conceive it in the way they do, with the consciousness that the full recovery of their past territory is an unattainable goal. Thus, beyond seeing the politico-religious aspects as external to the historical conditions of their articulation, it seems appropriate to us to see the tekoha as a result and not as a determining factor, as a continuing process of situational adjustment revolving around the determination of a territorial relation between Indians and Whites. This being so, the tekoha would be a territorial, religious and political unit, that has to be defined by virtue of the effective characteristics – material and immaterial – of access to geographical space by the Guarani.

Seen in this light, the relation between the Guarani and the land takes on another meaning, inscribed in cosmological tradition and in their historicity. By emphasizing the notion of tekoha as a space that guarantees the ideal conditions for putting this relation into effect, the Indians seek to regain and reconstruct ethnically and religiously exclusive territorial spaces based on the umbilical relation they maintain with the earth, at the same time they make flexible and diversify the organization of extended families, thus being able to maintain an articulate and dynamic relation with the more broadened territory, in this case as continuous space.

It is worth highlighting the fact that the osmotic link between the Indians and the land is not generic; thus, there does not exist an abstract relation between undifferentiated Guarani and a likewise undifferentiated place; on the contrary, what is established is a relation between specific extended families that are connected historically to precise places, and that, the interruption in continuity of occupation causes heightened sense of the notion of ancient origin (ymaguare), based on the authocthenous sentiment, and the production (when conditions permit) of a circulating effect, when they seek to maintain themselves as close as possible to the places of their ancestors, moving in circular fashion around them whenever they are expelled or pestered by the whites. The circulation around the places from which for some reason they were pushed away, allows the Guarani to give continuity to the maintenance of cosmic equilibrium, although often in a fragmentary way, which minimally allows for their earthy relation to the world.