The Museum at Maracanã
The Museum at Maracanã
He holds a master’s degree in linguistics and teaches Guarani: His way of preserving his native language. The word Maracanã derives from the Tupi-Guarani word “marakana,” for a type of parrot.
“You can only respect a culture if you know it,” Urutau said. “If you can’t teach the culture, how can they respect it?"
The Museum at Maracanã
He holds a master’s degree in linguistics and teaches Guarani: His way of preserving his native language. The word Maracanã derives from the Tupi-Guarani word “marakana,” for a type of parrot.
“You can only respect a culture if you know it,” Urutau said. “If you can’t teach the culture, how can they respect it?"
RIO DE JANEIRO — The aging face of the 150-year-old Museum of the Indian — the first of its kind in Latin America — was cast in orange and red police lights.
Officers stationed near the building, tasked with keeping José Urutau Guajajara out, didn’t notice when he and his accomplices crept toward the other side of the abandoned museum through shadows. They crossed a ruined courtyard and slid through double doors. There at the threshold Urutau waved, then disappeared inside.
They scaled steps with missing handrails. The group reached out a second-story window, cut the ropes securing a banner on the outside and pulled it silently into the building.
“Ey-yay-yay-yay!”
One of Urutau’s supporters shouted. The leader shushed him.
“New headquarters of the indigenous cultural reference center,” the banner read. It was a slogan for a renovation project they hated and a symbol of their movement’s most heated conflict. Later, they would vandalize it with a different slogan and hang it in their headquarters: A symbol for their resistance.
They folded it, stepped lightly down the stairs and slipped out the double doors. Someone stuffed the banner into an empty backpack. Urutau shouldered it, and the group stole toward the metro with grins on their faces.
The building was the first museum dedicated to indigenous culture in Latin America. The museum moved in the mid-1970s, leaving the building abandoned.
In 2006, about 50 indigenous Brazilians representing 20 tribes organized for the first time. They occupied the building and stayed for about seven years at the place they considered ancestral land. Back before the colonizers arrived, it belonged to their ancestors. They began to call it “Aldeia de Maracanã,” Portuguese for “Maracanã Village.”
With the arrival of the World Cup and the Olympics came a conflict over the crumbling building. In 2013, the struggle for management of Maracanã Village was at the center of city-wide protests. The government was going to raze it and build a parking lot. Urutau and his compatriots clung to it as a last-ditch effort to claim agency over how their identities as indigenous are represented in Rio de Janeiro.
But the indigenous of Rio don’t agree about how that representation should happen. Ancient conflicts between indigenous tribes have carried over to the urban setting. Today, they are at the center of a tangled mess of loyalties and motivations.
The fight over the former museum is also a symbol of the growing movement of Brazil's indigenous. Torn from their traditional bases in the countryside and the Amazon by land disputes and destruction of the rainforest, they have flowed into the country’s teeming cities.
***
Their numbers in Brazil’s cities have swollen to about 36 percent of their total population. The growth in numbers is in part because more people have identified themselves as indigenous in recent years.
The occupation of the old museum is tied to larger conflicts over land ownership and indigenous rights, said Dinah Guimaraens, a researcher and an advocate for the right of the indigenous community to manage their own museum.
“There is a clear prejudice against the native culture entrenched in Brazilian society, causing irreparable damage to the populations by people who should promote the very Indian rights,” Guimaraens said.
It is a fresh chapter in a centuries-old story of conflict between Brazil’s indigenous and the government. Urutau’s ancestors have been struggling against government officials for several hundred years. First they struggled against Portuguese colonizers and Jesuit priests who arrived in the 1500s. Today it's mainly loggers, who often illegally cut down trees on indigenous-owned land. Urutau has not forgotten.
To him, resistance isn’t only a cause. It’s family history.
He and his tight-knit group return to the former Museum of the Indian every Sunday, the same way they have for years. They gather loose cardboard, palm leaves, anything in sight that’s flammable, and build a fire in the abandoned parking lot of the run-down building.
For a couple of hours, usually as the sun disappears over the hulking Maracanã Stadium, they chant and sway in a shifting dance. The lights on two ever-present police cars flash, always nearby.
That’s their brand of resistance. The only problem is, it’s not working.
“The movement has weakened,” Urutau said. “We are very weak, very weak.”
***
After seven years of silence, the city government in March 2013 changed course. The 2014 World Cup was approaching, and the host city wanted to redevelop the land. After negotiations with the group’s leaders broke down, the city sent about 200 police storming into the building.
Carlos Tukano, then-leader of the movement, said he remembers Maracanã crawling with police and helicopters overhead. Suddenly under siege, the group split. Tukano and most of the group accepted a compromise and government housing, along with a promise the land would one day be reopened as a Museum of the Indian.
Urutau refused. He chose to resist. In the moments before police rushed into the building, he leapt through a window into a tree near the building. He stayed there, unnoticed for the moment, as officers cleared the building.
When police did notice him, he refused to speak with them.
“I cannot die today,” Tukano recalled calling up to Urutau in his tree. “The way forward is through dialogue. But the problem is yours, you do what you think is best.”
Hours passed. Police dragged protesters from the site. Urutau’s friends and family, interviewed by media at the time, explained through tears how they were not allowed to send food or water up to Urutau’s perch in the tree.
After 26 hours and many attempts to coax him down, firefighters tugged Urutau from the tree. The rope they looped around his neck nearly strangled him. His wife said she thought when the officers took him away, they were going to the hospital.
They went to a police station instead.
A few hours later, Urutau emerged from the station to cheers of “Aldeia! Resiste! Aldeia! Resiste!” — a chant that would become the group’s unofficial slogan.
Urutau and his followers are not the only indigenous in Brazil facing violence. The Indigenous Missionary Council recorded 55 invasions of indigenous land, illegal use of natural resources and property damage in 2015.
Indigenous are often attacked and even killed in land battles in the countryside, according to the council. It’s a centuries-old conflict, set time and again on stages across the globe. In Urutau’s native state of Maranhão, loggers have burned indigenous forests. A forest fire there in 2015 was one of the largest in Brazilian history, according to Greenpeace.
Now Urutau and other indigenous are taking the battle to the cities. Urutau has a subway card, carries a cell phone and posts to Facebook, often in all-caps. He punctuates his most important points with snaps of his fingers and cracks jokes often. At 54, his smile lines are deep creases.
It’s a far cry from his beginnings. There was little access to the modern world in the rural state of Maranhão. He tells stories of catching fish for his family to eat with lures he made himself. Now he scowls over trips to the supermarket.
He holds a master’s degree in linguistics and teaches Guarani: His way of preserving his native language. The word Maracanã derives from the Tupi-Guarani word “marakana,” for a type of parrot.
“You can only respect a culture if you know it,” Urutau said. “If you can’t teach the culture, how can they respect it?"
But it can be difficult to preserve their language and culture in Rio.
In Brazil, there is a deeply ingrained hate of Indians, Guimaraens said. She said many lawmakers refuse to acknowledge indigenous populations because, by law, they own key swaths of resource-rich land.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples pointed to land conflicts, violence and institutional racism as serious concerns for the country’s Indians in March 2016.
Preserving his culture is important to Urutau. But the city has a way of swallowing it up, he said.
“The culture is diminished, weakened,” he said. “The souls of the indigenous have been massacred.”
Urutau often gets off topic during his three-hour classes, usually political discussions during his three-hour classes. As critical as he is of corruption, he has almost more disdain for those indigenous who have chosen to work with the government.
“There were also elders of ours, indigenous peoples, who played their part,” he said. “Who accepted the situation. Accepted money. Who were weak.”
Though their hopes for Maracanã Village began much the same, Tukano and Urutau now have little common ground. Tukano, president of the Association of Maracanã Village, has struggled to coerce the Rio state government to follow through on its promise to renovate the land.
Victory came for Tukano when the state governor agreed in 2013 not to demolish the building. The chief has advocated for a quick renovation, but the building has instead sat in a sort of urban planning limbo; updates had no deadlines, and Brazil’s financial crisis has hindered plans.
Urutau and his followers don’t believe the government will deliver. They have been fighting in state courts for the land to be in the hands of indigenous.
Convincing the government to follow through on its promise can take years, Tukano said. But the building cannot wait that long.
“Our problem now is to gather all the indigenous leaders here,” he said. “To pressure the government to make a decision on the building.”
Thousands of protesters gathered downtown in late October. Maoist, anti-establishment and anarchist slogans were held aloft above the heads of the crowd. Military police, dressed for combat, flanked the group.
The smell of spitted meat wafted over the crowd. One vendor leaned on his cart and read a comic book. Street vendors routinely take advantage of crowds like these, which have become all too common in Brazil’s time of scandal and crisis.
The protesters are united by their distaste for corruption, but little else. A voice on a loudspeaker trying to direct the crowd’s attention was drowned in the noise.
Urutau and his followers care little about day-to-day politics.
A week after they broke in and stole Tukano’s banner, 10-foot-tall metal panels had been bolted together to form a fence around the old building. One day soon, Urutau will slide between a gap in the panels, climb to the second floor and put the banner back where it belongs.
They’ve scrawled “fuck the governments plan to oppress Indians” in Portuguese in spray paint across its nylon surface. The words cover the image of an imagined Museum of the Indian, the center of Tukano’s hard-fought plan.
The march ended at city hall. Urutau and his group began to pile spare cardboard and McDonald’s cups at its steps. Like they always do almost every week at Maracanã Village, a fire was lit and a shifting dance began.
A crowd began to form. Smartphones came out. They eased into a melodic, lullaby-like chant.
“Marakana, marakana. Marakana, marakana, nê nê nê.”
The commotion dies down. The crowd is quiet. Urutau’s eyes closed as he stepped to the tune.
“Ha hê a hê! Ha hê a hê! Marakana, marakana. Maraka, nê nê nê, marakana.”
The chant ended with cheers, claps and the shaking of maracas. Then another chant emerged, this time from high on the government building’s steps.
“Aldeia! Resiste! Aldeia! Resiste!”
Those standing around the fire exchanged a look of surprise. It had been years since anyone outside of their group had used their chant. They joined in.
The maracas begin their staccato shake again, and the chant swelled to a cheer that seemed, for the first time, to unite the crowd.
