Gavião: Parkatejê’s Paideia

Abstract

Registered in twenty intense days in 2011 in the Parkatejê’s village, southwest of Brazilian state of Pará, in amazon rain forest, the photo shoot with the Gavião of Pará part of a direct ethnographic perspective to be edited, years later, under a aesthetic (curatorial) and anthropological bias. The traditional games and celebrations took place on the occasion of a great community mobilization around the productions of a book and a film about the chief's memories "Krokrenum", the "Captain" of the Parkatejê. In these photographs, the proposal is that the ethnographic moment can attract perceptions to a denser texture, addressing the relations of generations between Gavião people, seeking the affection and the transmission of knowledge as sensitive conductive filters of the emancipated spectator.

Traditional leadership of Parkatejê, Kohokrenhum led the race in half a century of struggle: to from the first contact with “white people” in 1957, when his group then had about thirty adults only, victims of epidemics and conflicts, to the present, with recent physical and legal battles against giant corporations Vale and Eletronorte in the last two decades. Through massacres, tragedies, wars, slavery, ethnic resistance and an incredible population growth, Kohokrenhum tells lucidly the period of SPI and Funai exploratory and the uprising of indigenous emancipation, which expelled and sued then the State agencies, followed by the struggle for effective demarcation of the Indigenous Land, dragged since 1943, but in the 1970s faced grabbers front, farmers and squatters in southern Pará, with deaths on both sides, until the complete official rules by the State.

In the village, the older persons practically only speak the native language (Je linguistic branch), and the lot of young people practically only speak Portuguese, in a internal division by those dominates ethnic traditional knowledge and those who do not have or employ in daily life. The photo essay, addressing unique moments of these relationships through preparatory games for the Feast of Tepe (fish) is an aesthetic and emotional search condense a rich Timbira culture in large transformation process.

The ethnographic record of games and preparations for the Feast of Tepe was made possible by a unique occasion in which all Parkatejê village was mobilized and concentrated to writing a book and produce a collaborative film by the young people of ethnicity in 2011 in participatory methodology conducted by the project Video nas Aldeias (Video in the Villages). The process has produced a film entitled "Krohokrenhum", by Vincent Carelli and Ernesto de Carvalho, and a book authored by young Gavião own, titled "Me Ikwe Teje Ri - no one knows how hard I gave," about the life and memories of captain of the Gavião, Kohokrenhum.

Credits:

Authors:Philipi Bandeira

Photographs:Philipi Bandeira

Direction, image editing and text:Philipi Bandeira