·       Xukuru organise Youth, Art and Culture meeting

·       Kalankó people wait 10 years for demarcation

 

 

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Xukuru organise Youth Art and Indigenous Cultures meeting

Three hundred young indigenous will gather, July 18 thru 20, at a cultural meeting organised by the Xukuru, to demonstrate in various artistic languages what the indigenous people have produced in the cultural field. The meeting will take place in the Xukuru village of Cimbres, Pesqueira, in Pernambuco.

Prime objective of the meeting is to involve the indigenous youth and discuss policies of the government in the cultural area that respect the specific of the various indigenous people of Pernambuco. “We will demand programmes of the authorities that can be implemented in our villages”, affirms Jozelito Arcanjo, educator and one of the organizers of the meeting.

Experiences, proposals and initiatives will be presented in divers and creative forms: Theatre, music, visual and plastic arts. With two photo expositions, one about the murdered chief Xicão Xukuru and the other about Maninha, they will tell the history of the Xukuru people, as well as the history of the indigenous movement in Pernambuco.

Videos will show cultural manifestations, traditional sounds like the ones of the dancers. Toré and Coco singers will alternate with the sounds of the sanfona and the pífanos bands. Wood sculptures, representing animals of the artist Adelson, of the Pipipã people. Legends and myths will be represented in theatre plays.

The meeting will commemorate the chief Xicão Xukuru, who was murdered 10 years ago by landowners in the region, because of his role in the struggle for land demarcation of the Xukuru. Also the leader Maninha Xukuru, killed in 2006, wil be remembered with a photo exhibition.

Partners of the meeting: Associação Estação da Cultura, Cabra Quente Filmes, Conselho Indigenista Missionário (Cimi), Centro de Cultura Luiz Freire (CCLF) and Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisa sobre Etnicidade (NEPEUFPE).

 

 

Kalankó people wait 10 years for demarcation

 

These days the Kalankó people will complete 10 years of struggle for there traditional land. They are 77 families, totalling 338 persons, living in the rural area of Alagoas. They are the descendants of the Pankararu of the Brejo dos Padres who migrated in the 19th century to the sertão of Alagoas in search of land.

Far out in the dry savannah land of the sertão between the municipalities of Água Branca and Mata Grande, on the border of Pernambuco and Bahia, the land they found was empty and free of the influence of the coronéis, the powerful landowners of the Northeast. However, with the growth of the population and the expansion of the agriculture, the Kalanká gradually lost their land and turned into wage labourers for the fazendeiros. In the dry season they work as day workers in the sugarcane mills.

Over the years, the history of the Kalankó merged with several other indigenous people of the Northeast. Until the second half of the 1990’ies they were often considered as sertanejos, land workers, descendant of the Portuguese.

 

Land occupation

Last June, the 12th, tired of waiting, the Kalankó decided to occupy part of their traditional land. They demanded of the Funai the immediate installation of an Anthropological task force for the identification of their territory. Mid July the Kalankó and other indigenous people that support them met with the general prosecutor of Alagoas, to demand the creation of the taskforce. They denounced the neglect with which they have been treated by Funai over these ten years. The government institution refused to provide assistance, alleging that they were not officially recognized as indigenous.  

 

This denunciation is confirmed by the Funai administrator in Alagoas, who told to have received the order ‘of the juridical sector of the Funai to not even visit the Kalankó, much less give them support’. He also said the ‘in case I would provide any kind of benefits to them, I would be punished for administrative faults and I would have to reimburse the money to the Funai’. For the Kalankó-chief Paulo Kalankó, “the Funai, instead of defend the indigenous rights, does everything the other way round. Ike the demarcation: we have struggled for ten years and nothing has been done.’ He denounced that ‘several landowners in the regions have threatened us and nothing has been done against it’.

 

According to the prosecutor, the Funai does not have the right to reject any assistance to the indigenous, nor is it up to the Funai to decide about recognition of the ethnic identity of the people, regardless of the demarcation being realised or not. He added that he ordered the Funai to respond within ten days to the demands of the communities. If not, he would start a legal law suit.

 

(Based on information of Jorge Vieira – Cimi NE)

 

 

Brasília, 17th of July 2008.