Camila Galan de Paula

CAMILA GALAN DE PAULA, then a graduate stuedent at University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil, was awarded a grant in April 2021 to aid research on ‘Indigenous Blood: A Study of Indigeneity and Family in Northeast Brazil,’ supervised by Dr. Ana Claudia Duarte Rocha Marques. How can we make sense of a form of indigeneity not linked to the transnational category ‘Indigenous peoples’? What are the limits imposed by a state-mediated form of indigeneity? This project responds to these questions through an investigation of people in Brazil’s rural Northeast who have known indigenous ancestry (‘indigenous blood’) but do not classify themselves as Indigenous. Through fieldwork and archival research, this project investigates the local semantics of indigeneity and associated temporalities. In local narratives, Indigenous individuals and groups are placed into an a-historical and pre-civilizational past before the Portuguese descendants considered as local ‘founders’ established themselves in the region; as a result, indigeneity invokes a remote past. But indigeneity manifests itself in the present, in the form of racialized bodies. By investigating the local processes of indigenous racialization, this research focuses on the contextual interchangeability of race and family. More specifically, this study expands scholarship on indigeneity by addressing the processual and contextual dimensions through which indigeneity exists, linking the interconnected processes of historicization, racialization, and producing relatedness. This project consequently extends the literature that questions the limits of legal categories for alterity coding in (pluri)national states.