Patricia Freitas Lopes Rodrigues-Niu

RODRIGUES-NIU, Patricia, then a graduate student at University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, was awarded a grant in October 2019 to aid research on “Marshaling the Past: Indigenous Regimes of Ownership in Amazonian Ecologies,” supervised by Dr. Christopher Gordon Ball. The Xingu Indigenous Territory harbors a growing Indigenous population of over 8700 people, from sixteen ethnic groups. Following centuries of demographic crises and decline, the regrowth observed over the last decades has propelled a new wave of village settlements. The grantee investigates processes of reterritorialization, by emergent Wauja chiefly families, of ancestral lands located in the increasingly threatened Southwest borders of the territory. The research shows that Wauja communities are redeploying pre-contact patterns of land-use that muster the resources provided by millennia-old anthropogenic forests and black earth sites inherited from ancient arawak populations. To harness this legacy, chiefs must navigate the hazardous boundaries between Indigenous and non-indigenous, and between human and non-human temporal-ontological dimensions. The grantee conducted immersive ethnographic research and participatory mapping in seven new villages to document how the Wauja weave exchange relations and kinship bonds amongst families, and with the ancestral spirits who will make up the social fabric of these new territories. This project integrates ethnoarchaeological, social-cultural, and linguistic anthropological methods to ask how Wauja people marshal the past to secure a sustainable future. Specifically, how do they signify anthropogenic landscapes, while simultaneously building an understanding of themselves within a complex set of changing relations between humans, nonhuman agents, and a rapidly deteriorating environment?