The indigeneities of settler colonialism in Brazil: Qi Zhang, ‘Shifting Constitution of Indigeneity in (Post-)Colonial Brazil’, E-international Relations, 2022 | settler colonial studies blog

The indigeneities of settler colonialism in Brazil: Qi Zhang, ‘Shifting Constitution of Indigeneity in (Post-)Colonial Brazil’, E-international Relations, 2022

30Jun22

Excerpt: Though the indigenous were thus intended to be useful, they were also subject to a logic of elimination, intensified by further Portuguese settlement over time (especially after Brazil’s independence). This might feel like a paradox or a flaw in the colonisers’ plan, as Barickman suggests. Nevertheless, Wolfe’s explanation of “(structural) genocide” helps reconcile these seemingly contradictory logics. To Wolfe, the violence of settler colonialism is not equivalent to genocide as conventionally understood (actual killing of groups of human beings). It is rather the “grouphood”, or the “ongoingness” of an indigenous community’s mode of existence to borrow a communitarian expression from Walzer, that settler colonialism sought to eliminate. This gives meaning to “genos” in this particular form of genocide. By cultural assimilation, Portuguese colonisers disrupted (though not always successfully) the indigenous peoples’ ways of life. Their tremendously rich knowledges and practices, then unappreciated by Europeans, could have remained intact but instead suffered considerable losses. An epistemological/ontological violence no less eliminatory than direct coercion.

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