**2. The landscape and the Xavante**

The landscape encompasses both material and immaterial dimensions. It is the result of social relationships and cultural symbolisms that are materialized and piled up in space throughout time. From the mediation between the Xavante culture and its relationship with the natural world, complex, cultural landscapes full of symbologies have shown up, which can be hardly explained or understood in their totality and essence with a look formed in another cultural, historical, social, and spatial context.

The so proposed research is clearly limited, mainly concerning the contextual position of the researcher in relation to the matter being researched. Here, there is not an attempt to attenuate neither the liability nor the insecurity regarding the presented data. However, surely, there is a conscience that the scientific analysis that is to follow "suffers" of partiality, non-neutrality, and westernization.

The approach to the Xavante culture in a context external to its reproduction, according to scientific methods and philosophical-ideological matrices may lend to the objectives of this research; however, stripped of any illusion, this article does not intend to explain the Xavante culture in its totality, mainly because to the Xavante society, any effort in that direction would be useless.

To tell the history through the colonized is to echo voices that were trimmed or forgotten, means to renovate the knowledge about a history that has been well grounded throughout time, but could not crystallize all the possibilities or the circumstances of every historical fact. Giving voice to the Indians means reviving their ancestors, renewing the hope in the present

This article tries to echo those voices and values the tenacity of native American people who, even in front of cultural spoliation and territorial expropriation, lived on with ability and courage. Even though each contact and indigenous integration process has been unequal, multifaced, and full of specificities in time and space, such voices will be here spread through the dissemination of the Xavante people's history, who even in face of wars, diseases, and genocides, was able to elaborate political strategies which allowed, among other things, the

The Xavante Indians name themselves *A'uwe*, which means "authentic people"; they are genuine inhabitants of the Cerrado biome, which comprises a huge territorial extension in the Central Brazil Plateau. Among the Xavante, the group that will lead this research is concentrated in the São Marcos Indigenous Land, a reserve fully located in the city of Barra do Garças, in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil. Through historiography and analysis of the adapting mechanisms developed by that group throughout their contact with the national Brazilian society, the nature of native Americans' resistance to advancements of the national states and

This article, however, aims to investigate which sociocultural and spatial changes (voluntary or not) contributed to the adaptation, and at the same time, resistance of the Xavante before the national society and the economic advancements over their cultural territory and

The landscape encompasses both material and immaterial dimensions. It is the result of social relationships and cultural symbolisms that are materialized and piled up in space throughout time. From the mediation between the Xavante culture and its relationship with the natural world, complex, cultural landscapes full of symbologies have shown up, which can be hardly explained or understood in their totality and essence with a look formed in another cultural,

The so proposed research is clearly limited, mainly concerning the contextual position of the researcher in relation to the matter being researched. Here, there is not an attempt to attenuate neither the liability nor the insecurity regarding the presented data. However, surely, there is a conscience that the scientific analysis that is to follow "suffers" of partiality, non-neutrality,

The approach to the Xavante culture in a context external to its reproduction, according to scientific methods and philosophical-ideological matrices may lend to the objectives of this

maintenance of their social cohesion and relative cultural autonomy.

time, and stimulating their future blossom.

the capitalist system itself will be shown.

**2. The landscape and the Xavante**

historical, social, and spatial context.

and westernization.

resources.

46 Indigenous People

The researcher, being a result of time-space in which he lives has, for example, limitations of language that, inevitably, derived from ideological symbolisms and power relationships he was "exposed to" during his intellectual development process [1]. Thus, any analysis performed by the researcher in an environment exotic to his formation environment should, admittedly, be made without aspirations to neutrality and his observations should be conscious of his ideological, social, and historical partiality.

The interpretation of the Xavante landscape thus cannot be restricted to observations of materiality or empirical works, but should contemplate, before anything, the historical, spatial, social, cultural, and political processes subscribed in that landscape. The intended landscape idea here does not consider the materiality or the visible as an end, but as one of the possible means of seizure of the cultural processes engendered by the landscape.

The creation of material or nonmaterial symbols, according to an ideological social organization, together with the power relationships and even the individual passions, represents other possible means of cultural appropriation of the space, which allows for a broader conception of the landscape formation process [2].

The point that divides this analysis is precisely that of interpreting the Xavante landscape under an external optics of ideological capitalist matrix and, cosmologically, trying to understand the importance of maintaining the millenarian symbols of that culture for the contemporary society. The first effort of that research will, therefore, be to lecture about the capitalism role in the formation of the Xavante cultural landscape, identifying its main mechanisms of action and its expansion activities.
