**6. New economic expansion fronts and the "pacification" of white men by the Xavante**

The West acts like a soulless, impersonal machine, henceforth lacking a master, that put mankind at its service. Free from any human interference that may want to refrain it, the insane machine goes on with its planetary uprooting work. Uprooting men from their soil, even in the furthest corners of the world, the machine throws them in the desert of the urbanized zones without integrating them into the industrialization, bureaucratization, or the unlimited technicality it propels [7].

and the most striking feature of the conditioning imposed by the capital needs. To know the historical implementation process of those reserves is, therefore, an important stage to under-

The São Marcos Indigenous Land, main spatial slice of this research, in spite of its specificities, has its development thoroughly inserted in that paradigmatic change of subjection to the capitalist mode of production, attending to a single spatial restructure mechanism. Even so, taking to pieces the creation process of that reserve in special is an effort necessary to justify

The most striking episodes derived from this conditioning process and expropriation of the Xavante territory happened during the period of appearance of the TIs, and many of them were precisely linked to the appearance of the São Marcos TI. Between 1956 and 1957, populations from the Xavante villages, Parabubu and Wedetede, fleeing from persecutions of settlers and farmers, sought shelter with the Salesian missions of Sangradouro and Meruri, which already sheltered Indians from the Xavante and Bororo ethnics groups. That migration, however, meant death for a large number of that group, mainly through diseases like measles [6].

Later, other cases of persecution exploded, causing more Xavante groups to look for shelter in the missions, which led the Salesians, at a given time, to opt for the creation of a new mission, attached to Meruri, fully devoted to the Xavante. That is how the São Marcos was born [6].

By the end of the 1960s, the tension between Xavantes and farmers increased, leading the Federal Government to compromise to the creation of a series of reserves to guarantee the integrity of those people. The territory created by the capitalism, therefore, is a place of contradiction and tension, behaving like a permanent scenario of power disputes and, inevitably, produces numerous conflicts, either real or ideological. Thus, the reserves creation represents

The permanent characteristic of the disputes, supported by the contradiction and need for renovation of the capitalist activities, makes the reserves ephemeral symbols of cultural maintenance as its limits and resources are permanently subject to questioning and, consequently, reason for conflicts. Thus, the capital will be presented in the form of a physical landscape, created at its own image, created as value for use, accentuating the capital progressive accumulation in an expandable scale. The geographic landscape encompassed by the capital and fixed assets is as much a crowned glory of the development of the past capital, as an inhibiting

the momentary needs of the capitalism and not of the Indians in the villages.

**6. New economic expansion fronts and the "pacification" of white** 

The West acts like a soulless, impersonal machine, henceforth lacking a master, that put mankind at its service. Free from any human interference that may want to refrain it, the insane machine goes on with its planetary uprooting work. Uprooting men from their soil, even in the furthest corners of the world, the machine throws them in the desert of the urbanized

prison of the additional progress of accumulation [3].

**men by the Xavante**

stand the current Xavante landscape.

the option for that area.

54 Indigenous People

Many times, in distinct time and places, indigenous groups announced that they had "pacified the white men," claiming for themselves the position of subjects, not victims. "To pacify the white men" has many meanings: pinpoint them before the white men and the objects in the world's vision, empty them of their aggressiveness, their malevolence, their deadly force, tame them, in short, but also to establish new relationships with them and reproduce in society not against this time, but through them, in short, recruit them for their own continued existence.

The Xavante firmly state that upon establishing "definitive" contact with the *waradzu* (Xavante word meaning "white men" or non-Indians), they accomplished their pacification, not the other way around. For them, the acceptance of the contact does not derive from the simple inevitability of the Brazilian society expansion, but from inner geographical strategies of maintenance of their territory and culture. In other words, the Xavante bent and partially adapted to the western habits; in contrast the Western society also had to adapt to the Xavante.

The more pessimistic ethnographers consequently started to place the Xavante into the group of those Indians who, through flexibilization of "fundamental" aspects of their culture to preserve life, entered a kind of "social limbo," where Indians "stop" being Indians and, at the same time paradoxically, they are not citizens in their own right in the core of the involving society either.

The idea of maintaining the "Indianness" through inflexible cultural distinctions and geographic and social isolation ends up underestimating the ability of the aboriginal people to preserve ethnical differences in spite of the social immersion in other sociocultural structures. Moreover, while viewing the inter-ethnical contact as a manicheaist relationship between Indian people and dominant powers instead of a complex inter-cultural zone, the observers failed to evaluate how the differences are settled through economical and political practices [5].

Many Xavante, however, were able to understand that the selective cultural adaptation offered them the best guarantee to defend their land and communities and to adjust their relationship to the dominant societies [5]. Therefore, the idea of pacification of the *waradzu* by the Xavante is not only a matter of point of view or ideological orientation, but of a feasible strategy of survival that justifies itself, for instance, in the increase of birth and demography rates among the Xavante in the last years.

The adaptive mechanisms developed by the Xavante culture throughout the contacts with the Brazilian society—main objective of this article—were first perceived when, in several moments, the Indians actually took the reins of the "negotiations" and outlined their course, even without the due control over the results. That leading role, free of any romanticism, was necessarily permeated by concessions that almost always changed significant elements of those people's culture.

In the Xavante case, the dominant forms imposed on the Indians merged, opposed, or superposed the indigenous practices. A clear example of that was the specificity lived by each Xavante group in contact with the Brazilian society, as, after the pacification, some groups remained under the direct "guardianship" of the state represented by the Indian Protection Service (IPS), whereas other groups kept contact with the involving society through the work of the Salesian Missionaries.

The role of both entities was initially one of guarding the physical integrity of the Xavante communities; however, that "protection" had its price of the cultural flexibilization. In order to protect themselves from armed conflicts with the expansion front landowners, those Xavante groups had to accept the confinement of the reserves, each one with its own set of rules and specific social constructions. On the one side, under the tutelage of the Salesian missionaries, the Indians were gradually deprived of their cosmology in favor of the Christian monotheism; on the other side, under the IPS guardianship, they were skilled under a nationalist manual to become "brazilindians."

What the different processes of acculturation lived by the several Xavante groups had in common was the sign of work. The Indians were "stimulated" to definitely abandon the seminomadism in favor of getting skilled in any job that might contribute to building a nation or a divine work. In that way, hunting expeditions, pickups, and seasonal planting of food that served to initiate the young Xavante in the culture ceased, deeply changing not only their diet but also the symbolic landscape and oral tradition of knowledge transmission.

The Indians became permanent growers, carpenters, tractor drivers, artisans, seamstresses, rendering services either to the IPS or the Salesians in exchange of a few industrialized products that little by little became daily "needs." On the other hand, they became low-skilled manpower. The end of that process would be, in a way, to convert the Xavante into lowincome citizens devoid of possession and property of lands; however, it is in that dimension that the Indian protagonism begins to appear.

Even in the face of harsh and sudden cultural changes, the Xavante were able to maintain some practices that helped to perpetuate a feeling of belonging, creating a sensation of ethnical continuity. They maintained the communitarianism that molded and structured their lives and identities throughout generations, essentially keeping age structures, exogamous halves, performing rituals, and, mainly, dreaming of the ancestors so that the ancestral wisdom kept on nourishing their spirits.

On another plan, the Xavante sought to learn the Portuguese language as a means to understand not only what was being said but also to comprehend more deeply the sociocultural structures and the *waradzu's* way of thinking. Therefore, politically speaking their performance became more incisive and assertive when, through noncooperation, they were able to obtain concessions from the state as well as from the Church by playing one against the other on ideological conflicts.

Thus, the Indians began to realize that their Indianness happened even if they made some concessions like tossing aside some cultural aspects, and by doing it, they were able to better understand the outside social structure and, with a gentle touch and skill mark their ethnical differences and impose (covertly) their intransigence (here understood as something that decidedly should not be changed).

The *A'uwe*, however, quickly grasped the symbolic value of the indigenous identity after the pacification of the *waradzu*, even though culturally altered, the ownership of that identity would give them a concrete chance for political claims (territorial).
