Reclaiming Sovereignty: Political Authority in the Strategies of Three Indigenous Leaders in Brazil

Indigenous peoples worldwide have articulated their own claims of sovereignty, either by struggling for ‘a measure of real tribal power over their own lives and land[s]’ (De la Cadena; Starn 2002, p. 15; Lambert 2002), or by seeking ‘to reveal its multiple manifestations and refusal in a variety of contexts and texts’ (Moreton-Robinson 2007, p. 2). In a similar vein, Urt (2016) has explored the resistance of Indigenous peoples against sovereignty occlusion, ‘the practice of limiting an existing and legitimate sovereignty to the point where it presents the appearance of a non-sovereignty’ (Urt 2016, p. 866). This paper focuses on resistance in the face of occlusion in the strategies of three contemporary Indigenous leaders in/from Brazil. Davi Kopenawa, Ailton Krenak and Valdelice Veron, with very unique personal and collective histories, are leaders who have in different moments and institutional platforms performed the authorities inherited from their peoples. Founded in their cosmologies, their actions and thoughts express their peoples’ sovereignties. Their performances reclaim the idea of sovereignty from a self-referential Eurocentric standpoint, and subvert its modern/colonial political matrix towards politics based on ‘cosmopolitical proposals’ (Stengers 2007). Here understood as practices of Indigenous diplomacies, and taken in their own ontological significance, such performances encompass dealings with the modern diplomatic system (an international dimension), relations among different Indigenous societies (a pan-Indigenous dimension) and interactions with non-human and spiritual lifeworlds (a cosmic dimension). This research is conducted from a methodology of Latin American feminist lineage, based on situated thinking and the centrality of the body (Gago 2020). Our perspective is inspired by the ‘three inseparable imperatives’ that guide the ethnographic work of Albert (2013, p. 430-431): ‘the first, […] to be scrupulous in doing justice to my [Indigenous] hosts’ conceptual imagination; the second, to think rigorously through the sociopolitical, local, and global context in which their society was embedded; and the third, to maintain a critical overview of the framework of the very act of ethnographic observation itself.’ Therefore, with an assumedly partial and procedural analysis, we engage with the trajectory of the aforementioned Indigenous leaders in three dimensions: the colonial situation of their peoples (Balandier 1951); their biographical accounts (Arfuch 2010); and the key contributions in their thought. The sources employed are their published texts, oral and written, as well as ethnographies about their peoples. Kopenawa, Krenak and Veron were chosen for their prominence in the Indigenous movement(s) in Brazil, as well as for each in their own way reclaim the concept of sovereignty. In an attempt to summarize: Kopenawa lies on his personal shamanic journey to affirm Yanomami cosmology as the foundation of his people authority over their territory (Albert; Kopenawa 2013); Krenak catalyzes the pan-Indigenous movement in Brazil, providing an intellectual grammar and willing to mediate worlds with Brazilian-settler societies (Krenak 1999; 2019; 2020); Veron struggles for the recognition of Kaiowá traditional lands, both embodying the strategy of reoccupation camps, and going on an intercultural quest towards ‘making paper speak’ about Kaiowá rights and ways (Veron; Maso; Urt; Terena 2021).