ECOCRITICAL PATHS FOR THE WAIMIRI ATROARI TRAGEDY: STEPHEN BAINES’S TESTIMONIAL WRITING AND THE INTERPRETATION OF INDIGENOUS BRAZI

Abstract

There are many econarratives responsible for consolidating a memory legacy that breaks the silence and reveals the extent of the ghost of the Military Dictatorship for Brazil's indigenous peoples, as well as their natural territories. In order to reflect on some of them, this study has taken as a corpus of analysis accounts that promote the intertwining of anthropology and literature, aiming to reveal perspectives that have not yet been explored by ecocriticism in relation to the peoples of the forest. The objective is to revisit narratives from the ethnographic territory of Stephen Grant Baines, an English anthropologist whose legacy with the Waimiri Atroari indigenous people since the 1970s has brought to light the consequences of corporate indigenism driven by the civil-military regime in the Amazon and produced a valuable contribution to testimonial literature. From anthropology to literature, testimonial-memorial writing reconstructs the consequences of contact and the paths of extermination, revealing scars that are still very much alive in the recent history of autochthonous peoples as well as in their biocultural diversity, which is directly connected to the spaces they have occupied for millennia.