“We are the ones who know our history": memory, knowledge and praxis of r-existence among the Tenetehar-Tembé

Abstract

This article seeks to analyze elements of the history and daily life of the Tenetehar-Tembé people, from the Alto Rio Guamá Indigenous Land (northeast of Pará), based on their own memories and narratives, which elucidate life experiences faced with situations of guardianship and violence in the region. At this point, the memory of the elders is important to understand the details of the indigenous past recounted by the Tembé, whose experiences go beyond the objective dimensions recorded by official documentation. Through ethnography and oral history, as necessary methodologies for working with indigenous peoples, it was possible to access a different reality, narrated from the Tembé point of view, which denounces the arbitrariness endorsed, to a certain degree, by FUNAI and centralizes the role of the Tenetehar-Tembé in these historical processes. Among indigenous peoples, orality is an important link in intergenerational transmission and learning about history, traditional knowledge and cultural practices that demarcate their indianity, and build ancestral collective memory. In this way, the indigenous protagonism is reiterated through their inclusion in a set of actions constructed by the Tembé to defend their territory, affirm their ethnic identity and thus guarantee their existence as a people.