ARA RY´APÚ TEKO-ASY (Times of Pandemic)

This material is also available in: Português

Image: Aldeia Guarani/Kaiowá, Dourados (Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil). Photo: Maximino Rodrigues

(This is the first dispatch in our series COVID-19 in Latin America: Dispatches from the Southern Frontlines.)

Translated by Jens Andermann

Dear readers, and everyone interested in this situation, which frightens all people of this earth, the water planet. We live amidst so many diversities that today we get confused even about the kind of people we are, even though we are the first inhabitants of this land called tekoha guasú (the great land). At this difficult time, our Indigenous people here at the village where we live, have become even more afraid.

Until now, we have been confused and without understanding the danger the whites are warning us about when they talk about this illness, which people far away have baptized COVID-19. It scares us, it disturbs us, it puts our way of life in disorder, it makes our family unravel, and slowly it begins to devastate and kill what we accustom to call our Indigenous Guarani Nhandewá culture and tradition.

Yet even though we are confused, our elders, great teachers and knowledge bearers about the traditional plants without ever having attended academies of any kind, are our source of hope that we could still have a promising future. We have the force to listen to the instruments they make sound, and their chants, whether in a whisper or sung out aloud, manage to appease the shadow attempting to silence what Tupã-Nhanderú (the Great Lord) has given us, so that these same whispers can calm the earth and stay in control of it. We are a living people, alert about all things, but the white people’s greediness has wrought destruction on the dominion of the land, because of an intelligence that STUDIES until it can no longer control the earth. That is why, when the great vastness of the forests is being destroyed and their waters are channeled towards other ends, as with the all-powerful hydroelectric plants, one is in fact contributing to the destruction of the earth.

Aldeia Guarani/Kaiowá, Dourados (Mato Grosso do Sul, Brasil). Foto: Maximino Rodrigues

Even with all this, our Caciques (chiefs), Pajés (Shamans) and leaders still look for an intelligent way of keeping in the balance our place of residence. For centuries we have suffered discrimination, racism, the loss of our territories and rivers, and now we suffer from an unknown illness that dominates mankind in every corner of the earth, called Covid-19, or as we Indigenous Guarani people call it, NHEMONDY´I-GUÃRA (the illness which only threatens). As a matter of fact, things are not well here, but families still look for directions and advice on how not to forsake rights that are guaranteed by the constitution of our country. The illness entered our village without asking for permission, just as it happened centuries ago when, without being seen, they entered and dominated our lands taking away everything that was ours by right.

Our community has grown a lot, and the illness that threatens our people has also exploded with a blast. It is a difficult day for everyone here, we are practically surrounded by a second barbed-wire fence. The barbed-wire fence are our villages, called reservations by the government, the second barbed-wire fence is this illness called Covid-19. There is great concern that the illness might break free from the control of our elders’ wisdom. Even before, medical attention that we should be enjoying as a right, has been unsatisfactory, and now with all the situation of the virus it has become even more difficult to access.

Aldeia Guarani/Kaiowá, Dourados (Mato Grosso do Sul, Brasil). Foto: Maximino Rodrigues

We will continue to fight with our own weapons, not with firearms but with the weapons of wisdom and of mental equilibrium, putting our faith in our elders, those who know about the equilibrium of the land and the world with their chants and the sounds of the instruments that Nhanderú gave us. Once, an elder said: “Kuimba´e hi´arandu va´era há ixupe ipaha árâ (Man will get lost, he will create and destroy himself). What he meant was that man creates situations in which he gets lost, to which he doesn’t know the answer, and then there will a moment of covering up, of giving out palliatives as a treatment. Peaceful life is continuing in the village, but with our eyes vigilant towards everything. We only want peace, we want only to live, we want only to have the freedom to move about and to be respected as “humans” like everyone else.

Video recorded by the chief of the village of Jaguapirú, documenting failed attempts to communicate with authorities and request the transfer of a patient with symptoms of Covid-19 to a public hospital, which authorities denied.

Maximino Rodrigues

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is a teacher and pedagogical coordinator specializing in Indigenous schooling and education. He is the director of the Escola Indígena Ramão Martins school at Aldeia Guarani/Kaiowá, Dourados (Matto Grosso, Brazil). He received his degree in pedagogy with a thesis on Guarani and Kaiowá children’s toys and has a postgraduate title in Administration and Accounting, with special focus on Educational Administration, Coordination, Inspecting and Orientation as well as in African, Indigenous and Latin American Literature. Together with Maria Thereza Alves, he is the author of the installation works Um Vazio Pleno / A Full Void (premiered at Frestas Trienal, Sorocaba, São Paulo, 2017) and You Will Go Away One Day But I Will Not (Festival for Adventurous Music and Art, Berlin Botanical Gardens, 2020). Contact: maximinoguaranik@yahoo.com.br

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