Dressed head to toe in white, 33-year-old indigenous man Ailton Krenak ascended to the pulpit of the lower house of Brazil’s Congress on September 4, 1987. There, members of a constituent assembly were in the process of building the country’s new charter following years of a military dictatorship. At the time, neither Mr. Krenak nor any of the constituents were aware that the speech he was about to make would go down in history.
As he spoke into the microphone, he delicately touched his cheek with one hand, leaving a smudge. He had been holding a traditional black-colored dye made from the genipap fruit, used by the Krenak indigenous people during mourning periods. As he continued to speak, he painted his entire face black.
Mr. Krenak was campaigning for laws to protect Brazil’s indigenous peoples, and his theatrical gesture is remembered decades later by anyone interested in such issues. At the time, however, it was not well understood. A newspaper headline the following day read: “Indian gets angry with the constituent assembly,” omitting the content of his speech.
Nearly 40 years later, Mr. Krenak has written several books and is currently the leading candidate for a chair in the Brazilian Academy of Letters this year. But the way he and other indigenous thinkers see the world is still poorly understood in Brazilian academia.
There are more than 300 indigenous languages in Brazil, and dozens more have been lost over time as a result of the violence of colonization. And beyond the languages themselves, many unique expressions and philosophies have also been lost.
German linguist Edward Sapir was among the first to elaborate on how language can influence how people think. One of his students analyzed how the North American Hopi indigenous people had a different concept and understanding of time because their language don’t use temporal markers such as “today” and “month.” For them, time is a cycle, in which nothing truly ends — rather than a line with a beginning, middle, and end.
Mr. Krenak’s philosophy of the world is directly linked with the...
Search
