Territorial Conflicts and Soybeans: Kanhgág Politics and Their Struggle for Land Rights in Southern Brazil

Abstract

Today, Kanhgág people live mainly in small Terras Indígenas (Indigenous Lands) in southern Brazil. Those lands are the outcome of a history of equivocal alliances and conflicts between indigenous peoples and European colonisers. Presenting aspects of these relations in both historical and contemporary settings, this article traces continuities and transformations in indigenous politics and cosmology, focusing on the struggles over territory and resources now playing out around soy cultivation. Avoiding simplistic presentations of colonial impositions, it draws on kanhgág people's dualist cosmology, factional sociality and the fecundity of alterity to consider those territorial struggles within indigenous autonomy and alliances.