From French Guiana to Brazil: Entanglements, Migrations and Demarcations of the Kaliña

Abstract

This article sheds light on the indigenous Kalina in the French-Brazilian borderland. By combining existing historical anthropological work with new ethnographic perspectives from three Kalina women living in northern Brazil, this article shows that a web of multiple factors led to this Kalina group’s relocation from French Guiana to Brazil in the 1950s. Historical discriminations—including the exploitation and exoticization of Kalina members in ‘human zoos’ in the late 19th century—and a push for assimilation in the aftermath of French Guiana’s ‘departementalisation’ are hitherto underexplored reasons behind this migration, which resulted in the demarcation of an indigenous territory on the Brazilian side of the Oyapock River in 1982. By privileging female perspectives, this chapter also points to the centrality of gender within entangled inequalities which the Kalina in the French-Brazilian borderland were confronted with in the past and in the present.