The criminalization of indigenous people in Roraima state, Brazil: indigenous strategies to bring their rights into effect in the face of injustices and inequalities

Abstract

Abstract The criminalization of indigenous people in the prisons of Roraima state, Brazil, is examined, in which the justice system, as throughout Brazil, has no mechanisms to identify indigenous people and recognize their differentiated constitutional rights, reinforcing the inequalities and injustices for indigenous people, the most oppressed and discriminated since colonial times. Over the past decade, indigenous organizations in the state capital have drawn attention to this problem and taken protagonist measures to try to change it. The Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR), through their lawyer, Joênia Wapichana, elected, in 2018 the first Indigenous woman to be a federal deputy, set up a project to write down indigenous oral law so that it could be used locally to deal with criminal cases, encouraging indigenous communities to resolve accusations of crimes through councils of local leaders and thereby avoid them being handed over to the mainstream criminal justice system.