One can only imagine that the fundamental issue addressed in Reflections from the Inside: New Indigenous Scholarship from Brazil in Translation could be replicated in any number of places around the world, and that is: Can Western academic anthropology be trusted to accurately, sensitively, fully and profoundly express the values of Native cultures without imposing its own dominant colonialist perspective? Expressed another way, perhaps more crudely, is anthropology just one of the many scientific disciplines that serve the occupying state to the end of eliminating Native peoples entirely and stealing their land?
Editors Kristal Bivona and Manuela Cordeiro have selected five essays by emerging Indigenous anthropologists written from a non-hegemonic perspective, for their first translation into English, all published previously in peer-reviewed academic journals in Brazil. The translator is Lucas Escobar dos Santos, an Indigenous person himself, who moved from his biome to Manaus as a child, but never lost his Native connections. Truly, to translate a book like this, one would have to be intimately knowledgeable about Native culture and traditions.
Reflections is a publication of the Behner Stiefel Center for Brazilian Studies at San Diego State University, supported by the Consulate General of Brazil in Los Angeles, where a book reception with some of the authors and editors was held on April 25. Mr. dos Santos appeared in a video interview to speak of the challenges he faced. Presenters emphasized that not even in Brazil are Indigenous cultures known very well or at all, so the goal of the book is to make people aware of and to value the Indigenous experience, and to understand the roots and realities of, still, a substantial percentage of the Brazilian population. 
One theme that emerges is the collectivity of the writing. Although each article is signed, since their author comes from a specific people and place, the essay is very much a group effort, embracing and summarizing their communal wisdom, and there must be agreement as to which practices and customs they wish to reveal to the world. In some cases, even photography and video are discouraged. For example, if it is accurately described what rivers and lands are needed to sustain a community, prospective farmers and landowners might be alerted to where they should seek to demarcate their holdings so as to deprive the Native communities of their livelihood. The same waters required for soy cultivation or for cattle farming could be cut off from Native use for fishing and transportation.
Considering the number of people involved in the creation of this book and the formidable challenges of translating such difficult material, the finished product is as close to error-free as could be expected. In an interesting translator’s note, dos Santos describes the dilemma of rendering certain terms into English: “Parente,” for example, a cognate of the English word “parent” but meaning something larger—larger even than “relative” or “family member,” more like “the idea of belonging to a cohesive and supportive community, for each individual is seen as equal and close.” And “pajé,” something far beyond “shaman” or “healer” to reflect someone with “vast ancestral knowledge, that ranges from natural medicine to spirituality and the Indigenous worldview.”
One noteworthy aspect of this collection is that three of the five essays are by women. It is Ana Manoela Primo dos Santos Soares who introduces (to me, anyway) the idea of autoethnographic writing—“autobiography in dialogue with anthropology.” “In the writing of the self,” she tells us, “there are several voices that permeate the research and make a collective. There is a meeting of subjectivities and a connection between the subjective and collective. In it, we do not talk about the other, or for the other, but with the other.”
Felipe Sotto Maior Cruz addresses “otherness” in the academic world. Indigenous students have been given access to higher education, but there remains “the urgency of policies that would enable permanence in logistical terms, such as travel, housing, financial assistance, etc.” He goes on to critique the very foundations of the science:
“Anthropology emerged as a scientific discipline at the end of the 19th century, and in its beginnings, it was responsible for focusing on the phenomenon of otherness, that is, producing knowledge about the peoples that the West encountered in its commercial expansion. From its beginnings, anthropology was thus associated with the colonization process imposed on the people of different territories conquered by countries, such as England and France. It is important to highlight that colonialism…was a fundamental condition for the emergence of the discipline as we know it today, and it was in that overwhelming context for the people still studied by anthropologists that the discipline laid the foundations of the relationship between researchers and research ‘objects.’”
Although many of the more isolated Indigenous communities speak their Native language exclusively, “there are many Indigenous peoples,” the same writer continues, “who were led to adopt Portuguese as their primary language during the long and violent process of asymmetrical social interactions that we inherited from the colonial process.”
Braulina Aurora Baniwa (Indigenous people often incorporate their tribal identity into their formal names) writes about body care among Indigenous women, and how Native practices, surrounding menstruation and childbirth, for example, were affected by colonialism: “The arrival of churches was a great violence, both ideologically and in terms of human rights. At the time, it was the so-called ‘school of civilization,’ but now we understand it as the death of ancestral knowledge. Religion arrived and divided the Baniwa: one part of the community is composed of Evangelicals and another of Catholics. The division is still visible today.”
A reader, especially of an academic article, might have desired to learn more specifically about Baniwa practice—which herbs, what protocols? But the author wards us off: “We do not have to divulge everything we know to those outside our family. The women inherited ancient knowledge that is the continuation of the history of the people of their clan, and that dialogues with the work of the Baniwa men. This knowledge is powerful…”
Eriki Aleixo Wapichana takes us through the movement to reclaim the land of the Serra do Truarú community, and how it mobilized to reassert Indigenous control after white miners and farmers had tried to occupy and divide it, breaking up a Native homeland and destroying its life force. “This lack of knowledge about the cultural practices of hunting and fishing as a productive activity is similar to the idea that Indigenous people should work with plow and crops within a neoliberal logic of production and integration international society.” Fascinating in this chapter is the role of “catechists,” teachers of Catholic faith, who sided with the Native cause out of their devotion to Liberation Theology.
The struggle for Indigenous land is ongoing as plantation-style agriculture and raising cattle for meat continue to expand exponentially for immediate gain, to the total disregard of ecological health. Invasion, killing and rape are still critical words in the contemporary vocabulary of Brazil. It is a time, as one speaker at the Brazilian Consulate said, “not to give up but to grow stronger. The farther away that young people get from nature, the farther away they grow from themselves.”
The introduction of photography and film is the topic of the final essay by Edgar Kanaykõ Xacriabá. Well-known is the Indigenous hesitation to be “captured” on film for fear that a person’s soul will be taken away. While this is still very much in evidence, the usefulness of film to document political and territorial movements has to be admitted. Subtle thinking and nuanced decisions come into play in discerning the limited use of this technology as a “necessary evil.” “What are the implications for an Indigenous community ‘borrowing a weapon’ from the ‘other’ and gradually (re)appropriating and using it from its own point of view?”
“This is the moment when the arrows are launched, but it cannot be shown. The scene is cut again, now by the filmmaker himself, Divino Tserewahú, who makes a point of emphasizing the words of the elders about secrets and why he does not film this part of the rite: ‘What is secret, since our ancestors, is forbidden to film. That is why we did not film the throwing of the Pi’ú arrow. A secret is a secret, I cannot comment much.”
From an editorial point of view, aside from the occasional typo or missing word, I might have made some different choices, for example, restarting the footnote numbers with each essay and standardizing their margins. An index and glossary might have been helpful, too. But overall, for its content and unique approach—and despite the occasionally dense academic jargon of the discipline—this is a valuable contribution that will no doubt lead to much further achievement.
Kristal Bivona and Manuela Cordeiro, editors
Reflections from the Inside: New Indigenous Scholarship from Brazil in Translation
San Diego State University Press, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-938537-61-5
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