Voices that would not silence: colonial violence and indigenous women's coping strategies

Author(s)

Julia Pizardo Micheletto

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Franca. 2021-09-30.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp). Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais. Franca
• Defense date: 2021-09-27
• Advisor: Denise Aparecida Soares de Moura

Abstract

This research analyzes indigenous women and the contexts of colonial violence to which they were exposed, as well as their coping strategies to tackle these contexts. Bearing in mind the data dispersion related to this still underdeveloped historiographical subject area, this work’s thesis was conceived through extensive periodization, which includes the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The investigation about the role of the natives in Brazilian history has come a long way in the past thirty years and there already is a consolidated debate that has taken down old theses, such as the extinction one, the vanishment one and the ones of assimilation and acculturation of indigenous populations to the colonial society. However, the gender approach is still emerging in this subject area, with the exception of a few researchers’ contributions. Supported by data gathered through secondary sources, indigenous mythologies, narratives written by priests of religious orders and Overseas Council’s documentation, it was verified that the violence experienced by indigenous women in the ethnical environment, explained in the light of moral obligations of the group, was transformed by the colonization process. Colonizers’ presence exposed indigenous women to new work demands and to the religious conversion, both deviating from women’s moral obligations to their ethnic group. In that new colonial reality, indigenous women faced a violence scenario that was twofold: one of ethnic violence, when women did not comply with their roles and social rules; and another one in the colonial context, that came from their own group and women’s relations with the colonizers. In spite of that, in both scenarios indigenous women found mechanisms to act in order to circumvent the violence to which they, historically, have always been exposed to. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 19/06116-7 - Voices that don't want to silence: colonial violence and indigenous women's coping strategies
• Grantee: Julia Pizardo Micheletto
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master