Images from Prehistory, part II

By Anne Merrie Pessis

When the European reached the shores of Brazil their main objective was to gain riches, and to that end, they deployed technical devices that could give them the power of physical and ideological destruction. According to 16th century texts, the indigenous people received no distrust in character with their own structural values, so different from those of invaders. Their differences in technology and in cultural priorities were interpreted by the Europeans as signs of an inferior evolutionary stage. So extreme was the dogma of superiority that the Europeans even questioned whether the indigenous peoples really belonged to the human race, an issue on which the church was called upon to make a ruling with their insufficient knowledge of the technology of war, the indigenous people defended themselves against the invaders’ impositions and fought for their right to remain free from slave labor and from oppression. Many groups fought to the point of utter extinction.
The story of clash between the cultures is a succession of conflicts involving aggressive contests of power and violence, resulting, in massacres and extermination. The Europeans techniques of war prevailed over the indigenous people’s skills directed at searching for a harmonious co-existence of the two groups each other and with nature.
The texts of the age were written by men belonging to a culture that a dogmatic in the religious sense; their culture, therefore, provided them with and ideological justification for a cruel genocide that is still going under other guises. The usual descriptions of the indigenous peoples were full of images of bestiality and savagery that legitimized any act of extermination. From the beginning of European domination, stereotypes established the background of reference; these stereotypes came together into the accepted image of the indigenous Americans, which has been projected forwards up to the present day. Historical drawings and engravings frequently show a design in accordance with social partners of graphic representations characteristic of the different epochs. This stereotypical conditioning operating over centuries transmitted a distorted and misinterpreted visual image of indigenous American People. Nineteenth century drawings are perfect illustration of the process that make degraded monstrous and fearsome image of the ethnic and who originally inhabited Brazil, seen acceptable, completely natural second nature.