An Archaeogenealogy of Indigenous Policy

power, discourse, and tutelage in the Figueiredo Report

Abstract

This article analyzes how indigenist policy in Brazil transformed the concepts of tutelage, integration, and development into forms of governance that ultimately violated traditional territories. Drawing from the 1967 Figueiredo Report, it employs an archaeogenealogy of power, combining documentary ethnography with a historical-structural reading to trace a map of the rationalities, dispositives, and their effects. In the southern region of the former state of Mato Grosso, it demonstrates that inadequate demarcations, land leasing, expulsions, enclosures, starvation, and avoidable deaths suffered by the Kaiowá, Terena, and Kadiwéu were not exceptions, but rather part of an institutionalized routine underpinned by regimes of truth that racialize and hierarchize lives. Furthermore, it reveals the continuities between the SPI and FUNAI, suggesting that indigenist policies must break with the logic of tutelage and align with the ways of being and living of indigenous peoples.