Indigenous autonomy and organizations: a study on projects, actors and mediations in the application of Amazon Fund resources
Amazon Fund. Social and environmental projects. Indigenous organizations. Indigenous autonomy.
This research is part of efforts to reflect on the current process of consolidation of indigenous organizations in indigenous and indigenist politics. These legally and formally constituted and indigenous-led organizations have grown exponentially since the 1990s and have now experienced an increasing degree of institutional strengthening and articulation. In particular, I observed this dynamic in operation regarding access to and use of the resources of the Amazon Fund, one of the central initiatives of international environmental cooperation, which has become an important source of resources for the implementation of environmental and indigenist public policies. Currently, the Amazon Fund has approximately R$ 139 million committed to a set of 13 projects that allocate resources and execute actions on 83 indigenous lands in the Amazon. This portfolio of projects, as well as the issues that their existence raises, are the objects of the present investigation. The motivation of the research came from the fact that, from this set of projects, two are executed by indigenous organizations, and that this situation has been put in check in the face of the demand for the "direct support" of the Amazon Fund, so that the resources could be accessed and executed directly by indigenous organizations as well this demand has been covered by the narrative of the promotion of indigenous autonomy. In the course of the research, I detail the reflection on indigenous organizations and what roles, narratives and demands they evoke, discussing indigenism in the twentieth century and the transformations regarding the insertion of indigenous peoples into the national society up to the trajectory of the two indigenous organizations that achieved the approval of projects with the Amazon Fund – Associação Apiwxta e Associação Floresta Protegida. I also discuss the antecedents that contextualize the insertion of the Amazon Fund in the Brazilian “indigenismo” configuration, exposing the circumstances of its existence and functioning, and perceiving how it takes on an important role of financier of the implementation of the Política Nacional de Gestão Territorial e Ambiental de Terras Indígenas (PNGATI).