O Comitê Indígena Mineiro: ressignificando o cotidiano de indígenas desterritorializados

Abstract

This research analyzes the experience of the Minas Gerais Indigenous Committee (CIM), an organization that emerged in 2012 in Belo Horizonte to support dispossessed indigenous people in facing the challenges experienced by indigenous peoples in the context of dispossession. It discusses CIM's strategies for promoting Good Living, valuing ancestry and generating creative adaptation, configuring forms of ethnic resistance and self-organization. The research seeks to understand whether the CIM is capable of rescuing the indigenous Good Life in the daily lives of these peoples. CIM unites indigenous people from different ethnic groups who suffer from isolation and loss of identity, traditional knowledge and rights when they leave their lands. The collective seeks to create a cooperative system to defend the rights of indigenous peoples. It organizes cultural events and political struggles, such as support for retaking territory. The research has a qualitative approach and is characterized as a case study. The research participants are indigenous and pró-indigenous people from the CIM. Data was collected through conversation circles, recorded and transcribed in virtual format, and its content was analyzed. The theoretical framework is indigenous Good Living and the right to self-determination and indigenous self-organization recognized by the UN. The CIM has been fundamental in bringing together dispossessed indigenous people in the fight for rights, with participation in municipal councils, cultural and political events, and the conquest of spaces such as the Abya Yala fair, the Indigenous Week of Belo Horizonte, in a process of indigenizing the city. But something fundamental is the collective care among indigenous people through rituals, indigenous health practices, the rescue of ways of life, the valorization of ancestry as strategies to promote Good Living.