I made the decision to conduct my dissertation research in São Gabriel partly as a result of having learned about the steps that had been taken to make three Indigenous languages – Baniwa, Nheengatú, and Tukano – official at the local level. The legislation was originally passed in 2002, and further elucidated with legislation in 2006 that outlined the necessary steps to be taken in the public use and recognition of these languages (the second law is known as the law ‘regulating’ the policy). The full text of these two pieces of formal language policy are included as Appendix A. Basic points include the requirement for all public services to be provided, both orally and in written form, in all four of the official languages, the requirement for the municipal authority to support the learning and use of the three Indigenous languages (with emphasis in that regard placed on schools and media outlets), and the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of language. My hope – and indeed, my expectation – was that the existence of this official language legislation reflected a strong commitment to language revitalization, including in the urban area, and that I might find models of language planning that would help support the efforts of Indigenous people living in multilingual, diasporic contexts around the world. While I assumed that substantial work would remain in the efforts to strengthen and expand the use of all of these languages, especially those that had not been granted official status, the policy itself was one of the factors that suggested to me that São Gabriel was a place in which Indigenous language revitalization could be studied from a positive perspective.
Immediately after arriving in the city for a preliminary field visit in February 2011, however, I realized that this impression from afar was not entirely accurate. The first indicators that the language policy had not had the impact I had expected came as I observed the linguistic landscape (Landry and Bourhis 1997) during the cab ride into the city from the airport and during my preliminary explorations of the downtown area. Practically all of the city’s signage and written material was in Portuguese, and although I occasionally heard Indigenous languages being used in conversations among friends meeting on the street or families shopping at the market, the default language of public interaction was overwhelmingly Portuguese. During that visit, I found only one example of Indigenous-language text on a sign in a prominent, public location – the “welcome” sign that had been painted on the side of the city’s gymnasium (Figure 1, below). The few other examples that I encountered were either inside public buildings (such as schools, in examples that will be discussed later in this chapter), or on roads with very limited traffic, and were difficult to spot, either because of the size of the sign itself or its placement surrounded by other text and signage. By contrast, the gymnasium is located at an intersection that marks the entrance point to both downtown São Gabriel and beyond, to the bairros in which the majority Indigenous population lives. Driving in to the city from either the airport or the port at Camanaus would take you past this “welcome” sign10, making the location ideal for communicating a message to outsiders arriving in the city. The sign makes use of the unofficial slogan “the most Indigenous city in Brazil”, provides a list of local foods and traditional dances, and invites the reader to become
10
familiar with these “parts of our cultural identity”. The multilingual text of the word “welcome” is written in six languages: Portuguese, Spanish, English, Nheengatú, Baniwa, and Tukano.
Figure 1: "Welcome" sign on the gymnasium (February 2011)
This sign was painted as a mural on the gymnasium in downtown São Gabriel. In addition to the word ‘welcome’ in 6 languages (Portuguese, Spanish, English, Nheengatú, Baniwa, and Tukano), the Portuguese language text of the sign reads: “The most Indigenous city in Brazil”, then lists several local, traditionally Indigenous foods and beverages, as well as a few of the traditional dances of the peoples of the region, followed by the phrase “This forms part of our cultural identity”.
This sign exemplifies the role that the official language policy, and Indigenous languages in general, have come to play in the lives of the Indigenous population of the region, and in shaping an identity for the city itself. In this chapter, I will discuss the significance of this legislation, the motivations behind it, and the implications of the limited ways in which it has been implemented in the decade since it was passed by the
municipal government. The language policy project was conceived both as a means of meeting the needs of the non-Portuguese speaking Indigenous population and as an act of symbolic valorization of the languages themselves. While Brazil’s high concentration of linguistic diversity and relatively small proportion of Indigenous people within the total population11 make official status for Brazilian Indigenous languages impractical at the national or even state level, the municipal context of São Gabriel offers a different opportunity.
The idea for the policy came out of a class of Indigenous leaders and educators who were participating in the Magistério Indígena (MI), a program offering secondary education with a focus on Indigenous pedagogies to Indigenous teachers who had never completed this level of schooling12. In discussions of the importance of languages and the potential use of language policy as a means of protecting or promoting Indigenous
languages, one student made an offhand joke about trying to make their languages official in Brazil. Another student thought that, while it was useless to consider at the federal level, at the local level, this idea could become a real possibility. Gilvan Müller de Oliveira, a political linguist from the Brazilian Instituto de Política Lingüística
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The most recent census reported that only 0.4% (814,000 people) of the total Brazilian population declared themselves to be Indigenous (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística 2010). This population includes speakers of approximately 181 living languages (Lewis 2009).
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Formal education in the region was initially the result of the efforts of Catholic missionaries, who established schools in some of the larger communities and expanded their efforts by sending students who completed primary school (8th grade) back to their home communities in order to work as teachers of
younger children. As a result, many people who have been teaching in rural areas for years have never gone beyond this level of education, and supporting the improvement in their credentials has been an important goal of the Indigenous movement. The importance of this program has been further increased since the establishment, by the Worker’s Party (Partido Trabalhista, PT) governments of Luiz Ignácio da Silva (Lula) and Dilma Rousseff, whose emphasis on quality education in Brazil has included legislation requiring all teachers in Brazil to have enrolled in post-secondary education by 2015.
(Language Policy Institute, IPOL), was present in the area during this course, and offered to help the students design the policy and move forward with it13. From there, the
proposed legislation was developed by IPOL in consultation with FOIRN, who presented it to the municipal city council and saw it successfully passed in December 2001
(Oliveira and Almeida 2007).
The significance of language to Indigenous identity in the local context means that language loss and the threat of shifting completely to Portuguese constitutes a major concern for the peoples of the area, and despite the high degree of linguistic diversity, the languages chosen for official recognition indubitably serve as linguas francas for the Indigenous population (Stenzel 2005). Both the development of the law itself and the attempts to implement it since, however, have suffered from a lack of ideological clarification about its purpose, about the intended role of both official and non-official languages in public life, and about what types of planning measures would be required in order to ensure its effective application (most notably with respect to language
standardization). As a result, the practical implementation of this law remains stalled, and people frequently talk about it as “never coming off the paper” (‘nunca saiu do papel’). The 2006 legislation that outlined specific steps to be taken with respect to the
officialized languages also set clear deadlines for each action; these deadlines have long passed, with essentially no change. Despite the strong presence of Indigenous people and speakers of Indigenous languages within government, particularly at the municipal
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These discussions occurred in 2000, before I began my work in São Gabriel. This recounting is based on the recollections of Maximiliano Menezes, the second student in the story, as he told them at the event commemorating the 10th anniversary of this law that took place at the São Gabriel campus of the Universidade Estadual de Amazonas in February 2012, which I will discuss in more detail later in this chapter.
level14, the state demonstrates very little political will to promote or preserve these languages. At the same time, however, the law has had a multifaceted impact, as it has become a tool for some language advocates to use in grassroots efforts for the
valorization of Indigenous peoples and languages, while also serving as a point of contention in debates about the nature of Indigenous identity and its role in the urban area.