AMONG ESTUARIES AND CROSSROADS: ETHICAL POLITICAL LISTENING TO INDIGENOUS WARAO PEOPLE IN NATAL/RN
Migration, Refuge, Warao, Indigenous peoples, Psychoanalysis.
This work in born in the encounter with Warao families across the streets of Natal/RN, confronted with the state of vulnerability made starkly visible by the 477.493 people displaced from Venezuela arriving in Brazil until 2023. Even though migration is part of how national groups are formed and represents the universal right to free movement and territorial protection, migratory movements are currently seen as humanitarian crisis factors, unveiling death-producing capitalist policies. By focusing on global South issues, the displacement of indigenous groups stands out, as they are victimized by a historical project of extermination, seeing their territories assassinated by the extractivist logic in the “coloniality of power”. This is the european-imposed control of subjectivities, goods, cultures, and knowledge from indigenous peoples, by instituting the notion of “race”, favoring the european “White” colonizer as a universal subject model. From this perspective, in this research, we experienced and analysed processes of ethical-political listening to migrant and refugee Warao venezuelans in Natal/RN, performed by visiting their temporary shelter as well as their designated access points to health, education, and welfare policies. To achieve such, ethical-methodological pathways were composed between ethnography (del sur), psychoanalysis and militant research, taking on the political stance of desiring to contribute with Warao strengthening and resistance strategies when facing coloniality. From then on, we pose the question: which narratives inscribe and reinscribe themselves, building on the violent, non-organic displacement of indigenous peoples, more specifically the Warao people sheltered in Natal/RN CARE facilities? Therefore, this dissertation has as a general objective: to analyse the specifities in indigenous Warao migration and refuge in the municipality of Natal/RN, by ethical-political territorial listening. Furthermore, we propose as specific goals: 1) to discuss the possibilities of ethical-political territorial listening in the forced displacement context of the Warao; 2) to raise a discussion around the matches-mismatches of the Warao with migrant and refugee policies in Natal/RN; 3) to identify possible contributions from psychoanalysis in reinventing ethical-political listening devices for indigenous migration and refuge contexts in Brazil. Along with ethnographical incursions and ethical-political listening sessions derived from coexistence, three interviews were performed with Warao representatives residing in the shelter. Ethical procedures for free, prior and informed consultation following parameters set for indigenous peoples were adopted (Letter of Consent presented and signed by a community leader; participation consent for interviews; and dialogical feedbacks on the work). From these materials and the writing of a field journal, here named a corpus journal, the stories of Warao migrants were narrated and witnessed, versing over (their lives in their original territories, socioeconomic and political transformations in Venezuela, beginning to move towards cities, their crossings and challenges arriving in Brazil, difficulties faced in being welcomed in cities, and their needs and desires for a joyous future in Brazil). The unfoldings of this research experience showed how listening ethically and politically to the Warao and their migration and refugee narratives cannot be achieved without listening for the colonial unconscious inscribed in the researcher’s position, by making herself aware of the racial democracy myth, the denegation of racism and the repression of African and indigenous ancestry. At this study’s finish line, which is in reality a “start-finish-start”, we find that ethical-political listening is done with body and testimony, supporting the struggles of a population apart from their original territory, but who might, in territorrializing memory, re-territorrialize life.