The world’s largest rainforest, with the planet’s greatest biodiversity and situated in the world’s largest river basin has 5.5 million km2 and spreads across nine countries. About 60% of the Amazon is located in Brazil, covering 9 states, representing more than 40% of the national territory, or about 3.5 million square kilometers, where 18 million people live. Around 90 indigenous people live today in the Brazilian Amazon, often with a small population, after the extermination, usually due to illness, of the great civilizations of the region, such as Omagua and Tapajós, early in the contact with Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries.
This action of the state can be observed, for example, in the Directory of Indians[3] of 1758, a document with which the Marquis of Pombal, the all-powerful prime minister of King Dom José I (1750–1777), intended to legislate on the life of the Indians – first only in Amazonia, after all Brazil – in the period subsequent to the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal and its colonies (1759). The intention of “civilizing” the Indians is through the imposition of Portuguese, the language of the Prince, as this fragment shows with the spelling of the time:
Sempre foi maxima inalteravelmente praticada em todas as Naçoens, que consquistaraõ novos Dominios, introduzir logo nos Póvos conquistados o seu proprio idiôma, por ser indisputavel, que este he hum dos meios mais efficazes para desterrar dos Póvos rusticos a barbaridade dos seus antigos costumes; e ter mostrado a experiencia, que ao mesmo passo, que se intoduz nelles o uso da Lingua do Principe, que os conquistou, se lhes radîca tambem o affecto, a veneraçaõ, e a obediencia ao mesmo Principe. (...) será hum dos principáes cuidados dos Directores, estabelecer nas suas respectivas Povoaçoens o uso da Lingua Portugueza, naõ consentindo de modo algum, que os Meninos, e Meninas, que pertencerem ás Escólas, e todos aquelles Indios, que forem capazes de instrucçaõ nesta materia, usem da Lingua propria das suas Naçoens, ou da chamada geral; mas unicamente da Portugueza, na forma, que Sua Magestade tem recõmendado em repetidas ordens, que até agora se naõ observáraõ com total ruina Espiritual, e Temporal do Estado [Almeida 1997, 3–4, chap. 6].
It has always been unalterably practiced for all Nations, who will conquer new Dominions, to introduce to the conquered people their own tongue, for it is indisputable, that this is one of the most efficient means to banish from the rustic people the barbarity of their old customs; and because experience shows that at the same time that the use of the Prince’s language, which has conquered them, is infused into them, the affection, the veneration, and the obedience to the same prince are also expressed....will be one of the principal cares of the Directors, to establish in their respective settlements the use of the Portuguese Language, and in no way consent that the Boys and Girls belonging to the schools and all those Indians who are capable of instruction in this matter, use the languages proper of their Nations, or the language called Lingoa Geral (General Language); but only Portuguese, in the form, which His Majesty has rectified in repeated orders, which until now have not been observed, with total Spiritual and Temporal ruin of the State [Almeida 1997, 3–4, chap. 6].
At that historical moment, Pombal’s document turns mainly against the ‘Lingoa Geral’ or General Language, the Tupi of the coast of Brazil transformed into the vehicular language of indians, whites and blacks in vast portions of the territory, especially in the Amazon, where it was also called Nheengatu. The document marks the beginning of the decline of this important vehicular language, which will accelerate with the slaughter of some 40,000 nheengatu speakers – mainly indians and blacks – who took up arms against the ‘white’ domination in the Cabanagem Revolution (1834–1841) in the Amazon region [Bessa
Freire 1983, p. 65].
The process will be consummated with the disappearance of the Nheengatu in much of the Amazon – but not in all – caused by the arrival through immigration of 300 to 500 thousand monolingual Portuguese speaker Northeasterns between 1870 and 1918 attracted by the richness of the so called “Rubber Boom” in the Amazon Region.
Today, in spite of this process of linguistic displacement that replaced it with Portuguese in the gutters of most of the great rivers, Nheengatu resists
…between the city of Manaus and the hamlets of the Upper Rio Negro, in an area of approximately 300,000,000 km² (...) Nheengatu is the usual communication tool of the population living there and the language of commerce “ [Bessa Freire, 1983, 73].
This is demonstrated, to take an example, in this political propaganda of a Workers’ Party (PT) candidate to state deputy in the 1998 election:
Alto Rio Negro Miraitá Arã
Se’ Muitá,
Mbuessara Aloysio Nogueira candidato Deputado Estadual arã.
Aé mira katu, ti mira puxi. Aé yane’ anama.
Deputado Estadual yawé, Mbuessara Aloysio Nogueira ussu yane’ maramunhangara kirimbawa kuri. Aé ussu Alto Rio Negro miraitá nheenga kuri Assembléia Legislativa upé.
Ixé ayumana penhé, se’ anamaitá.
Mbuessara Auxiliomar Silva Ugarte suí[4].
“To the peoples of the Upper Rio Negro.
My Brothers: Professor Aloysio Nogueira is a state deputy candidate. He is a nice guy. He is our friend and relative. As a state deputy, Professor Aloysio Nogueira will be our brave warrior. He will be the voice of the peoples of the Upper Rio Negro in the Legislative Assembly. I greet you, my relatives. Professor Auxiliomar Silva Ugarte”. (The text was kindly given me by Aloysio Nogueira himself in São Gabriel da Cachoeira, Amazonas, Brazil).
We should not imagine, however, that laws such as the Directory of Indians have, by themselves, changed the linguistic profile of the country, or have been 'obeyed' quietly by the population. The historian José Honório Rodrigues draws our attention to the resistance that the various linguistic communities opposed against the policies of homogenization and glotocide, in a true war of languages [5]:
In a society divided into castes, races, classes, even when the process of unification of language is evident, especially in a continent like Brazil, where for three centuries several indigenous and black languages fought against a white language, there was neither cultural peace nor linguistic peace. There was a permanent state of war. (...) The cultural process that imposed one victorious language on the other was not so peaceful, nor so easy. It costed unprecedented efforts, costed blood of rebels, costed suicides, cost lives [Rodrigues 1985, p. 42].