Yuko Miki, Fordham University
ymiki1@fordham.edu
Reperiodizing the Nineteenth Century Conference
Yale University, February 27-28, 2015
Violent Terrains:
Black and Indigenous Legal Regimes in Late-Nineteenth-Century Brazil
This paper is part of a larger project that examines Brazilian postcolonial nationbuilding through the interconnected histories of black and indigenous people from the eve
of independence in 1822 to the end of the Imperial period (1889). The project critiques
scholars’ overwhelming focus on people of African descent in Brazil and the
marginalization of indigenous Brazilians as historical subjects after independence. It
proposes that in order to understand the scope of central issues confronting postcolonial
Latin American nations—such as slavery, citizenship, and constructions of racialized
difference and national identity—we must engage with the histories of both populations.
“Violent Terrains” addresses the relationship between law and violence in the first
half of the 1880s in the border of Bahia and Espírito Santo provinces. This was a frontier
region whose settlement and colonization only began in earnest after independence, a
process realized through the expansion of slavery into indigenous territory. I focus on two
parallel cases of extravagant violence that took place in the same region within a few
years of each other. The first is the settler massacre of an entire community of Nok-Nok
Indians in 1881; the second, a slaveowning family’s castration and execution of
Seraphim, a slave who impregnated his white mistress, Rita, 1884. In both cases, the
victims’ bodies were disappeared and the perpetrators subsequently denied their crimes. I
analyze the murders’ highly ritualized violence to show that far from representing frontier
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anarchy, these acts embodied the perpetrators’ ideas about legitimate violence and power
and reveal the presence of the state in frontier regions.
The Nok-Nok massacre followed a historically specific practice known as matar
uma aldeia (settler massacres of entire indigenous villages, with the aid of indigenous
guides), which settlers blamed on Indian “savagery” in order to legitimize their own
violence. In the example studied here, flagrant judicial misconduct allowed the massacre
to be denied all together and the killers acquitted because “no Indian bodies were found.”
The slave Seraphim’s tragic end echoed the numerous examples of gendered punishment
and executions of slaves throughout the Americas. Yet what distinguished his death was
its clandestine nature. Instead of a creating a public spectacle of violence to affirm
masters’ state-sanctioned power over their slaves, Seraphim’s executioners disposed of
his body in secrecy and denied any knowledge, and were subsequently condemned by the
public and law enforcement for their brutality. This paper argues that the outcome of
these two cases, although equally violent, reveals the diverging legal regimes governing
indigenous and enslaved black Brazilians in the later nineteenth century. For Indians,
who were de jure Brazilian citizens, the state’s presence manifested itself in the blurring
of legal and extralegal authority that effectively placed them outside legal protection and
abrogated their citizenship. For slaves, the state increasingly intervened in, instead of
abetted, masters’ private violence against them in an era of growing anti-slavery agitation
across Brazil. If such developments created further openings for slaves to claim their
right to citizenship, we must also recognize that that same right was increasingly denied
to indigenous Brazilians.
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