Rádios Indígenas: Brazil’s Indigenous Language Broadcasting Landscape

ABSTRACT

This article offers a critical review of Brazil’s Indigenous language broadcasting landscape, from traditional analogue transmission to podcasts and online radio. The study introduces Brazil’s Indigenous linguistic diversity and locates the current vitality of Indigenous languages within Brazil’s constitutional provisions and broadcasting legislation that both support and impede programming in languages other than Portuguese. Following an assessment of media penetration and uptake, and a contrastive review of four Brazilian radio stations that have either substantial Indigenous content or a dedicated focus on Indigenous issues, the article concludes with an assessment of the outlook and challenges for programming in this sector.

Funding

This work was supported by a University of British Columbia Work Learn International Undergraduate Research Award.

Acknowledgments

This article has benefitted significantly from constructive criticism and important suggestions offered by colleagues at the University of British Columbia, specifically Mark Johnson, Raiane Salles and Hannah Wittman. In addition, we are extremely grateful to the two anonymous peer reviewers whose generous and specific recommendations have further strengthened this contribution. We thank journal editor Anne MacLennan and the editorial staff associated with the Journal of Radio & Audio Media for this opportunity. All remaining errors and inconsistencies are our own.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The last sentence in the excerpt is a direct quote from Francy Júnior.

2. “So, why capitalize ‘Indigenous’? It articulates and identifies a group of political and historical communities, compared to the lower case ‘i,’ which can refer to anyone. For example, being born in Ludington, I’m ‘indigenous’ to Michigan, but I’m not an ‘Indigenous person’ from Michigan” (Weeber, 2020).

3. We ask the reader to note that the last national Brazilian census was in 2010, and while the next census had been scheduled for 2020, it was subsequently postponed. In 2021, the government did not approve the census budget, and without dedicated resources, no census can be conducted. Plans are currently being drawn up to conduct the census in 2022 (Richter, 2021).

4. Fundação Nacional do Índio (National Indian Foundation).

5. On the EGIDS scale, “dying” languages are those where “the only fluent users (if any) are older than child-bearing age, so it is too late to restore natural intergenerational transmission through the home; a mechanism outside the home would need to be developed” (Eberhard et al., 2021).

6. Many activists are critical of the “new FUNAI” which is perceived to be working against the interests of Indigenous peoples through increased political interference (see Milhorance, 2021).

7. Accessing publicly-available IBGE data sources, we attempted to identify the percentage of Indigenous Brazilians who own cellphones with internet capability and broadband access but were unsuccessful in our search for granular and disaggregated data.

8. From January 2019 until the time of writing, Jair Bolsonaro has served as president of Brazil. A retired military officer and a conservative politician unaffiliated with any established political party, his administration has been marked by toxic polemic, contentious decisions and a profound disregard for needs and rights of all minorities, including but not limited to Indigenous peoples.

9. The currency conversion to United States Dollars follows the exchange rates of September 27, 2021. While the actual amount may seem trivial to those in the global north, it is a significant investment for rural and less affluent communities in Brazil.

10. The information described in this section about the application process to register a community radio is taken from https://www.gov.br/pt-br/servicos/radcom, a government page, which we have translated from Portuguese.

11. Our translation. The original text reads: “Pela burocracia para concessão de outorgas, pelos custos do cotidiano de produção e veiculação e pelas exigências legais de constituição associativa.”

12. Our translation. The original text reads: “São livres as críticas e os conceitos desfavoráveis, ainda que veementes, bem como a narrativa de fatos verdadeiros, guardadas as restrições estabelecidas em lei, inclusive de atos de qualquer dos poderes do Estado.”

13. English version retrieved from Superior Tribunal Federal (Superior Tribunal Federal [STF], 2020).

14. We note that many rural and remote areas in Brazil can be understood as “zones of silence” (Medeiros, 2020), for having no easy access to radio or tv broadcast signals.

15. www.radioyande.com

16. Our translation: Network of Indigenous Communicators of Rio Negro.

17. Regrettably, specific languages and community names are not listed in this publication and no further details are available.

18. Our translation: Dourados Indigenous Reserve.

19. Quilombolas refer to the people who live in Quilombos, settlements of Afro-Brazilians (sometimes mixed with people of Indigenous heritage) descended mainly from fugitive slaves, who have formed communities in rural or forested areas. Ribeirinhos are traditional rural communities who live near rivers, with fishing and farming as cornerstones of their livelihood.

20. A short video (in Portuguese) by Vitor Vulga, a young member of the Indigenous Pataxó community, explains how and why Indigenous peoples in Brazil use the word parente: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CSNHNWQpmRh/?utm_medium=copy_link

21. These numbers were calculated based off YouTube episodes with the highest viewing numbers for the respective months, as of July 26, 2021.

22. Facebook page: AJI – Ação dos Jovens Indígenas de Dourados. Video: “Comitiva Esperança em Dourados na entrega de cestas básicas.”

23. Our translation. The original Portuguese reads: “As regiões que historicamente apresentam piores indicadores sociais no país – Norte e Nordeste – são as que proporcionalmente têm menos municípios com rádios comunitárias oficializadas.”

24. In the course of scoping, research and writing this contribution, from May to September 2021, we attempted to reach out to individuals and groups whom we identified as responsible for or in leadership positions within the radio stations we selected to review in this paper. Despite multiple attempts through multiple platforms over several months, we were unable to make connections. Any further research in this area would benefit greatly from engagement with the founders and broadcasters themselves in order to better understand the obstacles that Indigenous communicators face when running a radio station in Brazil.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natália Oliveira Ferreira

Natália Oliveira Ferreira graduated with a BA in Linguistics from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver. Her research interests include Indigenous languages, lexicography, and language revitalization. She has worked as a research assistant for two linguistics labs and participated in a fieldwork project to study comparative structures in Secwepemctsín, an Indigenous language of British Columbia. She is a member of the Latin American Languages Lab (LaLaLab), a student-led research group at UBC, and of the Relational Lexicography project. At present, she works as a research assistant in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies at UBC.

Mark Turin

Mark Turin is a linguistic anthropologist and an Associate Professor cross-appointed between the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He directs the Digital Himalaya Project and the World Oral Literature Project, and has been working in collaboration with the Thangmi-speaking communities of Eastern Nepal and Darjeeling district in India since 1996, and with the Heiltsuk First Nation community on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada, since 2014. Turin has written and presented two BBC Radio series on language endangerment and policy: Our Language in Your Hands and On Language Location. Turin's research is focused on language reclamation, revitalization, documentation, and conservation; language mapping, policies, politics, and language rights; and orality, archives, digital tools and technology. He is the author or coauthor of four books, the editor of 12 volumes, and edits a series on oral literature.