The desire to tell a new story: the Kiriri of Acré and the memory inscribed in the land

Abstract

This BEPE project focuses on the ethnographic problem of the "new story" (nova história) or "our story" (nossa história) which the Kiriri do Acré people want to tell in the land they inhabited in the south of Minas Gerais. Led by "cacique" Adenilson Kiriri, the families left their old village in the west of the state of Bahia and migrated to the Southeast of Brazil searching for a new place to continue their lives. This area, inhabited since 2017, has the state of Minas Gerais as its legal owner, but its "true owner" (verdadeiro dono) is a Kiriri people ancestor, which allowed them to establish the new village there, named Ibiramã Kiriri do Acré. On this new land, the enchanted ones are giving people the opportunity to start over, this time the right way allowing the Kiriri families to tell a new story connected to a movement to inscribe memory in the land. In this regard, we believe that preparing a more detailed treatment of ethnographic data around the relations between Kiriri stories and the memories they wish to inscribe in "green land" (terra verde) is essential to understand the "new story" they want to tell. We also suggest that exploring the nuances of the relationships between people and a sort of other-the-humans when they are talking about the stories is important to understand the memories that they wish to engrave. Finally, it is also intended to participate/collaborate with the research activities on the Humanities and Social Sciences School at Memorial University of Newfoundland. (AU)