Our Languages

Part of the Indians in Brazil series, OUR LANGUAGES relates the historic repression of indigenous languages in Brazil. Many Indian languages were nearly lost thanks to missionaries and merchants - who rewarded Indians for learning Portuguese with status and material gifts - and government-sponsored schools that punished children for speaking in their native tongues. In spite of all this repression, individual acts of resistance and cultural preservation mean there are still more than 180 Indigenous languages spoken in Brazil today. The linguistic diversity is so great that Indians living in the Negro river area must know at least three languages as well as the official Portuguese in order to communicate with their neighbors. The Constitution of 1988 finally gave Indians the right to bilingual education in their own schools, and we see how the Forest School of professor Joaquim Kaxinawa allows children to be immersed in their native language, developing new teaching methods that will help to preserve culture for the future.