ORE REKO PORÃ: OUR GOOD WAY OF BEING GUARANI

Abstract

This photo essay has as its main goal to demonstrate daily scenes of the Guarani people, seeking to affirm that such people, despite the long and intensive contact with the national society, is one of the people who creates most ways of resistance against the homogenizing action of non-indian society. These photos are a result from the work with the Guarani Tapixi (Lebre) and Pinhal communities, located in Reserva Indígena Rio das Cobras, the city of Nova Laranjeiras – Pr, and the Itamarã community, city of Diamante do Oeste – Pr. Nowadays, the Guarani people faces as a major difficulty the issue of access to the land, being the agricultural expansion fronts, carried out more intensively in the mid-twentieth century, the factor which most restricted the communities in small spaces of land. The Guarani names their traditional territory with the term Tekoha, in which Teko is triform root that in this case means custom, Guarani’s way of being; the suffix ha is where the action is performed; so Tekoha is the place where one can live the Guarani culture. However, this basic requirement for Teko’s maintenance in not being met by the government policies, and in the western Paraná the situation of the traditional lands of the Guarani people vary from delimited, non-delimited to camps, in which the conditions of subsistence are precarious. Seven in the number of land occupations by the Guarani in this region, adding up to approximately 150 families, all of which collide in the disregard of public policies and move on without the delimitation. I hope these images do justice to the Guarani people, and are able to show a little of the vividness of their culture.