On the trails of ñandú, under the paws of the centauro

traces of indigenous folk of pampa gaúcha

Abstract

The erasing and ethnocide (Angatu, 2019) caused the disappearance of Charrua and Minuano collectives of the pampa gaúcha. The racial whitening implemented by Portugal and Spain (Santos, 2018) and formation of an identity based in information gaps, stories of rapture and strategic silences (Bracco, 2020), the population constituted itself worshiping expropriated traditions and denying indigenous memories. The folklorization capitalized and unconfigured the indigenous people, baptized as gaúcho: poor citizen in lands owned by others. The indigenous women suffered a double violence, because their bodies, as the land, were treasure to be dominated by the settlers (Segato, 2018). The culture of this tribes can be recovered by the ethnoastronomy, that studies how the stories reveal the knowledge of the constellations used for locomotion and territorial management. What this people saw on the sky represented what was on the ground, (Afonso, 2006) as in the case of "caza ao ñandú", reported by Moqoit tribe of Argentina. (Gimenez et al., 2002), (López, 2018). The ñandú or rhea americana, lost its space in the fields as "especie etnobiologica clave" (Rosso e Medrano, 2016) for the horse, foreign element that composes the "centauro da pampa" (Zalla, 2010), symbol of the ingrafted culture of the gaúcho.