FOREWORD
The 2nd edition of the book of the writer, sponser of the culture and country lover for pé de barriguda (typical tree of the semi-arid) Jackson Rubem, is proof of the interest and of the importance of a text that has in the tradition and in the resistance of the indigenous people your object.
For a long time, the impression was been under that the indigenous people would be decimated in few decades. Thwarting these hypotheses, along these 500 years of colonization, the indigenous people not only elaborated different resistence/surviving strategies, as well as they reached in the last decades a considerable population growth.
Nowadays, people have knowledge of the existence of indigenous people with your respective traditional lands, demarcated or not, living in 24 States of the Federation. There is also great amount of natives living in urban centers, besides those belonging to people still without contact with the national society and others that today resume your ethnic identities until then hidden.
In the Northeast, 170.389 people pronounced indigenous that corresponds to 22,9% of the indigenous population in Brazil. (IBGE, Demographic Census 2000).
So, the book “Brazilians Before Cabral – History and Rock Art ” comes to contribute with this resistance history doing of Jackson Rubem an ally of the indigenous cause in the measure in that it exposes aspects of the life, of the culture and of the fights of the indigenous before Cabral and of the after Cabral using willing words in alphabetical order, didactical and with translation for English enlarging the range of inclusion of the information here contained.
Brasileiros Pré-Cabralianos – História e Arte Rupestre “Brazilians Before Cabral – History and Rock Art” brings revelations of the past history whith aspects of the manners of the natives’ life and of the European invasions in the century XVI, as well as of the indigenous contemporary history when denouncing the effects of the globalization of the capital and your relationship with the indigenous territories, of the natives’ suicide and it discourses concerning the manifestations of the art, of the culture and of the organization of these people at the present time.
Another originality touch and of hidden preciousness in the big world and in the beauty of what has been remaining of the Bahia Dry Area they are rock art in the territory of Irecê, more specifically in the cities of Cafarnaum, Central, Uibaí, Iraquara, Itaguaçu da Bahia, Barro Alto and Lapão, as well as in the close cities of the territory as Gentio do Ouro and Morro do Chapéu.
To obtain these histories printed in the walls of the caves and plateaus, Jackson Rubem needed to throw hand of your adventurer gifts and of radical sportsman when climbing, to walk, to camp to capture the wealth of images that the reader has in your hands.
For this group of information, curiosities and images, the text urges us to venture ourselves for the caves of the knowledge, in order to understand the cosmo visions and manners of life of these people that more than five hundred years struggle by their warriors, of the charmed ones, of their torés, of their Xamãs, Caciques, of the arches and bows and its hunting guns, through the internet and of the several communication means, of the associations and dispersed organizations for Brazil for land, life and freedom.
Irecê, summer of 2006
Cláudio Eduardo Félix
(Master in Theory and History of Education – Professor of UNEB – Bahia, Campus XVI – Irecê)