Brazil’s Fire At Museum ‘Like a New Genocide’
RIO DE JANEIRO — A handful of indigenous activists and researchers were celebrating a birthday when they noticed the flames devouring a building a few dozen meters away.
“It’s the museum that’s on fire!” said José Urutau Guajajara, a member of the Tenetehára- Guajajara tribe who had been researching his people’s heritage in the archives of Brazil’s National Museum. By the time they reached the centuries- old palace, home to the world’s largest archive of indigenous Brazilian culture and history, f lames had gutted it.
Mr. Guajajara tried to run into the building and was held back by guards. He watched as hundreds of thousands of documents, artifacts and artworks were reduced to ashes on the night of September 2.
It was a monumental loss for Brazilian historians. But the destruction of indigenous artifacts represented a more personal blow for the descendants of Brazil’s oldest inhabitants. “This is like a new genocide, as though they had slaughtered all these indigenous communities again,” Mr. Guajajara said. “Because that was where our memory resided.”
When Mr. Guajajara and his friends saw the fire at the National Museum, they were gathered in the husk of what had once been Brazil’s Indian Museum. It had been abandoned for decades. The National Archives building, which fire department officials have long called a fire hazard, is nearby. But the neglect of the National Museum, which had been home to emperors, stood out as singularly outrageous to the researchers who worked there.
Chronic underfunding left its halls with makeshift wiring, damaged ceilings and bat droppings along walls. A termite attack forced the closing of a dinosaur exhibit last year.
Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, a historian at the museum, said Brazil’s leaders had invested in areas that could become profitable. “They think of culture as a business,” he said. “Not the soul of a nation.”
The National Museum’s collection of indigenous artifacts included 40,000 items pertaining to more than 100 ethnic groups. A mask made by Tikuna tribesmen, which had been a gift to the Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro I, was most likely the oldest item. There was also a headpiece made by members of the Munduruku tribe, which was first exhibited in 1882.
But perhaps the most consequential loss was the collection of the German ethnologist Curt Nimuendajú. Born Curt Unckel, he was adopted by members of a Guarani tribe in the state of São Paulo who gave him the new name, which means “one who created his own place.” He died among the Tikuna people in 1945, leaving behind a trove of notes, letters, expedition journals and a map detailing the location and languages of the groups he had come across.
“Each year of his life he did a new expedition,” said João Pacheco, who curated the ethnological exhibition for the last 20 years. “He was the premier Brazilian ethnographer.”
The National Museum had struggled financially in recent decades and had a flood that drenched Egyptian mummies in 1995. Brazil’s National Development Bank had committed to funding improvements worth $5 million, which would have included a fire suppression system. The overhauls were to start late this year.
After the fire, Daniela Alarcon, an anthropologist at the National Museum who studies the Tupinambá people from the northeastern state of Bahia, collected statements about its loss from leaders of the tribe.
One leader, Glicéria Jesus Silva, told her, “That place was like a memory, a computer hard drive, that at any moment, any ethnic group, from any people, could access to get information, to know where they were, to not feel lost.”