Pacifying the white man

a history of modernity told by Indigenous peoples

Abstract

We develop the perspective of a criticism of modernity by Brazilian Indigenous thinking, from its denounce of modernization as an expansive and totalizing movement that has in the imbrication of eurocentrism-colonialism-racism and/as fascism its structuring and streamlining core. We will argue the proposal of an Indigenous thinking-praxis that offers and alternative explanation of modernity as war of colonization based on structural racism and having as consequence the institutional ethnocide-genocide against Indigenous and Blacks; and also that proposes an epistemic-political-normative role to Indigenous since their forms of being in the world, that is, to pacify the White man. Therefore, we have the inversion of a triple logic of modernity: the modernity as an endogenous, self-referential and self-subsistent perspective; the modernity as a lineal and direct expansive movement towards post-traditional universalism – and as post-traditional universalism – from cultural-communicative rationalization; and the modernity as an exclusive and necessary condition for the criticism of modernity, for the criticism of the others of modernity and for the basement of an universal notion of human rights, tasks that the others of modernity cannot generate or sustain.