The remaining quilombola community Grotão is located in the rural area of the municipality of
Philadelphia, state of Tocantins. Like other quilombola communities, it has its cultural heritage
transmitted from generation to generation, through the transmission of knowledge, practices
and values. It is territorialized in a historical process of resistance with a unique cultural
diversity. The research was done through fieldwork that included the participation of the
researcher in meetings, the production of interviews with residents and community leaders. The
information obtained in the interviews was used as evidence to trace the perspective of the
Quilombo do Grotão Remnant community about the pressures suffered in relation to their daily
territory and the impacts of eucalyptus cultivation. The work evidences the need to understand
the traditional peoples from their historical formation and their territoriality from that
perspective, to look for development alternatives that respect their particularities. It also
emphasizes that the arrival of modernization for the traditional peoples, was accompanied by
losses in the territoriality, result of the violence undertaken against them. Several situations of
conflict and the struggle for territory that have occurred in the community since the 1970s are
described, these situations involve constraints and threats carried out with the support of
gunmen. The socio-territorial formation of the Grotão community is presented as well as the
importance of this in the transmission of knowledge between the generations and the record of
the production of the territory by orality. In addition, it shows the connection of the community
with the territory through the cerrado, the marshes and rivers and portrays how the occupation
of the territory, through the deep knowledge of this, allowed the reproduction of life. Finally,
the concern with the maintenance of life is presented from the exposure of the impacts suffered
by the Grotão community after the arrival of eucalyptus, in what we consider to be the most
recent phase of the modernization process of the Amazon.
|
