Chronicles of Little People VII: Josefa, the Indian & Maria Josefa, the Queen

CMIO 26 de April de 2016

4 minutes read

Belém, capital of the State of Grão-Pará and Rio Negro. The year, 1779. The 4th of February dawned. It was the day on which the Indian Josefa Martinha was going to file her request for freedom from Queen D. Maria I. It was her last remedy to put an end to the intense persecution that Captain Hilário de Moraes Bittencourt was driving her, which was jeopardizing her freedom and that of your children. On the other side of the Atlantic, Maria Francisca Isabel Josefa, the Pious, had assumed the throne just over two years ago, after the death of her father, D. José. While Maria Josefa, the queen, took care to implement the turner, In the set of political-administrative actions that followed the fall of the powerful Marquis of Pombal in 1777, the Indian Josefa asked for her intervention, resorting to her most extreme resource in the long dispute that linked her to Captain Bittencourt.

The story of Josefa, India, had started long ago, when she was still young. She was living with her husband João when they were transferred to the said Captain Bittencourt, a rich man and powerful plantation owner. To her misfortune, her husband died and she was left with only two children, living on the plantation under the captain’s tutelage. Problems began when Josefa tried to make one of her sons an apprentice carpenter to support her in her old age. She didn’t make it because the captain went against her intentions.

Josefa did not surrender to the lord’s will and sought protection from the state governor’s court, but her efforts were in vain. To make matters worse, Josefa’s attempt made Bittencourt’s fury grow, making coexistence between them impossible. There seemed to be no alternative and Josefa fled the property located on the Acará River along with her children. The captain’s reaction didn’t take long and he made them hunt with slave escorts.

Aged, hidden in the woods, sick and tired, Josefa, the Indian, appealed to the mercy of the queen, the other Josefa, to be granted her freedom based on the Indian Freedom Act, of June 6, 1755, extended to their children and relatives and asking, finally, that “Hilário Bittencourt would not embarrass them anymore”.

House of the Indians, in a 19th century design. 18 by Joaquim Codina, in the book “Viagens Filosóficas”, by Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira

Josefa Martinha’s drama was not uncommon and many Indians who lived in the immense Portuguese colony in America were forced to live, for generations, with slavery or other forms of restriction on the use of their freedoms. In fact, the history of the process of conquest and colonization of the immense territory that we now call Brazil could not be written without the wide use of various mechanisms of compulsion of indigenous populations to work.

This process, marked by tension and violence, ended up reserving a place of subordination and inferiority for the Indians, expressed in legislation, in the discourse of colonial agents and, obviously, in the social and hierarchical relationships that involved these multiple characters. Thinking in this way, the history of Indian women like Josefa neither begins nor ends in the 18th century. In fact, his remarkable effort to remain free, along with his children, helps us understand the complexity of this long-lived process that marked the history of Brazil.

Contrary to what it seems, resorting to royal justice was not uncommon for the Indians in the colony. In recent decades, research on Indigenous History and Indigenism reveals that the native populations incorporated into the world knew, each in their own way, to appropriate their prerogatives in the colonial world and demanded countless times to the Justice to guarantee their freedom, their heritage. collective, including the defense of their lands. They are stories of incredible struggles in Pará, Maranhão, Ceará, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais among many other places that help us to put into perspective the vigorous action and protagonism of Indians in guaranteeing their rights and in the attempt to take your fates in your hands. An endless war that extends to the times we live in.

Queen Maria Francesca Isabel Josefa. Drawing by Giuseppe Troni.

Once again, I am unable to know what happened to Josefa, India. I was never able to find out if the other Josefa ever dispatched her case. As always, I prefer to believe that Bittencourt and his escorts were deceived by the labyrinth of woods and rivers and that Josefa lived in peace for the rest of her days. As for the queen, this I can tell. After the death of her husband and son, her mental health was seriously compromised, a condition that would worsen with the French invasion and the coming of the Court to Brazil. The chronicle of this disorderly voyage usually attributes to him a terse phrase when the anguished nobility struggled to board the ships for Brazil: Don’t run so fast, they’ll think we’re running away. Already known as Maria the Mad, she died in Rio de Janeiro in 1816.

* The image that opens this text is from Belém from the 18th century, in a drawing by Joaquim Codina, from the book “Philosophical Journey through the Captaincies of Grão Pará, Rio Negro, Mato Grosso and Cuiabá”, by Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira.

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