Between the 1960s and 1980s, Brazil's indigenous affairs agency (FUNAI) issued certidões negativas — official certificates attesting to the absence of indigenous peoples in specific areas — to landowners, ranchers, and corporations seeking legal clearance for land use. An estimated 1,400 such certificates were issued during this period, primarily covering the Amazon region.
This project analyzes a corpus of 78 certificates obtained via a direct email request to FUNAI, alongside 105 press reports documenting the conflicts and legal disputes generated by these documents. The analysis covers the states of Mato Grosso, Pará, Amazonas, and others, spanning the period from 1970 to 1990.
- Who signed the certificates, and was there institutional concentration of this power?
- When were certificates issued, and do emission peaks correlate with political events during the military dictatorship?
- Which indigenous peoples and territories were mentioned — or conspicuously omitted?
- How much territory was certified, and where?
- How long after a certificate was issued did press coverage of related conflicts emerge?
- Which peoples appear in both the certificate corpus and the press corpus, suggesting a documented link between certification and conflict?
Obtained from FUNAI via a direct email request to the institution. Subject to a usage agreement restricting the data to academic research purposes. Raw data cannot be shared publicly. A synthetic sample dataset and a full data dictionary are provided for replication purposes.
Researchers interested in accessing the original documents may contact FUNAI directly (www.funai.gov.br) or submit a formal request via the Lei de Acesso à Informação (LAI).
Collected from public sources, primarily the Hemeroteca Indígena digital archive. Coverage spans 1972 to 2009, documenting conflicts, legal disputes, and demarcation processes related to the certificates.
The 78 certificates analyzed here are not a statistically representative sample of the estimated 1,400 issued. They constitute a documentary corpus — the documents FUNAI selected and made available in response to a formal request. The selective nature of institutional archive access is itself analytically relevant: what was not provided is as significant as what was.
This project uses the language of corpus analysis rather than statistical sampling, in accordance with standard practice in historical social sciences and digital humanities.
funai-certidoes-negativas/
├── README.md
├── RESEARCH_LOG.md
├── data/
│ ├── reportagens_certidoes_negativas.csv # public source
│ ├── certidoes_sample_synthetic.csv # synthetic example data
│ └── data_dictionary.md # full column descriptions
├── scripts/
│ ├── 01_limpeza.py # data cleaning
│ ├── 02_coordenadas.py # coordinate conversion SAD69→WGS84
│ └── 03_eda.py # exploratory analysis
├── notebooks/
│ └── exploratory_analysis.ipynb
└── outputs/
└── figures/
- Certificates cover areas ranging from 100 to 136,730 hectares, with a median of ~5,000 ha
- Mato Grosso (41) and Pará (27) concentrate the majority of the corpus
- A small number of FUNAI presidents signed the majority of certificates
- 30 of 78 certificates make no mention of any indigenous people or territory — the agency certified absence without naming which peoples were considered
- Only 7 of 105 press reports include direct quotes from indigenous people (6.7%)
- Press coverage of conflicts extends to 2009, nearly two decades after the last certificate in the corpus
- Python (pandas, geopandas, matplotlib, seaborn)
- QGIS (spatial analysis and cartography)
- Quarto (reproducible reporting)
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Book chapter: FONTELES, Gabriel. "A FUNAI e os povos indígenas na Ditadura Civil-Militar: o caso das Certidões Negativas". In: MACEDO, Michelle Reis de (org.). Povos Indígenas no Brasil Republicano: Por uma Outra Narrativa da História. Curitiba: CRV, 2024. 438p. ISBN 978-6525165745. Available on Amazon
The press reports dataset is publicly available at Harvard Dataverse:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/6GK8BK
The dataset includes 105 press reports (1972-2009) documenting conflicts related to FUNAI negative certificates, collected from the Hemeroteca Indígena archive. A data dictionary describing the full certificate dataset structure is also available.
The raw certificate dataset was obtained under a usage agreement with FUNAI restricting it to academic research and prohibiting public redistribution, as it contains personal information. The press reports dataset is available in full in this repository. Aggregated outputs (figures, frequency tables) derived from the certificate data are published here and do not allow identification of individuals.
Gabriel Mattos Fonteles — PhD, Historian
Minor in Digital Humanities, University of California, Berkeley
fontelesgabriel@gmail.com
Code: MIT License
Data (press reports): Original sources retain copyright. Used here for academic research purposes.