“We are at war. The ideological falsification that suggests we are at peace is just to keep us going. There is no peace anywhere. It’s war everywhere, all the time.” This scathing statement from indigenous leader and environmentalist Ailton Krenak, from the Wars of Brazil.doc (Guerras do Brasil.doc) series portrays the class, gender and race conflicts in our country. In the case of indigenous people, the challenge is even more complex: as well as confronting systematic genocide for more than 500 years and even today fighting to have their rights recognized, these are also the people who lead a global struggle: for the preservation of the environment and the survival of our species.
In this context, between 24 and 28 April, approximately 6 thousand indigenous people and 200 peoples camped out in Brasilia for the 19th edition of the Free Land Camp (Acampamento Terra Livre: ATL), the largest indigenous mobilization in Brazil. Of the various debates held at the meeting – such as for the urgent demarcation of indigenous lands and about the unconstitutionality of the Temporal Framework (Marco Temporal) proposal – the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil: APIB), alongside its seven regional organizations, published an open letter to decree a climate emergency.
“The whole planet, Mother Earth, is sick, crying out for a cure. To be free of the diseases that the predatory development model, based on accumulation, on profit and on insatiable consumption, have caused: floods, droughts, dams, hurricanes, an increase of more than 1 degree in the planet’s temperature, close to the 1.5o target that countries established for 2030. All this is called a climate crisis and has worsened the precariousness of broad sections of the Brazilian population, particularly those who, like many of us, are already impoverished and marginalized by the current economic model,” a passage of the decree asserts.
The document presents 18 demands to all the State powers, including the demarcation of indigenous lands in all biomes, the strengthening of the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples and the current National Plan on Climate Change. Beyond progress to the institutional plan, the indigenous are calling for a profound change: the transformation of our model of civilization. “As our indigenous sisters say, we need to reforest minds to cure the Earth, Mother Earth,” the decree declares.
With the indigenous living, the forest stands
One of the crosscutting issues raised in the decree is recognition of the role the indigenous play in preserving the environment. “To talk of biodiversity is, in fact, to recognize all the services provided by the indigenous. We are talking about more than 80% of the biodiversity falling within indigenous lands. This is a reflection of the harmonious way that indigenous people treat the environment in which they live, the space they occupy, principally of a traditional nature, the reciprocity, respect for the environment,” noted Dinamam Tuxá, APIB Executive Coordinator from the Association of Indigenous Peoples of the Northeast, Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo (Articulação dos Povos e Organizações Indígenas do Nordeste, Minas Gerais e Espírito Santo: APOINME). “It is for this that we fight so hard, it is for this that we claim our territory, it’s to protect our traditional knowledge, for our physical and cultural reproduction, it’s for our livelihood. But it’s also for the livelihoods of those who aren’t able to talk – the rivers, the forest, the animals,” he declared.
Dinamam was born in Rodelas in the extreme north of Bahia and, since he was small, has experienced the consequences of the predatory development model for himself. In 1988, he saw his old town submerged to fill the lake for the Luiz Gonzaga – Itaparica dam, the last one on the São Francisco River. With their traditional lands under water the Tuxá were transferred to three areas, one of which was the “new” Rodelas, where Dinamam remained with his kin. This was one of the landmarks of his involvement in activism, since the Tuxá people still suffer the consequences of the diaspora today. “After 35 years, we are still a people without a territory, at the time it was demarcated, but today we haven’t had reparations for the flooded territory, nor the return of the traditional territory which was expropriated for enterprise at the time,” explained Dinamam who trained in law to fight against attacks on indigenous people.
He explained that processes like this reflect white people’s market view of nature, which is totally unlike the way the indigenous relate to the environment. “The non-indigenous, who want to measure the value of the land, who want to measure the value of a specific space and see it as something to be exploited. Indigenous people have another view, another relationship. As well as being respectful, it is a relationship of life, of exchange. This means that we are able to protect this biodiversity, which is still alive today because we are alive. The threat of non-demarcation, the threat against indigenous people also threatens diversity, not only in Brazil, but around the world,” he asserted.
“Brazil never again without us”
The different worldviews of the indigenous and the non-indigenous were also outlined by educator Maria Terena. “Politics today is the politics of the rural caucus, the politics of those who want to end everything for money. And we don’t need money. We need nature, to be at peace and walk in the forest, to sit under a tree here in the village, to teach our children to go to the river, to hunt and fish,” she explained.
Maria is an indigenous woman from the Terena people and lives in the Tereré community in the municipality of Sidrolândia (in Mato Grosso do Sul). According to 2010 data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística: IBGE), 56% of the indigenous population in the Central-West region is concentrated in Mato Grosso do Sul. However, today the state is notable for the destruction of local territories through the advance of agribusiness and attacks on traditional peoples. “For us, as indigenous peoples, it’s really crazy. You see animals walking around towns because they don’t have their own space any more, their habitat,” she decried.
Maria trained in pedagogy and had her first contact with activism after she entered the classroom, through the indigenous teachers movement. She notes that the different ways of relating to the community and the environment were apparent in school, in a worldview that was not described in books. “Because our elders are as wise as what you find in books, what science says is a theoretician, is someone who knows. Our elders have this. But we don’t appear in any books. We are on the village ground. And an indigenous school is this, it is going outside those four walls to go into the community and have this exchange of knowledge,” she noted.
In relation to the climate crisis, she emphasized that one essential step is to change the perception of nature. “This climate crisis will only end when we become aware of what nature represents for us. Of how important each Brazilian biome is, how important a standing tree is, how many lives it maintains. Every time we cut down a tree, how many of us die?” Maria also underlined the central role of indigenous people in this confrontation. “We’re trying to preserve, we go to the movements, to the assemblies, we denounce. Our role is this, it is to try to protect. Because if we don’t fight for nature, who will fight for it?” she asked.
Dinamam noted the urgent need to place indigenous peoples at the centre of climate discussions. “We want to be at the centre of the debate and for countries to see us a part of the solution to climate change. Not only for our way of life, for our traditional knowledge, but also because it has been proven that we are the main guardians and defenders of this fauna, this flora and the territories. So we want to highlight not only the indigenous agenda, but also the need for a change to civilization in order to contain this crisis, not to aggravate it.”
And he emphasized how many countries have discussed the climate issue and entered into international agreements to deal with the problem but how many of these efforts have been in vain. This is why the climate emergency decree declared by the indigenous fulfils a central role. “Due to the ineffectiveness of these treaties and international agreements, these conferences that try to dialogue about climate issues, we can see that, in fact, there is no real commitment from the economic sector, from financial capital, from capitalism as a whole. That is why indigenous people have decreed a climate emergency: to demand effective measures from the Brazilian state and from other countries.”
CESE can see that the devastation of ecosystems and environments is growing, in particular, in the inequality that accompanies this destruction and impacts on people’s lives, which means that environmental and climate injustice cannot be understood separately from the social question. The public CESE works with proposes new ways of understanding the environmental problem, which include other concepts about the assertion of life, in opposition to the neo-extractivist developmental model, other ways of living together and singular ways of life in relation to nature, that also refer to the environment.
Indigenous peoples, traditional riverine communities, extractivists, pasture and grazer communities and other populations and their ways of life are essential to keeping the environment alive. On the 5 June, as we celebrate World Environment Day, CESE reasserts its commitment to all the peoples and communities who keep the environment alive through their very existence.