The Indigenous women reforesting hearts, minds and politics in Brazil

Célia Xakriabá cuts a striking figure in the Brazilian congress, a space that is dominated by largely white men in dark suits. The Indigenous lawmaker attends legislative sessions in a bright yellow feather headdress and usually introduces her floor speeches with a short song in her native language.

Xakriabá and her colleague Sônia Guajajara – who was also elected to congress in 2022 before being appointed Brazil’s first ever minister for Indigenous peoples – are the two most visible faces of a nationwide movement of Indigenous women that is seeking to reforest minds and politics: the National Association of Indigenous Women Ancestral Warriors, known as Anmiga in Portuguese.

The organization was formed in March 2021 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, amid a women-led campaign to encourage vaccine take-up among the Indigenous population. The women realized their strength lay in numbers and came together to stand up against another, constant existential threat: the violence that has continuously threatened both their land and their bodies.

The two are inextricably linked. Indigenous women feel a symbiotic relationship with their ancestral land, as their territory connects them to their spirituality, their culture, the wisdom of their forebears and their traditional way of life, Xakriabá explains. It is a way of life that depends on a harmonious and non-exploitative relationship with the environment in and with which they live – a continuation of the stewardship they have practiced since time immemorial. It’s a stewardship that is ongoing. Globally, native people protect 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity despite making up less than 5% of the population.

In Brazil, protected Indigenous territories cannot legally be exploited for activities such as mining or intensive agriculture. Although enforcing rules is a big challenge, guaranteeing Indigenous land rights has been proven to help keep the forest standing in the Amazon, one of the world’s largest carbon sinks, which is critically threatened by deforestation.

A living relationship

The connection these ancestral warriors feel to the Earth shines through in the language they use to describe their different members. ‘Women-Earth’ denotes the group of two dozen co-founders; ‘Women-Roots’ are those who empower their peers on the ground – they are community leaders who spread information at a local level; ‘Women-Seeds’ represent the group in regional Indigenous organizations; and ‘Women-Water’ take the movement’s demands beyond Brazil’s borders, to international forums like the annual COP climate conference. Members also speak of themselves as ‘Women-Biomes’, reinforcing the national aspect of their movement: they represent all of Brazil’s 305 ethnic groups and its six different biomes – not just the Amazon rainforest, but also the Pantanal wetlands, the savannah-like Cerrado, the Atlantic Forest, and the lesser-known Pampa and Caatinga biomes.

“We are the Earth itself. My land doesn’t form part of my struggle, I am a part of my land. Wherever I go, I take her with me. I can leave my territory, but my territory will never leave me,” explains Xakriabá, who finds strength in this relationship to stand tall in congress in Brasília, a space that has traditionally been hostile to people like her. She adds: “We are much more than environmental activists. Environmental activists can decide to leave if they’re being threatened. We can’t decide to leave our own being. Attacking our territories is like attacking our very lives.”

Indigenous territories – and the bodies of the women living in them – have historically been under assault from invaders, from Portuguese colonizers and bandeirante settlers to farmers looking for land and wildcat miners prospecting for gold, often acting with the more-or-less overt blessing of the Brazilian authorities as was the case under the previous president, Jair Bolsonaro. These kinds of threats persist today, but there is another, connected, one: climate change.

What’s happening?

Braulina Baniwa is a ‘Woman-Earth’ who hails from the Alto Rio Negro Indigenous reserve, deep in the Amazon. She says that the change in the ‘ecological calendar’ on her land is evident. “The month of March is a month during which fishes migrate up the river. Rivers would normally have started filling up, fruit would be growing. This is a season of abundance. But what is happening now? Today, the river, our land, is all dried up.” 

The Amazon, which contains around 10% of the world’s biodiversity, endured its worst drought on record last year. Gushing rivers were reduced to a trickle, riverside communities were left stranded in parched-out landscapes and the forest’s abundant fauna and flora died off in the heat. Researchers have since linked the drought to man-made climate change. Similar extreme events are setting alarm bells ringing around the world, yet are met with worrying apathy by political leaders.

This is why Anmiga is committed to grassroots action. “Reforesting degraded areas and protecting the environment is never going to come just from the government,” says Guajajara. What we need, she argues, is a change in our collective and individual mindsets that puts people and planet first, and the election of representatives with an ecological conscience. This starts with recognizing the value of Indigenous technology and science as part of the solutions to climate change – as well as giving historically excluded Indigenous women a voice.

Custodians in congress

On this the group can claim success. Its campaign in 2022 to get Indigenous women into the legislature resulted in the election of Xakriabá and Guajajara. Indigenous women occupy numerous roles in the brand new Indigenous Peoples Ministry overseen by Guajajara, including as head of the national Indigenous foundation (Funai) – a decades-old institution that had never before been managed by a native Brazilian. Meanwhile in congress, Xakriabá leads a parliamentary group for the defense of Indigenous rights. She says that one of her victories is having moved forward a bill which would institute policies to combat violence against Indigenous women specifically (the bill currently awaits ratification in the senate).

“We created our own space for political participation, and we’re also empowering women on the ground so they can continue [our work],” Guajajara says with a pride in her voice. “I think we’ve overcome this idea that ‘women can’t’.”

Not only is it clear that they can, they are also reaffirming their cultural identity in the process. Women in feathered headdresses, beaded jewelry and face paint may still be a small minority in the corridors of Brasília, but they are no longer unexpected. Last year, 500 Indigenous women filled the congressional building in an explosion of song and color during the Indigenous women’s march, a bi-annual event which the group now organizes. The most recent edition mobilized a total of 8,000 women in Brasília – over three times more than the first edition four years earlier.

Speaking to the world

Marked by singing, spirituality and sisterhood, this march is not just an event for Indigenous women to get together and celebrate their diversity, their ancestry, and their culture – it is also an opportunity to present their demands to the world. “We attracted the whole world’s attention to the fact that Indigenous people and the environment are indissociable,” says Guajajara of the impact of the first march. Speaking of their accomplishments more generally, she goes on, “we show how Indigenous women contribute to fighting climate change, because women are always working in a sustainable way”, whether that’s farming the land to achieve food security or collecting seeds to make jewelry and other artisanal artifacts.

The success they have had in just a few years is historic – and can serve as a lesson in effective mobilization for all activists. The key ingredient, one ‘Woman-Earth’ says, is solidarity. But immense challenges remain. Despite a more favorable political climate under President Lula da Silva, who has demarcated ten new Indigenous territories and helped oversee a 50% drop in Amazon deforestation, Indigenous Brazilians continue to fight for their land and their life. Right now, the biggest threat to Indigenous rights is the marco temporal, or time-marker: a legal thesis according to which Indigenous peoples could only lay claim to land they occupied on a specific date in 1988. The supreme court ruled this interpretation unconstitutional in 2023, but the farmer-friendly congress disregarded this and enshrined the marco temporal into law a few months later, in a huge setback to the Indigenous movement.

But these women are not cowed. They find strength in the ancestral warriors who preceded them and whose knowledge they carry within, and the fight continues. They are campaigning for more Indigenous candidates in municipal elections and are meeting with Indigenous women from all over the world to build an agenda for the COP30 climate conference, which Brazil will host in the Amazonian city of Belém in November. “The future is Indigenous” has become a rallying cry of the movement – and these women leave us little doubt about that.