It is hard to imagine a place with greater human diversity than the Mid-Xingu region, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon. Entering the forest feels like travelling through time, a journey that goes back to the slaves using the woods as a hideout, to the rubber plantation settlers, to Transamazônica - a road that tore through the forest as the first agent of “civilization” and brought pioneers from all over Brazil, up to the cosmopolitan businessmen who arrived with the gigantic Belo Monte Hydroelectric Dam in Altamira, Pará.
All these migration waves were like a parade to the eyes of the native populations. The indigenous ethnic groups of the Mid-Xingu are at the core of an invisible Brazil, as guardians of songs and litanies and timeless practices. For centuries, they prospered in a sustainable way by cultivating manioc and yam, by hunting paca and armadillo, and by fishing tucunaré and piranha often from the top of their stilt homes above the rivers - the palafitas - which look more like the slender legs of an ingenious Don Quijote. And right next to it, the children would eat from their hands the manioc flour freshly made. It was paradise before being lost to Milton. Or at least, this was my first look of enchantment at the dawn of the Amazon.
Before the construction of the Belo Monte Dam, one of the largest in the world, Raoni Metuktire, a Kayapó indigenous leadership and candidate for the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize, tried to warn the local traditional communities of the devastation that would follow. All in vain.
