The news broke on 28 October 2018. Through the crackle and hiss of the radio, we made out one sentence: “Jair Bolsonaro has been elected president of Brazil.”
It was a long way from Brasília to Maçaranduba, an Indigenous community in the Amazon rainforest, but the significance of the news was clear. Some of our Awá and Tenetehar friends paced up and down, others held their heads in their hands. One let out a visceral scream, before reaching for a bottle of sugarcane spirit.
Two men arrived after dark, crossing the river in a dugout canoe, the final leg of their nine-hour journey back from delivering the community’s ballot papers. As they approached the village they absorbed the scene and knew the news they most feared had arrived. They pulled up some stools and sat down, deflated.
I sat with them, thoughts running through my head as we began to process the colossal significance of this moment for Brazil’s Indigenous people.
A coming-of-age party had been planned for that evening, in honour of a girl whose first menstruation marked her passage into adulthood. Should the ritual go ahead? This night is not a night for festivities, some said and stayed home. “The party is on!” others retorted, “we can’t let a karaiw [a white man] stop us.”
A firecracker launched high into the sky marked the start of the party. People began to gather under a large thatched shelter, holding hands and dancing in circles – round and round, in and out – to the rhythm of Tenetehar song and the rattle of seeds in dried gourds. We danced for hours, no need for conversation, the grip of each hand growing tighter as the night turned to dawn.
The next four years were to be the most brutal for the Indigenous peoples of Brazil since the military dictatorship. The president-elect was openly, unapologetically racist. “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians,” he once said. And: “The Indians are evolving; more and more they’re human beings like us.”
In December 2018, a month before Bolsonaro was inaugurated and took office, gunmen opened fire on dozens of Indigenous Tremembé families in their homes in Maranhão state. It would be a chilling portent of what was to come.
Invasions of Indigenous territories skyrocketed, the land-grabbers emboldened by Bolsonaro’s promise to protect the criminals, and by his genocidal calls for legislation to ease the theft of Indigenous lands for industrial exploitation. Fires raged, gold miners poisoned rivers and people with mercury, forests were felled, and vast fields of soya and sugarcane spread as far as the eye could see, the smell of pesticides lingering in the air. And when the pandemic hit, the loggers and miners brought Covid into Indigenous communities, the disease killing them at a much higher rate than non-Indigenous Brazilians. It was hellish to see, hear and smell this destruction.
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