The Amazon holds a unique place within the living fabric of the Earth. Its significance to the climate emergency and the wider extinction crisis is attested by science, while its role in the cultural imagination of environmental movements is unparalleled.
A campaign to raise awareness and fight for Indigenous rights is being launched by the “Teia das 5 Curas” Indigenous network, including Brazilian educator and UBC Professor Vanessa Andreotti, Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change, and Cash Ahenakew, a First Nations’ (Cree) scholar, Associate Professor, and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples’ Wellbeing, as well as Dr. Sharon Stein assistant professor in the area of Higher Education and students and artists involved in the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective.
On 25 August 2021, the supreme court of Brazil is due to give its decision on ‘marco temporal’. If this decision goes in the government’s favour, it will strip the rights of Indigenous communities over all lands on which they cannot prove they were physically present in 1988. The wave of industrial exploitation that would follow is likely to push the Amazon as an ecosystem across the tipping point into collapse.
Learn more and support the campaign.
“The fight against the climate crisis—which is also the fight against human extinction—depends on the protection of Indigenous peoples’ rights. We are the front lines of protecting the Amazon forest and many other sensitive areas in Brazil and around the world. Now is the time to act for our human and other-than-human relations, and for our collective future.” Chief Ninawa Huni Kui.
The video below by Canada Research Chairs specializing in climate change, ecology, community disaster, water resources, law, inequalities, and Indigenous rights, wellbeing and education discusses the current threats to Indigenous peoples, the Amazon forest and the escalation of climate change as the Brazilian government is voting to take away Indigenous lands, to cancel Indigenous rights and to open the Amazon and other protected areas to predatory projects.
Campaign video from “Teia das 5 Curas” network of Indigenous communities in Brazil, Cuerpo immenso performed by Azul (former UBC student).
