Video/Article: The Lungs of the Earth are on Fire

ROLE: Director, shooter, editor, write.

This 15 minute video and article is being reworked to incorporate new footage and will be published with Mongabay News this January.

The Munduruku indigenous people, in Brazil's Pará state, have seen an increase of loggers and miners who are taking advantage of Covid-19 to invade, extract, and profit during a debilitating pandemic—also contributing to the spread of the virus amongst Munduruku communities and the ultimate death of 14 elders.

“The lungs of the Earth are on fire. We feel afraid when the fire comes. You can imagine the fire burning houses — imagine the despair of the families,” said Maria Devanildesd do Carmo Kayabi — a Brazilian indigenous chief in the Amazon Rainforest. 

In 2016 the indigenous Munduruku people of the Tapajós River in Northern Brazil — numbering roughly 14,000 — managed to halt the production of a major hydroelectric dam on their river by demarcating their land. 

And in 2019 when illegal loggers and miners creeped onto their federally protected land, the Munduruku warriors burned the invader’s boats, destroyed their machines, and replanted trees in the damaged areas. 

But when fires of an unprecedented scale ripped through their land in the summer of 2019, the Munduruku were at a loss; they didn’t know how to protect their ancestral lands or return the fight. 

In 2019 the Amazon Rainforest lost 130,000 acres of land to fire — the equivalent of 72,000 soccer fields.

Carmo Kayabi described the fires as a catastrophic and unrecoverable loss of nature. “There you have the rivers, the animals,” she said. “When we loose it, a cultural genocide takes place.”

Luisa Molina — a 30 year-old Brazilian PHD candidate in social anthropology — is examining the importance of ancestral land for the Munduruku People in the Upper Tapajós River.

“What I really think we have to take seriously is this connection — the people, the land, and how they are connected,” she said. “Which means that if you destroy the ways that they live, as a Munduruku People, you destroy their lives.” 

The theory is that if a cultural genocide takes place the people affected remain alive while their culture dies off. But in her research with the Munduruku, Luisa doesn’t see a difference between genocide and cultural genocide. She added, “The Munduruku do not draw a distinction between life and culture.”

For the Munduruku, without their ancestral land, they cannot exist. 

Alessandra Korap Munduruku, a warrior of the Munduruku, has temporarily left her home on the Middle Tapajós River to study law at the University of Santarém. 

She explained that the fires happen every year during the dry season. “But this 2019 year it increased because of the President's speech,” she said. 

Korap is referring to a broadcast in which Brazilian President Jair Bolsanaro announced that indigenous communities should assimilate into mainstream society by opening up their protected land to logging, mining, and agricultural exploits.

Backing up his words, Bolsanaro has systematically stripped FUNAI of its power — the organization responsible for monitoring state-protected indigenous lands. 

In the wake of this action, many experts believe that soy and cattle farmers have been emboldened to set fires on protected indigenous lands to clear them, claim them, and use them for soy or cattle production. 

There was an 88% increase of fires on Brazilian indigenous lands in 2019 compared to 2018.

And between 2016 and 2017 there was a 62% increase in land invasions and exploitation of natural resources on indigenous lands — according to Brazil’s Indigenous Missionary Council.

Shocked by the lawless environmental exploitation, Korap’s community has pooled together enough money for her to study law so that she can fight the Brazilian Government’s legislation destroying their lands — and ultimately their culture. 

“We do not negotiate with any company, we do not negotiate our land, we do not negotiate our life, we do not negotiate our river,” she said. 

“As a woman, a mother, a wife, I will defend my territory. I will defend my people. I will defend my river. This is our fight.”