Time frame: For indigenous people, land is an extension of the body – 06/07/2023 – Environment

First, I thought that what my master’s professor told about his learning with the indigenous cultures of Colombia was a metaphor. “For them, the river is a continuation of their veins, their blood”, teaches Stephan Harding, doctor in ecology from the University of Oxford.

I found it poetic—as if it weren’t also literal. My limited vision considered the physical separation between a river and a human body obvious after all.

It was only at the end of the course —which precisely proposed a holistic approach to the environmental sciences— that I was able to accept the true obviousness: if we drink river water, it is clear that it will compose our body. The river, yes, continues in our veins. We, unfortunately, only realize this when environmental contamination crosses our health.

For the country to be able to discuss the legal thesis of the temporal framework, it is necessary, first, to establish a philosophical treaty: we are not talking about the same land when it is signified by whites or by indigenous people.

For us, the land is the ground we walk on, or even a property that belongs to us. In the indigenous view, however, humans belong to the earth. She is an extension of their bodies.

The broad meaning implies a physical boundary: the indigenous land is that which surrounds a people.

A good part of the 732 indigenous lands in Brazil have already been demarcated: there are 490 homologated territories. Another 74 were declared but are still awaiting the completion of the process, while 43 have already been identified by Funai and 125 are still in the identification process.

Adding up the lands already approved and those still in the process of recognition, indigenous lands make up 13.8% of the national territory —which, it is worth remembering, is the size of a continent.

Brazil is one of the few countries with land available for conservation, occupation and agricultural production. More than physical space, land conflicts vie for economic and political power —meanings that we white people attribute to land.

Completing the demarcation process is a fundamental step towards guaranteeing the legal and physical security of indigenous peoples, who live under threat in conflicts with invaders.

Likewise, the legal security of rural landowners also needs to be ensured. The debate over the time frame has overshadowed a legitimate source of the sector’s demands: farmers who are eventually expropriated need to be compensated by the State.

Compensation would also need to consider the value of the bare land and not just the improvements made to the land, as is currently restricted.

The direction of legal security passes, inescapably, through land regularization.

However, the ruralist caucus, which defends the time frame agenda in Congress, has systematically voted to postpone the deadlines for recent invasions of public lands to be regularized.

By defending the renewal of time frames for land regularization, the ruralist caucus ignores the damage that land invasions by land grabbers cause to the image of exporting agribusiness —which is already the target of legislation in the European Union to contain the import of commodities linked to deforestation .

Protection against deforestation is one of the services provided by indigenous lands, which comprise spaces for clearing, hunting, fishing and also sacred and untouchable areas, which guarantee the richness of biodiversity, in addition to providing climate and water regulation.

As the white and Western mentality does not understand this wealth —”there is nothing there, it’s all bushes”—, several studies seek to estimate the monetary value of the services provided by indigenous lands.

By way of illustration only: the ecosystem services provided by indigenous lands in Brazil, Bolivia and Colombia are equivalent to benefits of up to US$ 1.5 trillion (R$ 7.3 trillion) over 20 years, according to a study by WRI (World Resources Institute) published in 2016.

Two films on display at the 12th Mostra Ecospeaker, in São Paulo, translate, through interviews with indigenous leaders, the semantic abyss over the land.

“Wealth is not under the ground, in the ores, it is up here, in life, in culture”, says Alessandra Munduruku in the documentary “Listen: the Earth Was Rasgada”.

“There are people who, when they touch the earth, feel nothing. But there are people who, when they touch, feel the earth push back”, says American Indian Henry Red Cloud in the documentary “Lakota Nation against the USA”.

Indigenous cultures carry at their core the understanding of ecological relationships that we whites need a lot of study to be able to assimilate.

In addition, they attribute to ecology a spiritual dimension, through which devotion to spirits, ancestors and nature are united in a single vision of the world. The indigenous divine does not escape earthly reality; he inhabits the earth. Isn’t she who we literally return to after death, after all?

“My father died; he is now part of this land”, says O-é Paiakan Kayapó, daughter of leader Paulinho Paiakan, in a scene from “Listen: the Earth was Torn”.

In the same film, Kirixi Rewu͂n Munduruku questions the prospector invasion: “Why do they come here? I’m not going there in their territory”.

Different from the expansive rage of the whites, who advance to new lands, the indigenous dream is to remain in the land to which they belong.

Indigenous peoples, after all, do not claim ownership of land where they do not live. Those who do this are land grabbers — it is urgently necessary to impose a time frame on them.

_{The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.}