The International Day of Indigenous Peoples
The International Day of Indigenous Peoples is a date that symbolizes the resistance of the natives of the land, which refers to an ancestral struggle for diversity, respect, for the life of everything inside and outside the territories, whether they are demarcated or not. Among the 5 thousand indigenous groups that currently exist in the world, more than 300 groups live in Brazil, and are spread across the 5 regions, protecting the 5 predominant biomes. Since the beginning of the end, they have been in a constant struggle for survival, which is historically called “discovery”. However, since then the only discovery has been for the indigenous peoples, and it was the discovery of one of the oldest human emotions, fear.
Even in the face of genocide, under the blood of retaliations, climate and environmental changes, and the entire context of struggle to guarantee minimum rights, peoples bravely resist and continue to create a voice in the most diverse spaces so that our history is, this time, written and told by ourselves. May we no longer be the savages of the colonizer, nor the slave hand of the captains of the forest, that our clothes are not carnival costumes, that our sacred rites are not trivialized, despised or demonized, that our faces are not stereotyped, nor our bodies be violated, and that our children do not die from mercury or be murdered for the simple fact of being born indigenous.
We were and are more than the naivety of the mirror, we are not summarized in a single culture, and we are not all the same; myths simplify, and sometimes distort, our ethnic, historical, and cultural multiplicity. To this end, we are demystifying, politicizing ourselves, learning about scientific knowledge, developing eloquence, taking back our territories, demarcating social networks and effectively participating in public discussion spaces, doing a little bit of everything so that in the coming years we can celebrate this and others days being present and not being a memory of the people who once inhabited this planet. We are the resistance in Brazil, in the Americas and in the world. Indigenous people live!
Text: Rayane Xipaya