The Yarang Women’s Movement, in the Xingu Indigenous Territory (Mato Grosso), is commemorating ten years of collecting seeds for forest restoration in the Xingu and Araguaia River basins.

By: Roberto Almeida, journalist, ISA

Photos: Carol Quintanilha / ISA

Video: Fernanda Ligabue

Women and young people leave Arayó village walking in single file. They carry baskets, machetes, beijus (manioc bread), water, small children. The pace is measured; there’s no need to hurry, even when the late May sun is baking the dust of the Pavuru landing strip, Xingu Indigenous Territory.

The conversation among them revolves around one thing. That subject: seeds.

In the middle of the path there was a Yarang, a leafcutter ant.

What will we collect? Where? A path on the left and the forest ends, gaps opening onto fields of manioc, fenced against the incursions of wild pigs. This is the site of the former village of Moygu, abandoned in 2011. In the morning light, huge pequi trees are swaying in the breeze.

Halfway there and a child points to a small hole on the bed of the path. In a flash she extracts a leafcutter ant, large and strong, but which appears drugged between her fingers. In the Ikpeng language, a Yarang.

The Ikpeng are a Karib-speaking people living in the Xingu Indigenous Territory in Mato Grosso. According to the latest census (2014), they were 477 people in total.

The Yarang is a symbol and the name of the Ikpeng women’s movement that, for ten years, has been collecting seeds to reforest the region of headwaters of the Xingu and Araguaia rivers in Mato Grosso and other places where white people have cleared the Cerrado and the Amazon.

Stepping firmly forward, leafcutter ant now put back on the ground, the Yarang search this particular stretch of forest for jatobá, leiteiro, carvoeiro, cafezinho do pasto, mamoninha, lobeira and seeds of dozens of other species.

Stopping suddenly, everyone sits on the ground. With hands or machetes, they begin clearing the layer of dried leaves to uncover murici da mata shoots, so small as to be almost invisible. The dynamics shift. Now it’s collecting time.

Women, young people and children talk, laugh, play, under the shade of the murici tree. They collect the bittersweet yellow berries, suck the flesh with contented expressions and carefully put the seeds into their baskets.