As the Amazon burns, and the world’s attention turns to Brazil, the first inhabitants of the land now being consumed by fire should not be forgotten.

Some of the darkest, most heinous and globally ignored human rights abuses against Indigenous people take place in Brazil.

For the last several decades, Brazilian governments have ignored their own laws, have forced Indigenous people off rainforest lands and penned them into tiny reservations or left them no choice but to live on city streets. Indigenous leaders have been publicly assassinated and their deaths are often not investigated.

In 1969, writer Norman Lewis published a scathing account of what was happening in Brazil for the Sunday Times. It was called “Genocide,” and it detailed the near extinction of many Indigenous nations due to consumer-driven demands for rubber. The people were enslaved, brutalized, raped and violently removed from the land while many bureaucrats and police turned the other way.

What has been happening in Brazil is, and has been, a human-rights emergency.

One can draw a direct line from the burning Amazon to Brazil’s abhorrent treatment of Indigenous nations and of the precious forests and lands, which capture and store so much of the world’s dangerous greenhouse gases, and which Brazil’s first inhabitants long protected.

Indigenous people living in colonized nations like Canada and the United States, those who have shared a similar history — racist laws and residential schools, forced separation from the land and from traditional ways of life — knew the election of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right extremist, in late 2018 would be disastrous. Bolsonaro is known as the “Trump of the Tropics” — and his callous disregard for the great environmental disaster underway in his country again shows why.

Brazil’s president simply does not care for anything beyond protecting the ranchers and the multinational corporations that provide us so many of our coffees, sugars and treats. Intense fires have been burning across Amazon lands for weeks and his government has done little to stop them.

In fact, it seems the government had the opportunity to prevent some of the fires and chose not to. Government officials working in southwestern Pará warned Bolsonaro’s government about a planned Aug. 10 “Fire Day” on which ranchers and land-grabbers in the Novo Progresso region burned the forest to clear land for pasture and to show the government they wanted to work. Yet despite pleas from environment officials for help from the justice department, none arrived.

Now, the planet is paying the price.

This is yet another crime against the Guarani-Kaiowá people, who have been brutally persecuted as they attempt to legally reclaim and safeguard their land. They are the “people of the forest,” who, as I wrote in my second book, “All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward,” have for thousands of years been on a quest for the “land without evil,” a place where their ancestors said they could live without suffering. Before mass deforestation occurred in order to farm soya, cattle, coffee and biofuels, they once spread over 350,000 square kilometres in the Mato Grosso do Sul area of mid-western Brazil. Now they are forced onto small, government appointed reserves.

In 2007, it seemed the Brazilian government of the day had a change of heart. Along with 23 Indigenous leaders, it signed an agreement to identify 36 Guarani lands and demarcate seven large territories, safeguarding them so the people could return.

But that never happened. Instead of being welcomed back, they’ve been met with continued court challenges, armed resistance and violence.

“For the forest, I will go on until my last drop of blood," said Indigenous leader Raimundo Mura. "All the trees had lives … For us, this is destruction. What is being done here is an atrocity against us."

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All of our children need the lungs of the Earth in Brazil.

Let’s hope global outrage over Brazil’s horrific actions inspires Canadian governments to quickly work together with First Nations in northwestern Ontario to protect 1.3-million hectares of boreal forest, an ecologically sensitive area that, like the Amazon, serves a vital role in preserving the health of the planet.

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