AMAPÁ, Brazil — Ajareaty Waiapi is the oldest student in her high school geography class. But attending school at the age of 59 is a critical part of her mission to save her people and her lands in the Amazon rainforest.

As one of the indigenous Waiapi people's few female chiefs, she's in a race against time. She's determined to tell fellow Brazilians and the rest of the world that saving her indigenous community in the remote northern region of the country is in everyone's best interest.

“Our concern is that if the forest is gone, people will also end,” Ajareaty, who also goes by Nazaré, said during a visit to her village in March.

For the last several weeks, lands to the west of Amapá have been ablaze with wildfires that experts allege were likely started by illegal cattle ranchers and loggers who have been emboldened by Brazil's right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro to stake their claim on resource-rich indigenous lands.

Chief Ajareaty Waiapi. Teresa Tomassoni

Nazaré and other Waiapi elders predicted such devastation would incur months ago as they learned of Bolsonaro’s repeated promises to open indigenous lands and those belonging to descendants of slaves, known as quilombolas, for agribusiness and mining.

“If we humans misuse this planet, our creator will make a great flood that will melt the planet, there will be great fires and fires that will destroy the planet,” Ororiwa Waiapi, 98, said earlier this year.

Deforestation's dangers

In less than a year, Bolsonaro has dismantled the country’s agencies tasked with protecting the environment and indigenous peoples. Consequently, deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has surged so much that scientists warn the Amazon could begin transforming into a savanna incapable of serving any longer as one of the world’s greatest carbon sinks responsible for helping stabilize the global climate. In July, around 860 square miles of rainforest were destroyed, according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, resulting in a total loss of forest coverage bigger than the size of Los Angeles and New York City combined.

The forest provides food, shelter and medicine that the Waiapi have depended on for generations. In turn, Nazaré and many other conservationists say indigenous groups in Brazil like the Waiapi are some of the best stewards of the world’s largest rainforest, which produces 20 percent of the planet’s oxygen and is often referred to as the “lungs of the planet.”

Nazaré was determined to learn Portuguese so she could “talk with the white man out in the meetings.” Since then, she has spent the last several years traveling from her remote thatched-roof village to Brazil, Colombia and Germany, to advocate for her people’s rights to education, health care and land, all of which are currently being jeopardized under the Bolsonaro administration.

Most Waiapi women do not speak Portuguese, which is why there are not many female Waiapi chiefs, she explained. Her three sisters did not go to school.

Sitting in the front row of an open-air schoolhouse in Brazil’s northern Amazon rainforest, she is surrounded by younger classmates whose faces and arms are painted with bold red and black geometric patterns representing fish scales and butterfly wings.

As the buzz of cicadas, birds and monkey calls reverberate through the room, Ajareaty stares intently through her glasses at a laptop broadcasting a documentary about the spread of logging, cattle ranching and mining in the Amazon.

Waiapi students in class at the local open-air schoolhouse. Teresa Tomassoni

One of the land areas Bolsonaro has vowed to open is the National Reserve of Copper and Associates (Renca), which includes some land belonging to the Waiapi.

“Let’s talk about Renca. Renca is ours,” Bolsonaro said during a televised event in April. “Let’s use the riches that God gave us for the well-being of our population.”

But opening Renca for mining would be “reckless and dangerous,” said Christian Poirier, a program director at Amazon Watch, an indigenous-rights advocacy group. Not only would the forest be destroyed, he said, but local water sources also could easily become polluted.

In other areas of Brazil where mining is taking place, people have high levels of heavy metals in their blood, especially children, he said.

Alexandre Vidigal, Brazil’s secretary of geology, mining and mineral transformation for the Ministry of Mines and Energy, said this is not likely to occur in the future, as all proposed mining projects and companies will be investigated by his agency before projects are launched. If there is any indication that waters may be contaminated, the companies will not be authorized to pursue their projects, he said. He also said no mining will take place on indigenous lands without first consulting indigenous groups.

“It is impossible to think about mineral exploitation on indigenous lands without their communities’ previous authorization,” Vidigal said.

But according to another recent report, the government is in the process of introducing legislation to Brazil’s congress this fall that would make it easier to mine in indigenous territories.