Paulo Guajajara was shot to death in an ambush in the Amazon rainforest last week. Reports suggest his killers were illegal loggers.

Guajajara was a member of the Guardians of the Forest, a group of volunteers who defend the forest from illegal logging and who have reportedly been the targets of frequent death threats.

He and his cousin were shot on the Araribóia reservation in northeastern Brazil.

“We are protecting the land and the life on it — the land, the birds, the tribe on it here, too,” Guajajara told Reuters in September. “I am scared sometimes but we have to lift up our heads and act. We are here fighting.”

No matter where they live, Indigenous people have a spiritual connection to the land. It gives us ceremony, language, food, story and culture. And, after decades of being ignored by Western science, Indigenous knowledge is increasingly being looked to by academics and researchers for answers to questions on plant growth, organic foods, how to manage declining animal species and forest fires.

Yet the land — and the Indigenous people who defend it — continue to be attacked by corporations and governments and the insatiable consumer-driven culture they serve.

Reports of Guajajara’s death surfaced just a day before more than 11,000 scientists declared that the world is now facing a “climate emergency.”

As an article on the website of the American Institute of Biological Sciences noted, “Especially worrisome are potential irreversible climate tipping points and nature's reinforcing feedbacks (atmospheric, marine, and terrestrial) that could lead to a catastrophic ‘hothouse Earth,’ well beyond the control of humans. These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.”

Indigenous people already know that. Our communities have been on the front lines of climate emergencies for decades as the Earth warms. In Canada, northern hunters will tell you animals have already changed their behaviours, thus altering hunting seasons. They’ll also tell you of invasive fish species moving north or severe weather patterns that have led to both an increase in flooding and a shortened ice-road season.

Yet when Indigenous people raise their voices — be it in the Amazon, the Wet’suwet’en Territories in northern B.C. or at Standing Rock after the fight to prevent the Dakota Access Pipeline — our people are jailed, told they are being radical or, as in some cases, they are killed.

Brazil has always been ground zero in the climate-change fight. It is, after all, the home to the Amazon — the largest carbon storehouse in the world and a key driver in regulating the temperature of the Earth.

It is also the country where big ranchers and corporations have run roughshod over Indigenous rights, taking away land and murdering Indigenous people. President Jair Bolsonaro, the “Trump of the Tropics,” often makes derogatory comments about Brazil’s First Peoples; in April 2015, he mused in Campo Grande News that “the Indians do not speak our language, they do not have money, they do not have culture. They are native peoples. How did they manage to get 13 per cent of the national territory?”

There are 900,000 Indigenous people in Brazil. Many of them have been forced onto tiny reserves to make way for soy, coffee, cattle and palm oil farms, which sell to the multinational corporations that supply burgers to fast-food restaurants or provide the beans for our favourite cup of morning coffee.

Across the globe, we see an increased, frightening divide between Indigenous people who defend the land and governments that prop up Western, consumer-driven lifestyles and demonize those who stand in the way of development.

According to Global Witness, a Washington-based non-profit, more than 160 environmentalists or land defenders were killed in 2018, and many of them were Indigenous people.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

And as we continue full-steam ahead towards climate breakdown, so many standing up to climate change continue to be criminalized or killed.

Guajajara fought to ensure our capitalist consumer culture did not consume Brazil’s sacred forest. In the process he himself was consumed. His death is a tragic reminder of how far we still have to go in the all-important fight to protect both the land and its defenders.

Read more about: