We need the trees that give us life

Story 25 Nov, 2024

We need the trees that give us life

The revered Indigenous leader and campaigner Chief Raoni talks to Tom Ireland about saving the Amazon and its people.

Chief Raoni with Dr Jane Goodall at the Greenpeace Field, during this year’s Glastonbury Festival

Chief Raoni Metuktire, often known simply as ‘Raoni’, is the leader of Brazil’s Kayapo people and an international icon of the fight to save the Amazon and its Indigenous cultures.

Now in his nineties, Raoni has spent decades campaigning for the rights of Indigenous people and raising awareness of the destruction of the forest that supports them. Talking through an interpreter ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November 2024, Raoni tells me that he and other Indigenous leaders want to be given more say in global policy-making.

We want to find spaces where we can have a voice in all the decisions that pass about the land, about the forest, about our lives,

he says, “and take part in these big conferences where everyone is deciding on the world.” He says the days of conflict and fighting between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are in the past, and that he supports dialogue, partnerships, solutions and peace.

Raoni was born – or “came into existence” as his interpreter translates it – sometime in the early 1930s, in a remote village in the vast Mato Grosso region of central Brazil. Describing the changes he has seen over his lifetime, he remembers a happy childhood learning to hunt and fish, “before the colonisers came” and brought their industries and technology to the area.

The Kayapo people had a nomadic way of life, moving from place to place through a vast region south of the Amazon River, allowing them to live “in harmony with the forest and with great joy”, with many collective rituals and parties, he says.

Raoni says he grew up at a time when various nomadic people were just beginning to come together to discuss the importance of maintaining their culture, their way of life and history.

There needs to be production of food in the way the colonisers do it, but it should be on land already available. We need the trees that give us life, and that provide the air and water for all of us, not just the Indigenous people. If we carry on like this, we won’t have any more life here on this land.

At the age of 15, he began to wear an ornamental disc in his lower lip, symbolising that he is willing to die for his lands.

He was in his early twenties when he first met people from the outside world, and soon after he started to learn about the world beyond the forest. He became a representative for Indigenous people in his region, and the award-winning documentary Raoni further raised his profile in the 1970s.

By the 1990s he had gathered support from world leaders and celebrities, including pop star Sting, Prince Charles (now King Charles III), and Pope John Paul II, to help bring attention to the destruction of the Amazon.

Hundreds of thousands of hectares of land are now protected reservations, thanks to Raoni’s campaigning, but there is still a desperate need for more protection against mining, logging, land clearance and pollution, which spiked in recent years under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro.

The full physical demarcation of Indigenous lands in Brazil is a longstanding project that is seen as key to preventing further irreparable damage to areas of forest that support Indigenous people. But despite optimism that Brazil’s new president, Lula da Silva, would speed up progress of the demarcations, it has recently stalled because of opposition from conservative lawmakers with links to the agriculture sector.

A legal theory known as the ‘Marco Temporal’ is being used to dispute the boundaries of many Indigenous claims to land.

Raoni says he believes demarcation is still important to Lula and his government but accepts that he is in a difficult position because of the strength of the opposition in Brazil’s Congress. “Last time I met Lula, in Brasilia, we had a conversation where he even asked to come to my territory, to my base, to explain the situation to our relatives,” he says.

Just days after my call with Raoni, President Lula visited rural parts of the Amazon affected by some of the worst droughts in over 40 years, leading to huge wildfires and hunger across many Indigenous territories.

On the difficult question of how to balance the need for food production with the preservation of forest, Raoni believes more land is being taken from the forest than is necessary to feed the population. He wants to see less waste, and for global leaders to force farmers to farmland already available for agriculture before more forest is destroyed.

“There needs to be production of food in the way the colonisers do it, but it should be on land already available. We need the trees that give us life, and that provide the air and water for all of us, not just the Indigenous people. If we carry
on like this, we won’t have any more life here on this land.”

Raoni is speaking from Los Angeles, California, where he is holding a series of meetings with prominent environmentalists. Despite his age, he continues to travel across Brazil
and around the world, raising awareness of the plight of the Amazon. He ends our call by thanking Unite for Nature for the opportunity to continue his mission to talk to as many people as possible about his homeland and his people’s experiences.

“If the governments and leaders don’t act, we’re going to disappear from this planet.”

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At the 2021 World Congress, ��ϲʿ��ֳ�ֱ��’s Indigenous peoples Members developed the Global Indigenous Agenda for the Governance of Indigenous Lands, Territories, Waters, Coastal Seas and Natural Resources.
Read this online at iucn.org/gia

Last year at COP28, ��ϲʿ��ֳ�ֱ�� launched the Podong Indigenous Peoples Initiative, co-designed and co-led by Indigenous peoples and ��ϲʿ��ֳ�ֱ��. The four priorities
of the co-led, co-designed initiative are to:

•Facilitate the Indigenous-led design of direct-funding approaches

•Scale-up direct investment of Indigenous-led conservation
and climate actions

•Strengthen and build the capacity of Indigenous organisations to access,
manage and govern these investments

•Promote Indigenous rights and leadership, particularly women and youth, in global biodiversity and climate
policy spaces.

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PRIORITIES