The guardian peoples

What caring means, seen from their side

In many Amazonian languages there is no word for “nature” apart from “us”. The river, the forest, the animals and people are part of the same fabric of life. Caring for the land is a way of being in the world, learned from childhood and held up by songs, stories, festivals and shared work.

So when a community loses its language or its elders, it loses the manual for looking after a territory. And that is why education —the Indigenous school, in their language and with their knowledge— is a tool for defending the forest as real as a map or a land title.

This is the idea behind the Network of Guardian Schools of the Amazon: that Indigenous schools and European schools learn together, in both directions.

1. The land: recognised on paper, contested in practice

Almost every Amazonian country recognises some Indigenous right to land in its Constitution. The problem is the cómo: for that right to be worth anything, the State has to mark out the territory, register it and remove those who should not be there. That process — demarcação in Brazil, titling in Peru, resguardo status in Colombia— is slow, costly and politically awkward, and it stops as soon as the government changes.

Meanwhile three things happen: land is occupied without title and then legalisation is requested (Brazil’s grilagem ), territories are broken up by mining or oil concessions granted over them, and communities are worn down by lawsuits lasting decades.

In Brazil, that dispute now has a name.

How we got here

• 2009 · Raposa Serra do Sol. The Federal Supreme Court (STF) rules on that Indigenous land in Roraima and, among the conditions it sets, the marco temporal idea appears. It was said at the time to apply only to that case, but from then on it began to be used against other demarcations.
• 21 September 2023 · the STF strikes it down. The full Court declares the marco temporal thesis inconstitucional , by nine votes to two, in an appeal binding across the country (RE 1,017,365, Theme 1031). It looked like the end of it.
• October-December 2023 · Congress revives it. Congress passes bill PL 2903/2023 and writes the marco temporal into an ordinary law. The Presidency vetoes part of the text; Congress overrides the vetoes. That is how Law 14,701/2023.
• Since 2024 · the struggle continues at the Supreme Court. Several challenges are filed against that law (constitutional actions ADI 7582, 7583 and 7586, and declaratory action ADC 87). The reporting justice opens a conciliation panel to seek agreement between the parties. Indigenous organisations, led by APIB, reject it with an argument that is hard to answer: a constitutional right is not negotiated around a table.

Position in September 2026: Law 14,701/2023 remains in force and the Supreme Court has not ruled on the substance. This is a live matter: check the date before quoting anything.

Other laws bearing down in Brazil

The marco temporal is the best-known piece, but it does not advance alone. These are the open fronts that most affect the Amazon and its peoples:

• Weaker environmental permits. A reform of environmental licensing would let many projects be approved on a simple declaration by the company itself. Critics call it “the devastation bill”.
• Mining on Indigenous land. Proposals are under way to allow mining, oil and large dams inside Indigenous territories.
• Major infrastructure. Rebuilding the BR-319 highway, which crosses a still-intact block of forest between Manaus and Porto Velho, and the soya railway (Ferrogrão) are the two projects most likely to push the agricultural frontier open.
• Oil at the mouth of the Amazon. Exploration in the so-called Margem Equatorial is moving ahead despite warnings about the reefs and the coastal communities.

These bills change name and number often. We describe them by what they do rather than by their number; for detail and dates, the sources are below.

3. What they want to put on top

If mining and oil go after what is below, the other half of the problem goes after the surface.

• Cattle and soya. By far the leading cause of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. First the trees are felled, burned and turned to pasture; then, if the land allows, soya arrives. Much of that output is exported, and some ends up in Europe as animal feed.
• Roads. A new road is the axis along which everything on either side gets occupied. Rebuilding the BR-319, between Manaus and Porto Velho, would cut through one of the best-preserved blocks of forest left.
• Dams. Large hydroelectric dams flood territories, cut off fish migration and displace whole communities. Belo Monte, on the Xingu river, is the example that has marked the region’s peoples most.
• Transport routes for grain. Railways such as the Ferrogrão project and the waterways that channel the rivers are designed to move the harvest, and they bring ports, silos and more deforestation with them.

Where to check this

MapBiomas and PRODES/INPE (deforestation in Brazil), RAISG (infrastructure works across the Pan-Amazon), ISA reports on Belo Monte and the BR-319.

5. Defending the land is dangerous

Year after year, Latin America is the region where most land and environmental defenders are killed, and a large share of those cases is in the Amazon. Brazil, Colombia and Peru top almost every list. The figures are published each year by Global Witness; in Brazil, CIMI also documents invasions, conflicts and deaths in its annual report.

The murder of the indigenist Bruno Pereira y del periodista Dom Phillips in the Javari valley, in June 2022, put an international name to something that happens continuously and almost always without witnesses.

Alongside direct violence there are two quieter forms of pressure: criminalisation —charging leaders with “trespass” or “terrorism” to wear them down in the courts— and the presence of armed economies: on the borders of Colombia, Peru and Brazil, coca and drug-trafficking routes have entered Indigenous territories, including the recruitment of young people.

Peoples in voluntary isolation

The Amazon is home to todavía pueblos que han decidido no tener contacto con el resto de la sociedad. El valle del Javarivalley in Brazil and several reserves in Peru hold most of them. For them an unwanted encounter is not an incident: a common flu can wipe out a whole family. Any weakening of their protection —a road, a mission, a concession— directly threatens their survival.

Where to check this

Global Witness annual reports; the report “Violência contra os Povos Indígenas no Brasil” (CIMI); Survival International and FUNAI on uncontacted peoples.

7. New business with the forest standing

In recent years a different, less visible pressure has appeared: carbon contracts. Broker companies arrive in communities with thirty- or forty-year agreements to sell their forest’s carbon credits, written in a language and with clauses almost nobody there can assess.

Some of those projects are serious. Others have been signed without real consent, without independent legal advice and with very unequal shares, to the point that the Brazilian and Peruvian press has popularised the phrase “carbon cowboys” for them. Indigenous organisations do not reject the mechanism outright: they ask for clear rules, genuine consultation and that they be the ones to decide.

The lesson is the same as ever: any proposal arriving from outside, however green it sounds, needs the community to be able to understand it and decide on its own terms. That, too, is a question of education.

Where to check this

investigative journalism on carbon contracts in the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon; COICA and APIB positions on carbon markets.

9. And what they themselves do: a movement

Telling only the threats gives a false picture. The Indigenous peoples of the Amazon have been organising for half a century, and have won things that looked impossible.

• Their own organisations in all nine countries, coordinated through COICA. In Brazil, APIB; in Peru, AIDESEP; in Colombia, OPIAC; in Ecuador, CONFENIAE. And in the Juruá valley where we work, OPIRJ.
• Litigation and institutional presence. They have taken their cases to Brazil’s Supreme Court, to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and to the UN, winning rulings that are now points of reference.
• Territorial monitoring. Their own patrols, drones, GPS and reporting apps run by the communities: many of the invasions that get stopped are spotted by them first.
• Politics. Indigenous members of parliament, and in Brazil a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples created in 2023.
• Education and language. Their own schools, teachers trained in the community, dictionaries and materials made by Indigenous teachers. It is the slowest part, and the hardest to undo.

That last line is where our work fits, and the reason this association exists.

Where to check this

websites of COICA, APIB, AIDESEP, OPIAC, CONFENIAE and OPIRJ; Inter-American Court of Human Rights rulings in Indigenous cases.

10. Acre: the struggle that made our work possible

All of the above is easier to grasp by looking at one particular place. Ours is Acre, the state in Brazil’s far west where the Escola Ixubãy Rabuĩ Puyanawa and the Nukini school we work with are. And in Acre this story has names.

From rubber to forced labour

In the late nineteenth century the rubber boom brought thousands of workers from north-eastern Brazil to Acre. The seringais ran on a system of debt: the boss advanced food and tools, the seringueiro paid in latex, and the account was never settled. Indigenous peoples were hunted, displaced or put to work under the same conditions, the Puyanawa and the Nukini among them: their land was taken over by seringais and their language nearly disappeared.

Chico Mendes and the empates

In the 1970s, when rubber stopped being profitable, many seringais were sold to cattle ranchers who came to clear the land. The rubber tappers of Xapuri answered with the empates: whole families, children included, standing in front of the chainsaws to stop the felling. Unarmed.

Francisco Alves Mendes Filho, «Chico Mendes» (1944-1988), rubber tapper and union leader, was the one who turned that resistance into a proposal: extractive reserves, territories protected con the people living inside them, not sin them. His idea was simple and new: a standing forest feeds those who know how to live in it, and so whoever lives in it is the best possible guardian.

Chico Mendes was murdered at his own front door on 22 December 1988, in Xapuri, on a landowner’s orders. His death had a worldwide impact he had never achieved in life, and two years later the first extractive reserves were created.

The Alliance of the Peoples of the Forest

What that period left above all was an alliance. Until then, rubber tappers and Indigenous people had been set against each other: one group entered the other’s land. In 1989 the Aliança dos Povos da Florestawas sealed in Rio Branco: for the first time, the two peoples of the forest recognised each other as allies against those who came to cut it down.

That is where the word behind our honorary member’s name comes from. Txai, in the Huni Kuin language, means something like “more than a friend: a part of me in you and a part of you in me”. It became the greeting of that alliance, and gave its title to the album Txai that Milton Nascimento recorded after travelling through Acre in 1989.

Terri Valle de Aquino, the other txai

Beside that alliance there was also an anthropologist. Terri Valle de Aquino, trained at the Universidade de Brasília, came to Acre in the mid-1970s to carry out his master’s research among the Kaxinawá (Huni Kuĩ). When he went up the Jordão river to its headwaters he found something he had not expected: Indigenous communities tapping rubber in conditions of debt slavery.

Instead of writing it up and leaving, he stayed. He was the first in his field to carry out the socio-economic and land surveys of Acre’s Indigenous peoples river by river in the Upper Juruá —the technical work without which no demarcation is possible—, worked at FUNAI and was one of the founders of the Comissão Pró-Índio do Acre.

The Huni Kuĩ gave him the same name they gave Macedo: txai. Acre has two, and both appear in this story.

Txai Macedo

Antônio Luiz Batista de Macêdo, «Txai Macedo» (1952-2026) was one of the people who held all that up from the inside. He was born in the Seringal Transval, on the banks of the Muru river (Acre), next to a Huni Kuin community; he was a rubber tapper, river pilot, mechanic, indigenist, poet and singer. From the 1970s he worked with the anthropologist Terri Valle de Aquino and with the Comissão Pró-Índio do Acre travelling rivers and villages to explain to communities what their rights were and to support the demarcation of their lands.

He was a friend and colleague of Chico Mendes, central to the Aliança dos Povos da Floresta and to the struggle that led in 1990 to the creation of the Reserva Extrativista do Alto Juruá, the first of its kind in the world, in the same valley where we work today. He lived on Puyanawa land and raised his family there.

And he was, until his passing, friend and indigenist mentor to Adolf Sanz, founder of this association: one of the first people to believe in the Network of Guardian Schools. His full biography is in About us.

Acre’s Indigenous school has a long history

There is a piece of this story that is almost never told and that touches us directly. While demarcations were being fought for, the Comissão Pró-Índio do Acre began training Indigenous teachers y a agroforestry agents from the communities themselves, at a time when the idea of an Indigenous person teaching in their own language in their own village sounded utopian.

Much of the Indigenous schooling that exists in Acre today came out of that: teachers from the community, materials made there, teaching in their own language. When we work alongside the educators of the Escola Ixubãy Rabuĩ Puyanawa, we are working within that tradition, inventing nothing.

And today

The pressure did not go away. Acre still has deforestation, advancing cattle ranching and roads that people want to push through to the Pacific; and the communities of the Juruá still defend what Chico Mendes and Txai defended: that the forest stays standing with its people inside it.

What has changed is the tool. Where there were once empates, there are now schools: trained Indigenous teachers, a documented language, their own materials, and children from two continents talking to each other by video call. It is slower and less heroic, and it is what we know how to do.

Where to check this

Comissão Pró-Índio do Acre (cpiacre.org.br), que publica entrevistas con Terri Aquino y la historia de la formación de docentes indígenas; el archivo del Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) sobre las extractive reserves y la Aliança dos Povos da Floresta; el Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade (ICMBio), que lleva el nombre de Chico Mendes; y la biografía de Txai Macedo en About us.

To understand it from within

Behind all this lies a discussion deeper than the legal one: what a river is, who can hold rights and what living well means. We have gathered that part on a separate page, with its sources and bibliography.

Where our perspective comes from →

How we speak about Indigenous peoples

• We tell what the communities themselves want told, using the names they use.
• We do not use their culture as decoration: no costumes, no storybook “Indians”, no ceremonies taken out of context.
• Photographs are published with permission, and we do not publish images in which children’s faces can be recognised.
• When we give figures, we say where they come from. If we are not sure, we do not state it.