The Tapajós River is one of the largest clear-water rivers in the world. Flowing through the heart of the Brazilian Amazon and spanning a staggering 190,000 square miles, the Tapajós River Basin is teeming with immense biodiversity and essential to the health of the rainforest.
Since time immemorial, the Tapajós River Basin has been stewarded by at least ten Indigenous peoples, including the Tupinambá, Munduruku, Arapiun, Kumaruara, Jaraqui, Tapajó, Tapuia, Apiaka, and Kayapó. But these waterways are also the homelands of several Quilombos, maroon communities founded by Africans who escaped chattel slavery and have lived in reciprocal relationship with the land for centuries.
Yet, the ancestral ways of life and socio-ecological health of Indigenous and Quilombola communities of the Tapajós alike are directly threatened by corporate extractivism, industrial agribusiness, and destructive infrastructure and development projects. As the region is already facing unprecedented drought wrought by climate change, massive infrastructure projects like the Ferrogrão mega-railway, initiated by the American multinational corporation Cargill, would decimate the river’s intricate ecosystems and disrupt traditional fishing practices.
This encroachment upon and pillaging of their lands is an extension of centuries of settler colonialism and anti-Black violence in the region and across the Americas, which have laid the foundations of the contemporary climate and biodiversity crisis.
From Brazil to the United States, Indigenous peoples have been annihilated, subjugated, enslaved, and dispossessed from their ancestral homelands to make way for monoculture cash crop plantations, where enslaved Africans were subjugated to centuries of brutal forced labor and ethnocide.
In fact, Brazil received the largest number of enslaved Africans from the transatlantic slave trade. Slave labor was the primary force behind the sugar, coffee, gold mining, and cattle ranching industries, which continue to play crucial roles in the contemporary Brazilian economy.
When the country finally became the last in the Western hemisphere to formally abolish slavery in 1888, land laws ensured that Afro-descendant people were denied access to land, setting the stage for transnational companies and large private landowners to continue to exploit the land while deepening deforestation, biodiversity loss, desertification, and environmental degradation. Meanwhile, Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian communities are systematically dispossessed, deprived of life-affirming resources, and disproportionately exposed to a litany of environmental and climatic harms.
Understanding that their historical struggles for self-determination and sovereignty are intimately intertwined, Indigenous and Quilombola land defenders are organizing to integrate their land protections with river protections and shut down the project through the #NoFerrogrão Alliance.
Their collective efforts for environmental, climate, and racial justice are rooted in a long legacy of Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous solidarity in the Americas. Across history and geographies, when Indigenous and Black communities resisted together, they have nurtured networks of collective kinship and represented the most potent threats to white supremacist colonial power structures.
From the Tapajós to Standing Rock, Black and Indigenous struggles for land, life, and liberation are essential to our collective survival in the face of the climate crisis. We are proud members of the Black Indigenous Liberation Movement, a collective of grassroots organizations and social movements that understand that solidarity is the antidote to the ravages of colonial extractivism and racial capitalism.
