by Amanda Magnani on 6 May 2024
- In an interview with Mongabay, Brasílio Priprá, one of the pioneers of the Free Land Camp, the largest event of the Brazilian Indigenous movement, looks back on its 20 years of existence.
- Priprá, who has been active in the Indigenous movement for 40 years, has seen few changes, but enough to keep fighting for his rights.
- Land demarcation has been the main demand over the two decades of the Free Land Camp. Since 2019, marco temporal, a legal thesis that aims to restrict Indigenous land rights, has made this demand more pressing.
- Priprá shares his thoughts on the impacts of marco temporal on Indigenous rights, Brazil’s environmental goals and the future of the country for all citizens.
The “People of the Sun,” as the Xokleng Indigenous people of Brazil call themselves, are no strangers to conflict and violence. In the early 20th century, as the southern region of the country was colonized by newly arrived Germans and Italians, bugreiro militias hired by the imperial government decimated an estimated two-thirds of their population.
“There are accounts of bugreiros killing pregnant women and throwing babies and children up in the air to be impaled,” Brasílio Priprá, a 65-year-old Xokleng authority, told Mongabay at the Free Land Camp (Acampamento Terra Livre, ATL), the largest mobilization of Indigenous peoples in Brazil, which takes place every April in Brasília since 2004. He is one of the mobilization’s pioneers.
Priprá, who worked at Funai, the National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples, before retiring, has been a part of the Indigenous movement’s fight for land over the past 40 years. It has now been almost 110 years since the defunct Indigenous Protection Service (Serviço de Proteção aos Índios) forced contact and the integration of the Xokleng people under the pretense of putting an end to the genocide.
But little changed for the People of the Sun.
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