One morning in early September, Xavante children and youth from Wederã Village, in the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Territory, in the east of the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil, had to hurriedly climb to their rooftops. It was around ten o’clock in the morning. Many mothers had been sitting in front of their homes making baskets, while the children and young people were at the local school. The flames were rapidly approaching from the forest, forcing everyone to seek refuge. Some thought they could control the flames so they filled PET bottles with water from the stream. It was in vain. A giant wall of smoke and fire spread through the village, while young people and children climbed to the roofs, bottles still in hand. Their mothers, unable to climb up, screamed desperately. They all risked being burned alive.

“We already knew the Cerrado was burning because we had communicated with other villages already affected, but we didn’t know the fire would reach us like this. Thanks to an abrupt shift in the wind, that pushed the fire the other way, these relatives escaped,” SUMAÚMA heard from Indigenous leader Mara Barreto Sinhosewawe Xavante, a resident of Wederã, appointed by her people to report the situation and find help. “But this doesn’t mean we’re safe. On the contrary. We continue to run the risk of burning to death, of dying of hunger, or thirst, and from the variety of illnesses that come with drought and fire,” she adds. About 20 days after this episode, on September 30, village resident Arthur Xavante, 39, died from lung-related complications after inhaling smoke and soot from the fires.

For months, the fires that ravaged Brazilian biomes also consumed the life and culture of the A’uwe Xavante, an Indigenous people numbering over 20,000 individuals, spread across nine demarcated Indigenous Territories in the state of Mato Grosso. Known as the fire people for using fire in their sacred rituals, the Xavante now find themselves surrounded and threatened by flames. In the month of September alone, Mato Grosso had 19,964 fires, nearly the same amount as in all of 2023 (21,723), according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. Up to now, fires have been reported in at least 38 of the state’s 78 Indigenous territories. A total of 45 Indigenous ethnicities live in these areas, with the Xavante being the most populous group. A tireless voice in the struggle to preserve her people, in late September Mara spoke with SUMAÚMA about the extreme situation threatening the human and more-than-human lives in the Xavante’s territories.

We are not well. We’re fighting to survive, but it’s tougher every day. Most of our territory is burned, devastated. The animals are being charred to death. Because we live off of game and fish, we’re having a hard time finding food. Our rivers are drying up, which makes it hard for us to survive. In our village, the stream is nearly dry and we’ve gone months without potable water. This is a reality in our lives and in many other villages in Mato Grosso. In addition to the risk of fire, we have serious cases of dysentery, dehydration and lots of dry coughs from the soot and the water we are consuming. I am very outraged, because not only are our lives at risk, but we were being accused by the government of setting fire to the territory, yet many videos have caught criminals who are not Indigenous starting the fires. Still we are blamed. This is an affront to our dignity, to our morale and, chiefly, to our history. Nobody realizes it, but the Cerrado’s riches only exist because we are still here.

Yes. This and other statements he has made that we, who are known as the guardians of the Cerrado because of our rituals of preserving the biome, are supposedly responsible for destroying our territory. Look at the irony: we are known as the fire people because of the traditional Fire Hunt, a sacred ritual of passage when young people become adults, where our warriors choose a strategic area, at a specific time of the year, to make a circular and controlled fire, that helps in the hunt. There are studies showing how this ritual of ours helps preserve the Cerrado. Except that in recent years, we haven’t been able to even do the Fire Hunt, because the region’s superheating, which has come with the advance of agribusiness here in the state, is preventing us from doing this fire securely. Our warriors know this, they know the land, which is why we stopped doing it after 2014. It is the fire that keeps the traditions of our cultural calendar alive, but even this is being extinguished.

In what other ways are these climate changes brought by agribusiness affecting the Indigenous people of Mato Grosso?

In addition to the rituals and customs, this is making us sick in a variety of ways. In the old days, our warriors hunted on foot, they didn’t use firearms. Today, the Cerrado is so hot that they have to hunt by motorcycle, there is no longer any way to walk and run when it feels like 50 degrees Celsius. They are more sedentary. We’re having to eat things that aren’t a part of our diet, lots of rice, and many industrialized foods have been brought in. And that is why our people are sick. More than 60% of the population is diabetic. Men, women, children… and babies with infant malnutrition. We are dying. Our infant mortality rate is five times higher than the national average. Our people’s health condition is not much different than the Yanomami. The system created a problem within our territories that it is unable to solve, and now we are regarded as if we were the problems, treated like foreigners in our own land.

We’ve been abandoned for a long time. Since 1940, when the missions came, they forced contact with our people and began to take our territory. In the following decades, we had to watch our territories being burned and turned into pasture, the heat increasing each year. Accessing health is harder and harder for us. Why don’t they respect us? Everyone knows that if there is no Indigenous life in the territory, there won’t be a favorable climate for the crops. We are still continuing to spill blood, because our people are dying in our land. If our life doesn’t exist in this territory, it will turn to pasture. We are the ones protecting this land and, at the same time, we are suffering prejudice for being here. This year, the fires are out of control, and much of what is happening now is because of this advance by agribusiness. They started in Serra Dourada, a district in Canarana, bordering our territory, Pimentel Barbosa. It was set through arson and it expanded very quickly, it burned for two weeks, spreading within the Cerrado, affecting our people’s villages for almost 60 days, until it reached our community.

As long as the fire is out of control, I imagine your situation is only growing worse…

Yes, and this is why I’m crying for help. We have gone over 30 days with no drinking water, our people have very dry coughs, very bloodshot eyes. People have dysentery. It’s an extreme situation. It was already tough before the fires, and now we’re at risk of a true genocide. The sick are having trouble getting to the closest cities, and the fire doesn’t stop. It keeps burning around our village and so many others. The fires are out of control. Nobody realizes what is happening here.

The year before last, some men from our territory were taking part in firefighter training to combat the fires, held by a Brazilian NGO using funds from foreign organizations, in partnership with the government of Mato Grosso. However, considering we have an average of 230,000 hectares of living Cerrado in our territory, the training was offered to very few firefighters, an insufficient number considering the extent of our Indigenous Territories. In my village, just one person went through the training program.

Our volunteer firefighters don’t have the personnel or the equipment needed to fight fires. On the day the fire came closer, the young people had to climb the houses with PET bottles; if we were depending on the amount of firefighters and equipment we have, we would have been burned alive and to a crisp, left to the mercy of our own luck. It was the wind’s strength that diverted the fire and saved us from a tragedy waiting to happen. Fortunately, nobody was hurt and there were no deaths, but we don’t know if we’ll be so lucky next time. We live in precarious conditions, without what is minimally needed for a dignified life. Our population, mostly humble and simple people, who don’t even speak fluent Portuguese, as it isn’t our mother tongue, frequently do not know how to demand their rights. Those who do know how are often hesitant to confront powerful authorities. I’m not afraid, because I’m fighting for what’s fair and right, for the benefit of my people and all 44 other Indigenous ethnicities in the state, who are going through the same hardships as we, the Xavante, are.

Asked by SUMAÚMA to comment on Mara Xavante’s criticism of statements made by Governor Mauro Mendes (União Brasil), Mato Grosso’s Office of the Communication Secretary sent the following response by e-mail: “There is no insinuation or discrimination. The governor merely cited official data, which are public and compiled by civil servants at the agencies working to prevent and fight forest fires, like the Fire Department and the state’s Office of the Environment Secretary.”  

The data mentioned in the statement shows that, according to the Military Fire Department of Mato Grosso, fires registered from July 1 to September 13 proportionally happened every 100 square kilometers, as follows: 6.51 in settlement projects; 5.22 in Indigenous Territories; 4.75 in conservation units; and 2.85 on private property. Yet the Fire Department’s data indicate the location of the fires, not their origin, or rather, where they started. A fire happening in one place could have originated in another. Monitoring by the National Institute for Space Research and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro shows that in the first semester of 2024, 95% of fires in the Pantanal originated in private areas.

Research done by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) and published in science journal Plos One analyzed satellite images of Pimentel Barbosa Village taken in the last four decades. It found that, despite the constant fires, the Indigenous Territory maintained plant cover and is much better conserved than the surrounding region, occupied by farmers. While deforested area in the village held steady, at 0.6%, from 1973 to 2010, deforestation in the surrounding area increased from 1.5% to 26% during the same period.