BUÍQUE, Pernambuco, Brazil — In the Brazilian backlands, the jurema is a most willful tree: When you think it’s dead, it sprouts again. You can cut it, tear it down, burn it; at the first thunderstorm, its leaves tear through the soil again in search of light. Same thing for the Kapinawá, a people for whom jurema is the most sacred of plants, a cosmic bridge between the living and the spirits. They, too, when believed extinct, resurfaced. “And, as the jurema sprouts again, its branches grow even stronger,” emphasizes Mocinha Kapinawá. It happened during the Cutting of the Wires. When Maria Bezerra da Silva – known today as Mocinha Kapinawá, a leader in Mina Grande village – was still a teenager, but already on the frontline in the fight against Colonel Romero Maranhão and his land-grabbers. Mocinha recounts that, since the mid-1970s, the residents of Mina Grande, now the largest village in the Kapinawá territory, had been under pressure from farmers wanting to take over their lands “because of the wealth we have here, which is water.” Indeed: The Kapinawá territory coincides, geographically, with the Catimbau Valley, a privileged point in the hinterlands of Pernambuco whose maze of hills stores an abundance of water sources — high-quality water that springs at the foothills, irrigates the vegetation and quenches the thirst of those in need. A Catimbau Valley landscape, Pernambuco state, Brazil. Image by Xavier Bartaburu/Mongabay. Maria Bezerra da Silva, known as Mocinha Kapinawá, leader in Mina Grande village. Image…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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