A central figure in many Indigenous systems is that of the Enchanted Ones, ancestral entities thought to connect the earthly world and the spiritual world. Some of these contacts are said to occur through dreams, liturgies or dances. For Glicéria Tupinambá, an Indigenous artist and activist from Brazil, it was a dream in 2006 that she says set her on the path she’s now on. She tells of hearing a call from the Enchanted Ones to rescue a feather cape, more than 400 years old, that belonged to her people. The piece in question sat in the storage vault of a prominent French museum, so it wouldn’t be possible to bring it back to Brazil. But there was another way to go. “In 2018, during a visit to the Quai Branly Museum’s storage in Paris, I had access to the cape, and the cape spoke to me,” Glicéria tells Mongabay. “[It] showed this dimension where women’s hands make the cape. Women bear their own cape. From then on, I started making a cape in 2020 for Chief Babau — a cape authorized by the Enchanted Ones.” That first cape, for Babau Tupinambá, her brother and the chief of the Serra do Padeiro village in Bahia state, represents for Glicéria not just the renewal of ancestral Indigenous cosmology and the tradition of sacred garments, but also a new perspective on belonging and on Indigenous peoples’ identity and struggle to preserve their culture. Artist and activist Glicéria Tupinambá wears one of the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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