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‘Our rights are on trial in Brazil’: Interview with Indigenous movement pioneer Brasílio Priprá

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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. The tutelage that followed turned out to be the institutionalization of violence over their lands, which peaked in the 1970s during Brazil’s military dictatorship. In subsequent years, the construction of the containment dam Barragem Norte displaced entire families and flooded a large portion of their territory. To this day, the Xokleng people still face public calamities caused by the…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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