As the wildfires rage on in the Brazilian Amazon, Ajareaty Waiapi is attending school at age 59 to educate herself and the rest of the world about saving and conserving the world’s largest tropical rain forest.
In Amapá, located in the northern region of Brazil, Ajareaty — who also goes by Nazaré — is one of the few female chiefs of the indigenous Waiapi people, according to NBC News. The rain forest makes up 90 percent of her homeland and Nazaré is concerned not just for the land but for her people.
“Our concern is that if the forest is gone, people will also end,” she told NBC News.
The lands to the west of Amapá have been affected by the fires that were allegedly started by illegal cattle ranchers claiming indigenous lands for resources, an act of deforestation encouraged by Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro, CNN reports.
While Waiapi women don’t speak Portuguese (which is why so few are chiefs), Nazaré is determined to learn so that she can advocate for not only their land but their rights to education and healthcare which is currently under threat by the current administration.
But she’s not only educating herself, she’s encouraging all of her community — nearly 1,500 in 92 small villages — to do the same while also passing on their traditions and knowledge of the land, including plant medicine. Their land is demarcated, keeping it exclusively for their use and protected under Brazil’s constitution. However, recently heavily armed illegal gold miners entered their land and murdered one of their leaders, chief Emyra Waiapi. For this reason, Nazaré encourages community members to rotate villages.
She also teaches people how to fish, weave baskets out of palm fronds, and how to use cassava, a root vegetable, and a staple crop, to make foods. She also knows how to safely clear areas of the forest using controlled fires and ensures that they don’t spend too many years in the same area so that the forest can regenerate.
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