The Tocantins River Quilombos' Resistance against Demolition of their Ancestral River for a Commercial Waterway

• In Event: Ecological resistance spirituality and community

Description for Program

I will present my research on the resistance and mobilization of Afro-Brazilian quilombola (maroon) communities of the upper Tocantins River basin in the Amazon in order to stop Brazil's imminent plan to dynamite and dredge their river for a shipping channel to serve the interests of agribusiness and mining companies. My findings are based on two years of field research (starting as a Fulbright scholar), traveling the river with the quilombolas, hearing their stories, hundreds of interviews, community visits, and accompanying leaders to public meetings and marches as they have raised an outcry to demand the government stop the demolition of their ancestral river.

For agribusiness and mining sectors, the Tocantins River is a non-productive area that will gain value by being privatized. By contrast, I will describe the quilombola cosmology embodied in movements, storytelling, cultural practices, in a uniquely quilombola concept of space and territory that they manifest in the river, distinct from standard cartography. The river, up to six miles across, has two distinct arms, with midriver islands where tens of thousands of black people live and fish, areas likely to suffer degradation from water pollution, erosion, and disruption and dredging of fish reproduction sites. I’ll describe what the government is ignoring: the ancestral significance of the river as a fugitive place, a place of freedom, a place of resistance, a place to which their enslaved ancestors would flee, their bodies even today making circuits within the labyrinth of the islands criss-crossed by channels, inlets and streams and lakes.

Theoretic reference points in conveying how the Lower Tocantins River territories conceive of their watery territory are An Aqueous Territory by Ernesto Bassi, Leda Martins' Spiral Time, as well as historians of quilombos, Flavio Dos Santos Gomes and Benedita Celeste de Moraes Pinto.

Author

• Tiffany Higgins, Independent researcher & documentarian