- Brazil’s Cerrado savanna has experienced its worst fire season on record, but a tiny Indigenous territory here has for four years now kept the flames at bay.
- The volunteer brigade made up largely of Bakairi Indigenous women has been instrumental in preventing major fires from devastating the Santana Indigenous Territory in Mato Grosso state.
- The initiative was born after fires in 2018 destroyed part of the territory and left the community vulnerable as a result of the authorities’ delay in providing help.
- While the Cerrado faces record devastation and public policies remain weak, the Bakairi experience points to a possible path forward that other Indigenous territories in the state also hope to emulate.
When they closed their eyes, the Bakairi people of the Santana Indigenous Territory in Brazil heard a sound similar to rain in the forest. It was reminiscent of a summer storm, the kind that arrives suddenly and drenches the vast Cerrado savanna. But instead of water, it was fire. The flames spread across the 73,000-hectare Indigenous territory in the municipality of Nobres, Mato Grosso state, burning trees, animals, medicinal plants, and everything else in their way.
“A machine caught fire in the farm near the territory. The owners couldn’t control it, so it spread to our area,” says Edna Rodrigues Bakairi, a 39-year-old educator.
As the fire advanced, the community waited for the authorities — municipal, state or federal — to authorize fire brigades to start containing the flames. “During that wait, the fire arrived and destroyed everything here,” Edna says.
The incident, in 2018, left deep scars and forced the Bakairi to seek their own response. A community brigade was born from those ashes, and over the next six years it has prevented large-scale fires on the land. The difference from other Indigenous-led fire brigades? The prominence of women: of the 45 volunteers trained by a retired firefighter, 25 are women.
Tragedy amid a national crisis
It was Paulo Selva, a retired colonel from the Mato Grosso state fire department, who came up with a project to strengthen socioenvironmental resilience in the Bakairi community. He says he didn’t believe the official system could handle all the demands. “The fire department only addresses issues related to fires that occur within its areas of operation, but more than 45% of forest fires occur outside of that legal condition,” he says.
In December 2019, Selva created the Environmental Operations Group Institute (GOA), a nonprofit of volunteer environmental agents. With GOA, he traveled to Indigenous villages far from urban centers to offer technical training and free firefighting skills development.
During one of his visits in 2021, he met a resident of the Santana Indigenous village, who invited him to train the residents. There, he found an unprecedented dynamic: most people interested in joining the volunteer brigade were women. That was also a consequence, he would later learn, of the fires: during the last major event, while the men sought help, women watched the land burn, unsure of what to do.
During the lessons, Selva learned that women spend more time in the territory caring for their children, their homes, or their own community, while men leave to work in nearby farms. He also understood that preservation requires a watchful eye, a quality he saw in the women.
That same year, the 45 volunteers completed GOA’s basic course in urban human-made burning and wildfire management. They received training in first aid, amateur radio, firefighting and prevention, use of equipment, and techniques for living in inhospitable environments. Since then, the program has been organized around three fronts: risk management and traditional fire control; emergency response and forest restoration; and development of sustainable economic alternatives — all with women playing leading roles.
“It’s not just young girls. There are women aged 40, 45, 50 who can fight the fires. They come from all age groups, and they all act with courage,” says Edna, who in addition to being an educator is also a member of the brigade. This profile breaks stereotypes about who’s capable of fighting fires, as 15- and 16-year-old teenagers join mature women, many of them grandmothers, and take the lead in environmental protection.
Together, the Bakairi women have achieved a feat that defies statistics: there have been no major fires on the Santana Indigenous Territory in four years, even as other parts of the Cerrado burn.
The Cerrado on fire
Between January and December 2024, 9.7 million hectares (24 million acres) of the Cerrado burned land — an area larger than Portugal. According to the Fire Monitor tool developed by mapping collective MapBiomas, 85% of that, or 8.2 million hectares (20.3 million acres), were areas that still had native vegetation cover, a 47% increase over the average of the previous six years.
Data from the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) indicate that the total burned area on Indigenous territories in the Cerrado grew by 105% from January to September 2024, amounting to 2.8 million hectares (6.9 million acres). A combination of deforestation, burning for farm expansion, and a lack of effective public policies has increased fire vulnerability.
“Most of these fires that occur in Mato Grosso start outside the [Indigenous] territories and invade them,” says Edmar Kajejeu, a geographer and member of the Bororo people, who serves as an adviser to the Federation of Indigenous Peoples of Mato Grosso (FEPOIMT). According to organization, on a single day in 2024, there were fire spots in 23 Indigenous territories across the state.
Through overshadowed by the higher-profile Amazon Rainforest, it’s the Cerrado that suffers much of the environmental damage in Brazil. In 2024, for the second year running, it accounted for more than half of the country’s deforested area (52.5%), totaling 652,100 hectares (1.61 million acres), according to RAD2024, the sixth Annual Report on Deforestation in Brazil, prepared by MapBiomas. As high as that figure was, it still marked a 41% decline from the previous year.
In recent years, the Amazon and Cerrado have accounted for more than 82% of the country’s deforestation, bearing the brunt of the environmental crisis.
Guardians of land and ancestral knowledge
The Bakairi women’s commitment stands in stark contrast to their scarce resources. The brigade operates on a strictly voluntary basis, without any pay or allowance for food, transportation or equipment for the women. They often have to be away from their homes for days on end, giving up their routines.
The group received some uniforms from the Federation of Indigenous Peoples, but not enough for everyone. “There are only eight overalls for more than 30 volunteers. Most of the women wear flats or sneakers they received as donations, but it’s not safe,” Edna says. “Even so, they work with love because the territory is ours and the land is our mother, it’s our life.”
Their work isn’t limited to fighting flames; on the contrary: when the women put on their improvised garments and head out to fight the fires, they’re keeping ancestral knowledge alive. “We have young girls’ transition rituals, mourning rituals, postnatal rituals, diets, any medicine we might take,” Edna says. “For the Indigenous population, everything has its own spirit. You have to ask permission, you have to ask with love, because it will hurt the plant if you pull it out.”
After the destruction of 2018, they were the ones who reinvented the territory’s food production. “Because of the fire that destroyed everything, we started protecting ourselves by planting bananas and cassava in our backyards so these trees would protect us from the fire, but they’d also feed us. There’s no more hunger here, thank God. We learned to deal with the pain of loss; we transformed,” she says.
Edmar, the geographer, says fires destroy more than just trees. “Besides medicinal plants, there’s the fruit-harvesting season, which also has its specific period. The fire ends up changing that. Sometimes there’s no fruit like there used to be,” he says. Animals are also part of the toll: jaguars, capybaras and others die in the flames, disrupting the ecosystem. “Indigenous people live off hunting and fishing, [so] the fire destroys everything,” Edmar says.
Neighbors in different situations
About 150 kilometers away, in the Umutina Indigenous Territory in Barra do Bugres municipality, still in Mato Grosso, Helena Indiara Corezomaé talks of the impacts of deforestation in the Cerrado, but under different conditions. A member of the territory’s Indigenous Balatiponé people and a journalist with a master’s degree in social anthropology, she says the 29,000-hectare (71,700-acre) territory has been repeatedly hit by large fires, but without an organized brigade like that of the Bakairi.
In 2020, the flames came so close to her parents’ home that the family had to use buckets of water and improvised tools. While the community’s men were fighting a fire in another area, there was no specialized support. In 2024, another large fire broke out. Although 23 Indigenous territories across Mato Grosso burned, according to FEPOIMT, only Helena’s territory received support.
Year after year, “we face the same reality: no support, no structure, no proper equipment,” she says. “We feel that Indigenous people are never taken seriously. There’s no commitment to solving the problem.”
The consequences go beyond environmental destruction. When fires swept through the land in 2020, the smoke and soot made the air unbreathable. “You can’t stay in the territory. There’s a low, black smoke, and you can’t breathe,” Helena says. The community had to leave their homes temporarily.
Unlike the Bakairi, who managed to establish a permanent brigade, the Balatiponé rely on ad-hoc volunteer groups formed in response to each new emergency. These operations usually take place only after the fire has already grown very strong.
The community has made several requests to IBAMA, the federal environmental agency, for support to establish a brigade, but has never received a response. “If we have a plan, if we are prepared, if we have a trained team, that’s a different situation,” Helena says.
Edmar agrees an organized Indigenous brigade can be effective, by protecting not just its own territory but also by helping other Indigenous groups. “This year, there was a fire on the Tereza Cristina Indigenous Territory,” he says, a site that’s home to the Bororo people. “The Bakairi brigade left their territory and went there to fight the fires alongside a local volunteer brigade.”
But bureaucracy hinders the expansion of these initiatives. “To establish trained Indigenous brigades, you have to go through a lot of red tape,” Edmar says. “They have to approve these brigades and then go through the whole process. We understand it takes time.”
He adds that other agencies, such as the state fire department, could speed up training, but are held back by Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs, which claims that these other agencies aren’t prepared to deal with the specific needs of Indigenous peoples.
Against statistics
Yet the results of an Indigenous territory having its own volunteer fire brigade are undeniable. “Last year, the year before that, and this year, we had no fire spots, thank God and this volunteer brigade,” Edna says.
Any fires that do flare up are quickly subdued by people who know every spring, trail and vulnerable area in the territory. This proximity, combined with technical training, has transformed the Bakairi brigade into a local reference.
“I was talking to a young man from the Bakairi brigade in Santana. He said that there haven’t been any fires on Indigenous lands since the brigade was created,” Edmar says. “This means it’s having an effect. They’re getting the job done — fighting the fires.”
The Bakairi experience has caught the attention of neighbors and authorities. Neighboring farmers have turned to the brigade in times of crisis, and state agencies have also sought its help. “It’s the first Indigenous brigade and also the first volunteer brigade that I know of,” says Selva, the former firefighter to helped establish the brigade.
Edmar says the initiative is unique. “I think it’s positive in terms of women’s leadership. This needs to be strengthened,” he says.
Now, the struggle is for recognition. Four years without major fires have shown that when women stay on the land to care for it, the land remains alive, proponents say. Even though they’re surrounded by agribusiness, the Bakairi guardians have demonstrated that resisting also means caring, and that the future of the Cerrado may be in the hands of those who have always lived in it.
“The Bakairi are stubborn, the Bakairi are insistent, the Bakairi persevere,” Edna says, “and that’s why they resist to this day.”
Banner image: Bakairi women firefighters from the Environmental Operations Group, in the Santana Indigenous Land, Mato Grosso. Image: Colonel Paulo Selva.
This story was first published here in Portuguese on Oct. 14, 2025.
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