- After decades of invasions, pollution and state neglect, the Akroá Gamella Indigenous people have reclaimed part of their ancestral land in the Taquaritiua Indigenous Territory, in Brazil’s Maranhão state, and shut down illegal landfills maintained by local governments.
- For more than 12 years, hospital and urban waste has been illegally dumped in springs at the Tabarelzinho Indigenous village, in a region that’s also supposed to be an environmental protection area of internationally recognized ecological importance.
- The Akroá Gamella’s so-called retomadas (recapturing) of land aims to restore the territory through agroecological practices, reforesting it with native species and recovering its springs; meanwhile, they continue to face ongoing violence by invaders.
For more than 12 years, the government of Viana municipality in Brazil’s Maranhão state dumped used needles and syringes into three springs in Tabarelzinho village, inside the Taquaritiua Indigenous Territory, home to the Akroá Gamella people. They also dumped glass bottles, plastic bags, cans, foam containers and used diapers into these water sources, as well as cotton balls with blood, contaminated fluids, tumors and other hospital waste items — including those needles and syringes.
On two adjacent plots of land within Tabarelzinho measuring 2.5 hectares (6.2 acres), the Viana municipal authorities created an open-air dump. Here, for more than 4,300 days, it spread the garbage produced by its more than 50,000 residents.
Flies and bad smells took over the homes of the Akroá Gamella for more than a decade. In the blazing heat and humidity of the Amazonian noon, families were forced to close their doors and windows to be able to have lunch unplagued by flies or beset by the foul smell of garbage.
“This is the result of white men’s development: contamination of our water table, of water bodies, of all living species,” said Cywr Xxa Akroá Gamella, who lives in a village near Tabarelzinho, also inside the Taquaritiua Indigenous Territory. “Several people have been infected, there have been several deaths related to the dump, but there is no visibility.”
The Akroá Gamella have reported illegal garbage dumping to the authorities for more than a decade, but say they’ve always been ignored. And there’s an aggravating factor: the municipality of Viana is located within the Baixada Maranhense Environmental Protection Area (EPA), a mosaic of rich and complex ecosystems, including mangroves, babassu palm groves, open and floodplain fields, estuaries, lagoons, and riparian forests.
Due to its ecological importance, in 2000 the EPA was designated as a Ramsar Site, a wetland of international importance. These are areas whose natural wealth and importance for the protection and maintenance of wildlife and human life deserve special attention from national and international conservation policies. Brazil has been a signatory to the Ramsar Convention since 1996.
In 2024, the neighboring municipality of Matinha also began dumping urban waste produced by its 23,000 inhabitants in the same location, effectively treating the ancestral home of the Akroá Gamella as a public latrine. Municipal managers leased part of the land in agreement with the invader of the territory, who also leased some of it to Viana for its landfill.
The invader in question is a local farmer who is friends with various politicians, notaries public and police officers. In the 1980s, he grabbed Indigenous territory by forging documents and registering as his own the lands that, at least since the mid-18th century, have been documented as belonging to the Akroá Gamella.
For more than four decades, he profited from the Akroá Gamella lands by leasing them to third parties and illegally deforesting them, in addition to using violence to prevent the Indigenous people from remaining in their own territory. There have been several reports of houses and schools being demolished and burned, of beatings, arbitrary arrests and shootings — all allegedly perpetrated by the invader and his thugs over the years.
With yet another garbage dump growing and contaminating their homes, the Akroá Gamella decided it was time to put an end to the violence.
On Aug. 28, 2024, they reclaimed that part of the territory, forced the invader out, and shut down the Viana and Matinha garbage dumps.
Waiting forever or reclaiming it
Since at least the 1980s, the retomadas, or recaptures, carried out by the Akroá Gamella in Maranhão state have been an autonomous strategy for resistance and permanence in their territories, to confront the theft of their lands and the Brazilian state’s connivance with crime and illegality.
Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs, is notoriously slow in carrying out its duty of demarcating the lands claimed by Indigenous peoples. That has allowed invasions of Indigenous lands, attacks and murders to persist.
Funai’s official justification for its failure to demarcate is usually its lack of resources and personnel to carry out the work. The demarcation process for the Taquaritiua Indigenous Territory began in 2014, but was stalled for years and has only resumed now, a decade later, with the start of technical environmental and delimitation studies.
In 2015, fueled by the glacial pace of Funai’s work and the ever-increasing urgency of securing land in which to live, plant and exist, the insurgencies of the Akroá Gamella people gained momentum. In the last nine years, they’ve reclaimed another five areas of their Taquaritiua territory from invaders and land grabbers. The territory sprawls across the municipalities of Viana, Matinha and Penalva, in the Amazonian state of Maranhão.
The total size of the territory as well as the number of villages and families is still being determined by Funai staff through ongoing field studies.
Letting the land rest again
The process of reclaiming land starts with removing the fences installed by the invaders and evicting them.. This is a collective effort by men, women, young people and children, who march and sing together through the territory on the date determined for this purpose. This follows deliberation in assemblies of the people led by what they call the Enchanted Ones, said to be spiritual entities that guide, protect and nourish each Akroá Gamella individual.
After the fences, life: they resume their work on the land, usually violated by farmers who plant grain monocultures or pasture grass for cattle, in addition to spraying pesticides. The Indigenous people restore the land’s right to health by removing garbage, genetically modified seeds, and chemical products. Then they restore its right to rest while they plant native species uprooted by the farmers, such as bacuri, babassu, guarimã, buriti, juçara, mango and cashew trees. In the silted streams and springs, they plant species that help revive the waters, such as juçara and buriti.
The Akroá Gamella live off family crops, fishing, and raising small animals such as pigs and chickens. Today, some cattle also help to provide protein.
On farms reclaimed long ago, the regeneration can be seen from afar: the green of the trees and the colors of seasonal fruits take over previously barren landscapes. Silted streams and rivers have recovered not only their waters, but also their fish. Animals that have disappeared due to deforestation are gradually returning to the territory: armadillos, spotted pacas, agoutis, rabbits, peccaries and deer. Birds include white-tipped doves, owls, thrushes, toucans and boat-billed herons. In the reborn forests and waters, the enchanted ones are also said to be strengthened. Everything is connected, involved, for the Akroá Gamella.
The invader will not give up
Reclaiming the land is no easy feat. About two weeks after the August 2024 retomada, unknown assailants opened fire on a house in the village of Cajueiro-Piraí, also in the Taquaritiua territory. It was Sept. 15, a Sunday night, shortly after a power outage. The shots hit the beds where the Indigenous inhabitants were sleeping, but no one was injured.
Two days before the attack, on Sept. 13, the Akroá Gamella had received audio messages from a man threatening to attack them. “I’d tell people to beat up those bums. They are bums harming the entire population of Viana. I’d tell people to beat them up; that land is not theirs,” the man said in the forwarded audio message.
To date, no one has been investigated or prosecuted for the attack.
The past wanders the streets
I visited the Akroá Gamella territory in Viana for the first time in early 2019.
I went to meet two members of the community, Aldeli and Zé Canário, to report on how they were doing two years after a violent attack on April 30, 2017. On that day, a mob of more than 200 people armed with shotguns, sticks and machetes attacked a group of 30 Indigenous people who were trying to reclaim their land for the fifth time. The criminals were incited by politicians, including a national congressman, and leaders of local neo-Pentecostal churches who want to grab the Akroá Gamella lands illegally.
The attack was brutal. Dozens of people were injured, including Aldeli and Zé Canário, whose hands were severed with machetes. At the time of the attack, the then governor of Maranhão, Flávio Dino, now a justice of Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court, denied that the Indigenous people had their hands cut off, in blatant disregard of the evidence and the suffering the two men experienced. To this day, no one involved in the episode has been punished.
In February 2025, I returned to the Akroá Gamella land to report on the new retomada and the closure of the landfill, I saw remnants of the barbarism of eight years earlier. Driving to Tabarelzinho village with Benedito Akroá Gamella in the passenger seat next to me, he pointed out, on either side of the street, two people who had participated in the 2017 attack against his people.
“Those two took part in the massacre,” he told me, his speech full of living memory. They were ordinary men, owners of small food businesses, during an ordinary day at work. The apparent normality of our movement among criminals jarred with the fact that those two men hate the Akroá Gamella and had tried to murder some of them eight years before. In the colonial world, peace is luck, and violence is always on the brink.
Walking with Benedito through the garbage dump that had been closed for six months, I saw the forest rise up from the rubble in search of sun and water, like a war survivor. Little by little, the greenery covers the land, and the stream begins to flow again, with the water less dark from leaching. The rains of the Amazon winter are washing the land and the springs, less obstructed now that the town governments have stopped dumping garbage.
Glass bottles and many plastic bags and packaging can still be seen on the land and underground – these are corpses left by progress that refuse to accept their fate. They will not give up easily. Plastic takes more than 100 years to decompose; glass takes more than 10,000.
“Maybe 20 centuries from now this will go back to normal,” said Cywr Xxa Akroá Gamella.
To those who defend the land, Indigenous peoples present ways for a possible life in the colonial world: reclaiming territories stolen by white people, tearing down the fences, recovering the territory and looking after it so that the land and its people do not forget what it means to be free.
Banner image: Traditional markings made with genipap dye on the foot of an Indigenous Akroá Gamella individual. Image courtesy of Marciel Pires.
This article was first published here in Portuguese on June 4, 2025, in partnership with the German organization Save the Forest – Rettet den Regenwald e.V.
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