MAXAKALI INDIGENOUS LAND, Brazil — Instead of cattle, the Indigenous. And nothing else changes in the landscape as soon as one crosses the sign announcing the entrance to the Maxakali Indigenous Land. The rest is grass. Not even the tops of the hills escaped the brown covering that at one time dressed the ancestral territory of the Tikmũ’ũn and clung to it as scabs adhere to flesh. Every morning, the mist that slowly rises over the dead soil now seems to express the tragic visage of shrouds. When Joviano Maxakali asked me to go with him in search of embaúbas, I didn’t think we’d go so far: Two hours on the road among immense clumps of Guinea grass to reach a point well beyond the northern limits of the Indigenous land, where a piece of Atlantic Forest has survived the advance of pasture. There, where the embaúbas grow robust, and the spirit-people don’t go hungry. Tuthi, the fiber of the embaúba (Cecropia glaziovii), is the “mother fiber” of the Tikmũ’ũn, an enchanted tree with which the ancestors are said to have woven various magical objects, including the thread that once connected heaven and Earth and allowed people and spirits to transit between the two worlds. The Tikmũ’ũn say that this thread was cut one day and, to descend to Earth, the spirits had to become animals. The animals that now exist would then be the physical form in which deceased relatives present themselves to the living. So sacred is the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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South Africa Today – Environment
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