When Ailton Krenak walked, barefoot, onto the stage of a packed auditorium during a book festival in Rio de Janeiro, the crowd hushed. He lifted the microphone, sending earsplitting feedback across the room.
He took the screech as his cue. People nowadays are too reliant on technology, he said; it is good to be reminded that “we are the ones who speak, not the little gadget.”
Krenak, an Indigenous author from Brazil, used the microphone malfunction to launch into one of the main messages of “Ancestral Future,” his new book: Technology often gives people the illusion they’re tackling the crises humanity has unleashed on the planet, he said. Societies should, instead, try to chart the path ahead by looking at what was here before: nature, and ways of living that had all of nature, and not just human beings, at their center.
At 70, Krenak, a member of the Krenak Indigenous group of Brazil, has been in public life for decades, as an activist for Indigenous rights, a conservationist and a philosopher. But as the ravages of climate change and the biodiversity crises become more visible in the lives of billions, Krenak has never been more popular.
“I could say these things a hundred years from now, and it wouldn’t have any effect. Or a hundred years ago,” he said. It was the overlap of his message with a world in crisis, he added, “that gave it power.”
Videos of his lectures and interviews often garner tens of thousands of views. After his talks, older adults and teenagers alike run after him for a picture or an autograph. Many say Krenak’s books have changed how they see nature.
Duscélia Rocha, a retired teacher who attended the lecture in Rio, said that before reading his books, she had not thought about rivers and mountains as living things. “He brought meaning to it,” she said of her relationship with nature.
“Ancestral Future,” which was published in English last month, was a best seller in Brazil. His previous book, “Ideas to Postpone the End of the World,” also a best seller there, has been translated into English, German, Japanese and other languages.
What he provides in his latest book, Krenak said, is less a solution than a challenge. He delivers a sharp criticism of capitalism and of a development paradigm he blames for making the planet increasingly uninhabitable. But what he proposes, he said, is not “to end capitalism and go live in the wild,” but to strengthen society’s relationship with living things, and to develop a worldview that has the fullness of nature at its center.
His argument for humanity’s interdependence with nature echoes the work of other Indigenous authors whose books have also resonated profoundly, such as Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass.”
Krenak’s experience living in a country where dozens of Indigenous people are killed every year adds urgency to his message.
He was born in Minas Gerais, a state in southeastern Brazil named for the mines that have been central to its economy for centuries. Many of the Krenak people were killed and driven from their land during the mining rush that started in the 18th century.
Krenak’s own family fled their ancestral land in the early 1960s, when he was 11, after loggers and cattle ranchers moved into the area. His family left after they saw others be violently expelled, he recalled, ending up hundreds of miles south, separated from most of their relatives and from a way of life that was intertwined with the forest, the river and the animals on their land.
Krenak uses his break from an ancestral way of life, when nature was all around, to a modern world that was divorced from it, to ground his discussion about where the world is headed, said Bill McKibben, an environmental activist and the author of the “The End of Nature,” a 1989 book that introduced the concept of climate change to a generation of American readers.
“He almost literally comes from a different world, and so provides an extraordinarily useful testimony,” he said. “There are very few human beings in quite that same position, very few writers.”
Literature arrived late in Krenak’s life. His family’s early struggle to survive meant he only learned to read when he was in his late teens. Books, he said, only entered his life when he was well into his 20s.
As a young man, Krenak visited other Indigenous groups across Brazil as he and other leaders built the Union of Indigenous Nations, an organized movement to push for their rights.
He became known across Brazil in the late 1980s as the movement fought for the recognition of their ancestral lands and cultures in a new constitution that followed decades of military rule. Many Indigenous people died as a consequence of economic development policies pursued by the dictatorship.
In 1987, he defended the proposal before the constitutional assembly as he slowly painted his face black with dye made from jenipapo, a tropical fruit. It was a powerful image, and the first time he laid out to a national audience a particularly Indigenous way of thinking and living that, he said, had been damaged by greed and ignorance but still stood, “in defiance of all riches.”
In the years that followed, Krenak hosted a radio show, organized politically and gave speeches around the world. In April, he became the first Indigenous member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. During the acceptance ceremony, he said one of his goals was to document and protect Indigenous languages.
“The idea is to prioritize spoken language, and not text,” he said. “What threatens these languages is the lack of speakers.”
His books have a spoken origin as well — they are not written, but derive from lectures he’s given over the years.
In an essay in “Ancestral Future,” Rita Carelli, his editor, argued that his writing isn’t simply born from the spoken word, but emerge from his interactions, “nourished by his interlocutors.”
The oral nature of his books seem to allow their message to adapt with each new audience. In the lecture in Rio de Janeiro, in June, the crowd was mostly made up of teachers, so “Ancestral Future” was about education.
He lamented children’s addiction to technology. “I see devotion to technology as a substitute for the encounters that give meaning to community life,” he said. “And without community life, humans get sick.”
His message is timely. Governments are busy working on technological solutions to the many crises assailing the world, but they have also agreed to draw more ambitious policies to protect and restore nature. Increasingly, Indigenous people are part of the conversation.
Researchers have found that Indigenous people in Brazil and Australia are better at protecting biodiversity than many government agencies. And, in Canada and the United States, cultural fires, long considered harmful to native forests, are now seen as effective ways to prevent bigger wildfires.
To Krenak, these examples are “evidence that the future is ancestral.”
Years ago, he moved back to the ancestral Krenak land. The Doce River, which runs by it, is one of his main sources of inspiration.
In 2015, a mining dam collapsed, unleashing a wave of toxic mud that poisoned the river and killed 11 tons of fish. In “Ancestral Future,” he wrote that Watu, as the river is called in his language, will adapt. It is people who struggle.
“Water will continue to exist here in the biosphere and slowly regenerate because rivers have that gift,” he wrote. “It’s we who have such an ephemeral existence.”
People have much to learn, he said, from plants, which can adapt and survive in a new habitat, or from rivers like the Doce.
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