Books
Now, being a writer, he promotes a direction that relies on nature and traditional knowledge.
An Indigenous Author Offers Ancestral Answers to Today’s Environmental Crises. Ailton Krenak was a child when his family was forced to leave their land in Brazil.
Updated 2024-Aug-20 01:00
Ailton Krenak, in a button-down shirt and a beaded bracelet, speaks while sitting near some plants.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A 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.
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.
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.
ImageAlthough Krenak learned to read later in life he became the first Indigenous writer admitted to the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
Bruna Prado Associated Press 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. 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.
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.
