EDITORIAL – Identity and belonging, by Paula Litaiff

Us amazonians have had a year that has shown us how necessary it is to understand the concepts of identity and belonging in order to guarantee the visibility of our challenges and combat attempts to silence us. We’ve had a year in which we’ve woken up to the taste of smoke in our mouths and the presence of solid waste in our lungs, generated by the criminal forest fires that occurred mainly in Manaus (AM), Belém (PA) and Rio Branco (AC). A year that has seen attacks on indigenous lands (Roraima) and attacks on the guardians of the forest (Rondônia, Acre and Pará).

We’ve made progress, but we’re still being suffocated to a great extent, and this can be seen in congresses and debates on the Amazon region, when there’s still the narrative that we’re incapable of managing our own resources, highlighted by french president Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to join the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), among other rehearsals of external and internal colonization. They’re still trying to be our spokespeople, because we still don’t understand the power of our ancestral strength.

Pará writer Daniel Munduruku wrote about the need to create the courage to follow a path of acceptance of what is original in each one of us and to take the path back to our ancestry in order to guarantee decolonization. His analysis was described in the book “Eu sou macuxi e outras histórias” (I am a Macuxi and other stories) (Caos & Letras, 2019), by Julie Dorrico, from Rondonia, who, through a poetic text, seeks to resist politically, showing that memory can be a great key to the discovery of the self and its empowerment.

All this reflection is so that amazonians, who often want to erase their indigenous ancestry, can reflect on the year they have lived and the importance of realigning a purpose for the coming year, based on their own pain and not on the needs of another part of the country, in an attempt to copy a pseudo-ideology.

With the recovery of identity and the re-signification of belonging, we may be stronger to face the challenges of the coming year and it may be more possible to fight for changes that actually alter the paths that try to pre-establish us, without our knowledge, often based on our weaknesses. May 2024 be a year of rediscovery and ancestral discovery.

Read also:

EDITORIAL – Illegal mining and ‘blood’ on the land, by Paula Litaiff
EDITORIAL – Hostages of a divided country, Amazonians expect concrete action from the Summit, by Paula Litaiff
The subject was the cover story and special report in the new December 2023 issue of CENARIUM AMAZON MAGAZINE. Click here to read the full article.