Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.BZ

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.BZ

When God made the land, the sun, the moon,

there was no one to admire the work of Nhanderu Guaçu, our great God.

So he sent the Guarani-Kaiowá, and gave us the name of Ivy Poty.

Our name means "Flowers of the Earth, Admirers of the Work of God".

For us Guarani-Kaiwoá, the land is the mother.

She gives us food, life, health.

The land is a living being,

and very important to us.

A Kaiowá poet always said that water lives in our bodies,

evapotates into the air, and turns into a cloud of love,

to fall as rain, sprout the buds, and bloom the flowers.

We are nature, we are nature.

The indigenous people of Mato Grosso do Sul

are recognized as nine ethnicities today.

But before the colonization process,

researchers say that here, in this territory

there were many ethnicities, various ethnicities,

and these ethnicities lived in territories free of borders.

There were no national states like today,

Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay.

At that time it was very beautiful, very healthy.

We lived off of the forest,

there was a lot of hunting, a lot of fishing,

a lot of fruit, a lot of game that we ate,

birds, medicine,

materials to make our houses.

In the 1500s, the arrival of European colonization,

there was a very big impact, especially in the coastal region.

Then this process of colonization started to arrive here in Mato Grosso do Sul.

When the colonizers arrived,

they didn't pay attention to who was here.

For them, the environment and the indigenous people who lived here,

were not a concern.

There were a lot of people.

But with the arrival of the Europeans, many died.

Many ran away,

and many sided with the colonizers,

but we are the children of those who ran away.

One of the key moments

was the war against Paraguay.

Indigenous peoples were captured to fight in the war,

which decimated the indigenous population.

Soon after, this company, Mate Laranjeira, was created

and it became the first large business in the region.

The Guarani Kaiowá\hindigenous people were reduced to slave labor,

they worked many hours a day, in slavery conditions, in exchange for food,

and thus great wealth was accumulated here.

This took place until the mid-1920s.

The federal government understood

that Brazil would need to modernize,

therefore it would need to expand its borders.

But, the idea was to remove the indigenous people

from the free territories where they were,

and create areas that we call reservations, "indigenous reservations",

and the lands that were “left,”

were destined for colonization.

These lands where the indigenous people lived were released for agricultural expansion,

while indigenous people were brought into the reservations.

In 1910, the state established eight small areas with a maximum of 3,600 hectares.

And 100 years ago, that seemed like a lot of space.

The idea, at the time of the Indian Protection Service,

was for the indigenous to integrate into the non-indigenous society.

In that period, companies were moving forward in their land concession process,

which, between Brazil and Paraguay, reached an estimated 5 million hectares.

That land was granted for the handling, planting and processing of yerba mate.

People came from the big urban centers,

with a promise from the government to come to Mato Grosso do Sul,

to live, to colonize, and to obtain free land

through these colonization companies.

They came based on the promise, with the perception,

that there were no indigenous people here,

there were no people, it was a land without anyone on it,

and therefore, it was a vast expanse of land

that anyone could come and claim for themselves.

The white men who came from abroad, their way of thinking is to destroy.

It's to take profit and destroy.

Everything, forests, water, rivers,

they destroy everything, because their way of thinking is different than ours.

The mountains have to fit in their pocket,

because it has to become money, and fit in their pocket.

For us, in our culture, to destroy mountains,

it's to destroy the bones of the land.

So they are destroying the bones of the land,

the land who, for us, is mother.

Because the government itself encouraged it:

"Go to that land, and if an indigenous person appears,

you can kill, you can burn the land, you can act however you want

to take care of that land, because it will be yours."

When the pioneers arrived in this area,

they killed all the relatives,

and threw them all in the river.

The bodies of many people,

ancient relatives, are all in the river.

No descendant survived.

Our ancient relatives were completely exterminated.

For us Guarani Kaiowá, the land is most important.

The land...

the land where we were born,

that land is our skin.

The tree is our umbilicus.

It has many roots.

I am already a great-grandmother.

I have a great-granddaughter, a great-grandson.

I want the children who are born now,

to carry our culture.

You have to plant it, it sprouts,

and you harvest it, in full bloom.

That's what I always say.

So, this chant that I have,

I want them all to learn it.

That noise is from a mining company over there

and it's 24 hours, they never cease, except on Sundays.

It stops for a tiny bit, and it starts again.

So, it's right next door.

This quarry has always been a nuisance.

There's no...

it's working 24 hours.

At night, it feels like big rocks are going to fall on us.

You lie down in bed, you sleep,

it feels like a rock falling, falling on you.

You dream about the damn thing.

When the quarry detonated charges out of schedule, around 10 o'clock at night,

without even notifying us,

suddenly, in the still air of night, an explosion.

I fell and passed out.

I broke my pelvis and my hip here.

The doctor said I would have long-term effects.

I was the one who talked to the owner of the quarry to reduce the explosions.

Their explosions are 4,000 tons of dynamite.

4,000.

He doesn't say how much they're using now but the land still shakes...

I lost my hearing because of the quarry.

It kept worsening with time until I became deaf on this side.

I can't hear. Now I can hear only on that side.

I've been living here for over fifty years,

and this quarry, fifty.

And pollution comes from there too, it contaminates the water.

It gives the children fever,

it causes sore throat, stomach ache.

That's what we live with.

When we cook, we have to eat immediately, or cover it.

If we don't, there's that smell of stone dust.

It's like the food is full of it.

I won't hide anything, I have to speak up.

So, that's it.

It's sad for us. For me, it's very sad.

But the quarry will never stop, it will never leave.

It will continue like this.

For us, the earth, our mother, is the center of everything.

Not for the white men. Economy, money is at the center for them.

A plant is our life.

These plants are the life of our children.

This land here, this land is our wealth.

This land for us, maestro, this land,

this land for us is our health.

This land for us is life for our children.

This land for us is what makes our life content.

Land, indigenous people, health, this land for us is our life.

This land for us will never end and our life will always be together.

In recent years, the agribusiness

here in Brazil has entered with full force, with destruction.

It is a highly destructive model, because, in principle,

it is a model of monoculture, of monocropping.

Unfortunately, today Brazil is the country that consumes the most pesticides in the world.

In this region, if we were to divide it, it would be about

7 liters of pesticides per person, per year.

We used to produce rice, cassava, corn, rice, watermelon, pumpkin.

We had a vegetable garden, but now after the poison,

after it is spread on the farm, the crops, it's over.

The poison kills even our wisdom,

it's like the poison destroys the mind, causes stomach aches, diarrhea.

At various times, pesticides become a chemical weapon

that is applied by aircraft

directly over communities, over people, we have several cases.

When the plane passes,

it kills chickens, kills dogs.

And more.

When you take away the forest, these insects multiply, others die.

And then the white men bring the poison. We don't need poison.

God didn't leave poison for us to drink.

God left good things, clean water, potable, healthy food.

God left it all to us. Nhanderú Guaçu left it to us.

But the white man came and invented

poison to kill themselves.

He earns a lot of money, but he also gets sick.

I'd rather be poor and happy in good health, than sick with money.

These people have been waiting for many decades

for the demarcation of their traditional territories.

Our constitution is from 1988.

The constitution of Brazil foresaw that within five years

after the constitution, all territories should be demarcated.

It recognizes the right to be indigenous, to their unique way of being indigenous.

Including the recognition of their mother tongues,

their beliefs, their traditions, their customs.

It's been 33 years since the Federal Constitution was approved, and our lands are still not demarcated.

Since the state did not meet its deadline,

the indigenous began an autonomous movement:

to return to their traditional territories.

And they begin to reinvent this other way of fighting for the land,

which is the retomada (reappropriation) of their traditional territories.

It is really a form of resistance.

The retomada is a struggle by those who no longer believe

that the government can solve their problem.

It comes as the only way to have control over that territory,

access to their water, to have dominion over their place,

to reclaim the land that was already theirs

which was taken by the government and by the colonization process.

So, how do we demarcate our lands today? It's about fighting and entering the land.

We have to give our blood, our lives, to demarcate our lands.

Mato Grosso do Sul is a situation

of permanent conflict between indigenous people and farmers.

Indigenous people fight every day,

not only to recapture their land but to survive, every day.

Indigenous people do not want to have to negotiate over rights and territories.

They want to recover the land,

much of which today are occupied by farmers, by agribusiness.

They just want this territory back.

For us, this is an achievement,

because being here today, in these roles we hold,

coordinating DICEI, leading FUNAI,

presiding over FUNAI and SESAI,

and now with our own ministry, it is the result of our long journey,

of many years in the Indigenous movement.

Our challenge now is to truly leave behind, or begin to build, a legacy.

A positive legacy.

There will be demarcation, we want demarcation.

I'm here by the roadside, like a lost jaguar,

like a dog without an owner.

That's what I think.

If demarcation takes too long, we will gather the people,

we will enter the village, reclaim the village as well.

For example, in the region of Laranjeira-Nhanderu,

Mrs. Alda, who is an elder,

says she was around 7 years old when the colonization group arrived.

They arrived one night, shooting several people.

Many armed horsemen, arrived, shooting at the community.

She was a child, and she, with her big family, had to run away,

leave everything, and jump into the Brilhante river.

There were few survivors, just those who managed to jump into the river,

run away, and then find another place in the territory.

This story that Mrs. Alda tells is not an isolated story,

an unusual story, it’s a common story.

When you listen to the elders, they say, “Look, they burned my family,

they burned my house, they burned my food, they burned my farm, they persecuted me.”

The government of the country,

along with the agrarian elites, along with the companies,

carried out this process of expulsion of the indigenous communities.

Dona Alda told the story of how she was expelled from this land

during the Farroupilha revolution, when the landowners came

to take the land we're on.

So, in this part, she tells that this land belonged to her parents and grandparents.

So, since 2007, we've been here, fighting for this territory.

We weren't here before, we were out in the woods.

We stayed a long time out in the woods.

We couldn't plant, we couldn't clear the land.

We survived with hunting, fishing, and traditional medicines.

We are always in the fight. Always with the hope to reclaim our land again.

Because sometimes it feels like there's no reason to hope.

We want to see the demarcation of indigenous land happen.

We are five women leading the way, five women.

Six with my mother, along with Chief Farid.

Always in the fight.

When we say we go, we go, we don't back down.

Nowadays, fighting to retake the land here in Laranjeira,

over these four years that we've been here, we've managed to sustain ourselves.

The children who came from the woods,

didn't know cassavas, bananas, papaya, chayote,

everything you grow in traditional farms.

So, since 2018, we've made a little progress.

When we talk about reclaiming our territory,

we mean reclaiming everything:

our prayers, our paintings, our earrings, our headdress, like hers,

our language, our traditional clothing, we're reclaiming all of that.

Indigenous people often say that reclaiming the land

is not just about the land, but about reclaiming their way of being.

The land is described by the word 'Tekoha'

which means "the place where one can be."

This quest for Tekoha, for the place where one can be, can assert themselves,

where they can speak their mother tongue, where children can be Kaiowá or Guarani,

was initiated with great strength by the indigenous movement.

Non-indigenous people say they own the land.

We don't. We belong to the land.

They did not buy our lands.

The land was not sold,

and the Guarani-Kaiowá territory was not sold or negotiated.

We did not occupy anyone's farm.

We did not take anyone's land.

We are reclaiming what we lost.

When we came here to retake it,

we were also brutally attacked.

We are no longer going anywhere.

We resisted everything.

From the beginning until today.

Our existence is this,

to continue fighting,

not to give up.

First it was the Landless Workers Movement. Then the Forest Code. And now the Indigenous cause.

We do not want medals for the GDP. We do not want to stand on the podium for the GDP.

We only want peace.

This place has always been ours.

We are the descendants of the people

who were expelled from here.

If we don't stand up, the violence will continue,

until the end of our race, our humanity, and our people.

I was born right there, in 1920.

This area was all forest still. All forest, there were no roads,

there were no fences, no boundaries,

there was no barbed wire anywhere.

My father was born here, so was my mother, and me.

They know that this village is truly ours.

We have been fighting in this Guararocá village for 23 years now.

We are waiting for the demarcation; let's see if it happens this year or...

While my father is still alive, we want this demarcation on 11,400 hectares.

The first one who came to buy our land saw the indigenous people, and bought it with them in it.

He even asked how many they were.

And then he said, "I don't want any more indigenous people here."

After about a week, on a Saturday,

he carried out a shooting and killed seven women.

I'm telling you this with great pain.

He killed three of my children.

They killed a lot of people.

All the people they killed, my God, the cemetery is there.

13 cemeteries now, and there wasn't a cemetery here.

The state favors the farmers against the indigenous people.

The farmers also have their own police force,

their own militia, their own way of organizing to

attack the indigenous communities and the retomada process.

From 1980 until now, more than 300 indigenous leaders

have been assassinated here in the Southern region of Mato Grosso do Sul.

And today we are being visibly killed, it's no longer invisible.

We are being personally massacred.

There was a very sad, very large massacre here.

In this place, Guapo'y Mirin.

People were shot,

my son was also shot in the hands,

the girls were shot in the head.

The shooter was in that house and the people were all around here.

Right here, a woman got shot in the leg.

There was a fence here.

They were shooting from behind the fence.

People also got shot here. My daughter got shot in the head here too.

That's were the shots hit.

It hit here and hit here, and hit here.

When the shot hit here, they shot from over there, the bullets hit my son right there in front.

It had to be a professional because

only a professional could hit here from that house.

A woman fell right there, and then the husband...

There was a cornfield here.

He came out from the cornfield to take the woman, the wife,

and they shot him too.

Two fell here. Two people here.

Police officers joined from down there.

There was a road here that passed through and went out there.

Those who came didn't come just to shoot at people, they came to kill.

Thank God, they only managed to kill two.

Vitor and Márcio.

We know that this Tekoha is ours,

this land is ours.

There is no help for us here because many say that we are the invaders,

that we invaded the farms.

But it's not an invasion, because since our grandparents' time,

we've known that this land is ours.

But the farmers took it not long ago.

Here is Vitor.

Here is his grave.

He always did his prayer in the morning,

morning and afternoon, afternoon and morning.

And today he is here.

It was very difficult and very sad too.

The children, the elderly, they are still traumatized.

This land is ours.

We expected justice, but...

There are more than 50,000 Guarani Kaiowá living here in Mato Grosso do Sul,

and at the same time, they are the people who face the most severe rights violation.

When the Brazilian state itself takes the land away from this population,

doesn't give them proper living conditions, and then takes their children away,

saying they can't stay with their mothers because they don't have housing, food or water,

it's a kind of kidnapping that the state carries out against these women.

These women are living in a condition of exploitation,

oppression and violence in every way.

Violence from lack of territory, racism, economic issues, cultural issues.

It's a multiplicity of violence that mainly affects women, children and the elderly.

For example, we have Dona Elida, who suffered so much from lack of health care

that she gave birth to her son at home.

Soon after birth, the child was taken away by the social assistance system.

They took my son, just 8 days old.

They said: "You have to do a DNA test."

"Is he really your son?"

He's not someone else's. My son is my son.

He stayed five years away from his mother, in a shelter for children.

The mother faced much hardship.

She had to go by horse-drawn cart or bicycle to visit her son.

We would walk there, we would walk back.

It was like that for five years.

There were times when visits were even forbidden.

The mother spoke her language and the son grew up speaking Portuguese.

I am alive, I said.

I'm alive.

I am alive and they're going to take my son away.

After a lot of struggle, many complaints from various organizations and support entities,

the case was reported.

There was an international campaign and after a lot of pressure,

Dona Elida was able to regain the right to be with her son.

When her son comes back after five years,

and he has to get used to the family again, get used to the language,

so it's a kind of kidnapping that the Brazilian state

often carries out with a family that lives in a condition of

misery due to lack of territory.

And now, Ender has been with us for a year.

We managed to get him out of there.

When children are taken by the child protection agency, it's not easy to get them back.

It took a long time for him to return.

He's all grown up now, and he lives here with us.

Thank God, we are together.

The white men model of worshiping God is very false for us, Guarani Kaiowá.

They pray very little, we pray 12 hours.

The white men pray for brainwashing, to make money.

There are many rich pastors,

but those who follow them are poor, they live in favelas, they are hungry.

I've always said, I don't know why the professional pastors ask us for money.

And when people ask them, he tells them to ask God.

This is wrong. It's not like that.

Why do I have to give money to the pastor and when I want it, I have to ask God?

Along with this process of intense colonization, also came religion.

Part of the colonizing process of the Guarani Kaiowá region was the implantation of churches,

especially the evangelical churches that arrived here early last century,

so about 100 years ago.

Today, the indigenous reservation of Dourados is a reservation of 3,600 hectares.

More than 20,000 indigenous people live there with more than 100 evangelical churches.

The advance of the evangelical churches over the Guarani Kaiowá territory

has led to deep conflicts, deep violence, and a lot of confrontation

between the traditional religion\hon one side and the evangelical churches on the other.

It's very difficult, like me, I'm 26 years old.

And during these 26 years, I've been through a lot of hardship

with my friends, with the neighbors, even the Christians.

When we pick up a maraca, they think we're performing an evil ritual.

In reality, they don't respect it.

I have my culture, I grew up in it, and I'm not ashamed to show my culture.

Sometimes I feel alone.

But then I ask God to give me strength, my mother and father and my siblings are with me, only us here.

And then I lift my head up, and I'm not afraid to show it.

The church comes and imposes its God, my God is bad, but their God is good.

The church arrived among us, they asked us to close our eyes.

When we opened our eyes, we were left with the bible and they were left with the land.

These evangelical churches come into direct conflict

with the traditional Guarani-Kaiowá religion.

Many times they preach that the traditional prayer healers, the women and men,

are demons that need to be fought.

They recommend the prohibition of certain customs.

Often rituals have to be practiced in secret,

they had to do the rituals only within their families,

so that no one would know, so that they could avoid direct confrontation.

Every Saturday with the students, we teach the culture.

The culture in which the child was born.

But now, the children who are born, they no longer know the culture.

They already speak in Portuguese and grow up like that.

Each identity, the identity we have is very little.

So, in 2000,

the mothers asked me, the fathers asked me

to create a small classroom.

We built this small classroom, a school.

The Tekoha Guarussu School.

My concern is the identity.

The identity we speak of is not the same as the identity the whites are teaching us.

But the identity of our culture.

One day, if we lose this identity,

where will the healers be?

Where will Nhanderu, Nhandecy be?

When we lost our land, we lost our language along with it.

When you lose the land, lose the forest, lose the religion, lose the language,

you lose the will to live.

What gives us life is our culture, our tradition, our faith.

When you lose all of this, then dying is more important.

Jejuvy is suicide, hanging.

But, what happens with suicide is a loss of identity.

That's why we have to\hstrengthen our spirit, our faith,

in Pa'ikwara, which is the great sun, in Nhanderu Guaçu, our great God.

Even if there is nothing to eat, if you are spiritually strong, you are happy

If we don't teach the culture,

then it will die with me.

From the beginning, I have to teach the children, the boys, the young ones.

This isn't just any flower, this pink one; it's heart medicine.

Various types: this one is for heart medicine,

that one is for bodily pain.

You have to boil it before drinking it. It has little seeds.

This one, my grandfather planted it.

It's Pariri, its name is Pariri.

Here, Donna Elida.

It's a joy to give you these plants, they came as a donation.

In Jesus' name, may God bless you abundantly.

May God be with you. And thank you to you all.

This one is pomegranate.

These plants come from land reform farmers here in Mato Grosso do Sul.

Thank you very much.

In the last years, as the people start to reclaim their ancestral territory,

their spirituality is also reclaimed and their way of eating.

Eating traditional food,

praying before planting, praying before eating.

There is a fundamental trinity between prayer, farming and retomada.

Trees, food, flowers for the birds,

all this is deeply connected to their spirituality.

They pray to plant, call the spirit, pray during harvest,

they are extremely connected with the seasons, the calendar, the lunar cycle.

They are well connected with the sky, with the wind,

with the earth, with the water, with everything there is.

What we plant now isn't only for us,

we plant for the future.

This one,

Atipara.

Apaawatipara.

Awatipara.

This one, tupi monoti.

Tupi monoti.

We planted it, not to waste it

but to make it grow.

In the past, there was dense forest here.

A very large forest, and then it caught on fire, burned down and died.

I arrived here in 1969.

My place is called Bopeí.

There are remedies for diarrhea, vomiting, for headaches, for toothaches,

for snake bites on feet.

Back then, we had no medicine.

We only had herbal medicine.

We have an intercultural indigenous college.

This college was born based on the demand of the movement of Guarani Kaiowá professors,

who wanted a teacher training course so that they could be in their territory.

They learn the history of their territory.

When they have difficulties to elaborate ideas,

they learn to elaborate on their thoughts,

they strengthen themselves in this meeting between modernity and traditional culture.

It is a school, it is a farm,

it is a didactic place, where at the same time we learn and teach.

Our education is done orally.

It's about spirituality, our way of life

and taking care of nature, hence it is different.

The white man's is based on books

and competition to have more.

My idea here is to build a free school, free university,

where everyone can get free education.

Learn how to plant, learn how to make a house, architecture, designer, writer.

And reforestation.

Not the land for now, but the mind.

We need to help to reforest the mind,

we need to reforest our university.

We need to reforest our political leaders and national congresses

here in Brazil and everywhere else.

The world needs to be reforested, starting with the mind, the soul,

so we can be happy and leave a future for the youth.

That's why the moment is now.

The invitation that we indigenous people extend to the world is to "Reforest Minds".

Which is a change in thinking, a change in projects, in ideas.

By reforesting minds, you also reforest the heart.

For a fairer, more equal, more compassionate world.

By reforesting the mind, you reforest territories worldwide.

What will heal the Earth is biodiversity.

In our culture, we are all human,

the forest is human, the animals are human.

This is where health is.

Because my paradise is here, I don't need to die to go to paradise.

I am a person that lives in paradise, I built a paradise.

This is a joyful place.

In Guarani, we say Tekohavy'a.

Where I live, I am happy, because I live in a paradise.

Often when we enter a land,

it's because Mother Earth invited us to return to her, to her embrace.

So when the land invites us to return to her embrace, we go with great pleasure.

Even if we die, it's a great pleasure,

because we will die in the arms of Mother Earth,

and that brings us great happiness.

It's a very beautiful thing, this love for the Earth and the Earth's love for us.