How Brazil’s Indigenous Maxakali confront climate change

By Sara Van Horn

Published On 30 Apr 2025 – original article

Bertopolis, Brazil – The hottest region in Brazil is blanketed with guinea grass: thick, invasive and highly flammable. Black swaths of burned earth checkerboard the rolling hills — evidence of the fires that have increased along with the temperature.

Yet enter the village of Pradinho, and a verdant patchwork emerges. Here, lush banana palms, cassava plants and guava trees sprout from the dry plains.

These flourishing lots are the product of Hāmhi Terra Viva, an Indigenous-led agroforestry project in the eastern state of Minas Gerais where ancestral songs and traditions are woven into the planting process.

Each oasis of trees, cultivated in backyard plots or large reforestation areas, signals a kind of rebirth for the local Maxakali people, also known as the Tikmũ’ũn.

The Atlantic Forest, a complex ecosystem of rainforests, coastal broadleaf trees and mangroves, used to cover the Maxakali territory. Its dense canopy trapped in moisture and fostered one of the most biodiverse regions in the world.

But the destruction of the Atlantic Forest has exacerbated the local effects of climate change — and with it, heightened the risks of wildfires.

In Brazil, the Jequitinhonha Valley, where the four Maxakali territories are located, has suffered a dramatic rise in temperatures in recent years.

Twenty Brazilian cities registered temperatures five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the average daily maximum, according to 2023 government data analysed by the newspaper O Globo. Of those cities, 18 were in the Jequitinhonha Valley.

The city of Araçuaí even shattered the record for the hottest temperature in Brazil’s history in November of that year, with thermometers rising to 44.8 degrees Celsius — or 112.6 degrees Fahrenheit. It lies a mere 130km (81 miles) from Maxakali territory.

“We are in the epicentre of the climate crisis in Brazil,” said Rosângela Pereira de Tugny, coordinator of the Hāmhi project.

More than 85 percent of the Atlantic Forest has been destroyed, as agriculture, development and practices like logging encroach upon its land. In Minas Gerais, experts estimate, less than eight percent of the forest remains.

“When I was a kid, there was lots of forest,” said Lúcio Flávio Maxakali, a schoolteacher and a master’s degree student at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. “There were lots of animals and we planted food — corn, beans, sugarcane — in the middle of the woods.”

But over the centuries, colonial settlers used fire to clear vast tracts of the Atlantic Forest. Farmers often seeded the burned areas with guinea grass, brought from Africa, to feed their cattle.

“The farmers changed the landscape,” said Manuel Damásio Maxakali, the 52-year-old leader of Pradinho village.

His wrinkled hands drawing makeshift maps in the dusty earth, Damásio was eager to communicate the destruction that the farmers wrought. “They burned everything. They added fences. They added cattle. They cut down everything. Each time, the farmers took more land.”

Brazil’s dictatorship, from 1964 to 1985, set the stage for even greater destruction of the region’s tropical forests.

Governed by the motto “integrate to not surrender”, the military leadership cut roadways through dense forest and pushed for development projects in remote regions to stimulate economic growth.

Deforestation ultimately hit a peak in the period between 1995 and 2004, when as much as 27,772 square kilometres (10,723 square miles) of forest in Brazil were destroyed per year.

That, in turn, increased temperatures across the country. In the region of the Atlantic Forest in particular, one study found that the surface temperature of a hectare increased by one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) whenever a quarter of its tree cover was razed.

If the entire hectare of forest was demolished, the study said, temperatures could spike by four degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit).

Without the moist tree cover, experts say the Maxakali territory has grown hotter and drier. That increases the likelihood of wildfires sparking.

Last year even broke a record for the number of wildfires in Minas Gerais. In less than nine months, 24,475 wildfires were tallied — far exceeding the previous record high in the whole of 2021.

Scarce rainfall also heightens the risk of fires, as does the seemingly endless guinea grass, which creates a thick carpet of flammable material across the landscape.

Grass fires can spread four times as quickly as forest fires, leading the Maxakali to nickname the invasive plant “kerosene”.

Some blazes are started accidentally within the Maxakali communities themselves.

Fire, after all, is a frequent part of Maxakali death rites, which often involve the burning of the deceased’s clothing, tools and house, and it is also used for cooking and to clear areas of snakes.

But wildfires are not the only consequence of the changing climate. The river in the village of Pradinho has shrunk so much that villagers are unable to bathe.

“There’s no water. The water has dried up,” Damásio explained. “We normally use water from the river, but there’s nothing now.”

Maxakali territory once spanned at least three large valleys in the Atlantic Forest. Elders in the village remember how the forest supplied food, medicine and construction materials — in addition to serving as habitat for the yãmĩyxop, spiritual beings central to Maxakali beliefs.

“There were medicines in the forest for us,” explained Damásio. “When we had stomachaches, we would use the bark from the trees to feel better. But now, it’s just grass. The farmers burned everything.”

But the four remaining Maxakali reservations — reduced to 6,434 hectares (15,900 acres) of pasture — contain less than 17 percent of their original vegetation. Some experts consider the Atlantic Forest to be regionally extinct.

That absence has many Maxakali leaders turning to reforestation — and finding in their musical traditions an ecological blueprint of the past.

Singing organises life in Maxakali villages: Music, for instance, is used to cure illness, teach history or transmit practical instructions, like how to make bags or weave fishing nets.

“Songs tie together the whole Tikmũ’ũn social structure,” said de Tugny, the Hāmhi project coordinator, who is also a musicologist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. “People don’t compose songs. They have songs.”

To have a song, she added, means being capable of taking care of the spirit considered to be the song’s creator.

Ancestral songs also provide an extremely detailed register of local ecology. Twelve musical canons, distinct in grammar and lexicon, total about 360 hours of song. Contained in the lyrics are hundreds of species of flora and fauna now extinct in the territory.

“We sing about everything: the saplings, the bananas, ourselves,” explained Manuel Kelé, leader of the village of Água Boa. “Even dogs have a song within our religion.”

One song, for example, lists 33 species of bees, some of which don’t have names in Brazil’s national language, Portuguese, and only two of which are currently present in the territory. The lyrics supply information about bee behaviour that many Maxakali have never witnessed first-hand.

“The songs are snapshots,” said de Tugny. “They are like photographs of every detail that exists in the Atlantic Forest: the names of insects, birds, plants, moments of relationship between an animal and a leaf. All these are registered.”

For the Maxakali, ritual songs also play a crucial role in helping the forest regenerate. Singing is a daily part of their work in Hāmhi’s tree nurseries.

Nursery caretakers not only sing to seeds as they are buried, but they also make music as part of the regular rhythms of harvesting and cultivation. Caretakers divide into groups, position themselves around the nursery, and sing in concert with each other. The song lyrics help participants remember the ecological knowledge of their ancestors.

And while some of the work at Hāmhi is dedicated to planting fruit trees and other crops, the project’s leaders see reforestation as key to reducing the region’s fire risks.

Since its inception in 2023, the Hāmhi project has planted over 60 hectares (148 acres) of fruit trees and 155 hectares (383 acres) of Atlantic Forest vegetation. The goal is a reforested area nearly twice that size.

Programme participants have also organised themselves into a provisional fire brigade and even created natural fire barriers, using traditional methods like planting species of fire-resistant vegetation.

“Songs help the forest grow,” said Damásio, the village leader. “We ask those who have died to help us. They walk here and assist us. We are calling on the forest to grow back.”