Relax. This title is a provocation, says the author Ailton Krenak, activist of the socio-environmental and indigenous rights movement in Brazil. We’re not so doomed, yet. There is still a chance to reconnect with Nature.

Today is the Dia do Indio (Indian Day) in Brazil and it’s a perfect occasion to remember the truth about nature told by the wise Indigenous communities.

“I don’t understand where you have anything that isn’t nature. Everything is nature. The cosmos is nature. Everything I can think of is nature.”

– Ailton Krenak

There are at least 250 ethnic groups in Brazil who speak more than 150 languages and dialects. Before the colonization, there were more than 1.000 different Indigenous languages. One of the biggest myths about the Indigenous people is that they’re all one. When Europeans think of Native Americans, they put them in one category. You know, those valiant people who talk to the mountains and can stop the rain.

The fact that we can share this space, that we are traveling together doesn’t mean that we are the same; it means exactly that we can attract each other through our differences, which should guide our roadmap in life. Having diversity, not that of humanity with the same protocol. Because that so far was just a way to homogenize and take away our joy of being alive.

– Ailton Krenak

Humanity is being detached in such an absolute manner from the organism that is the earth. The only nuclei that still consider that they need to stay attached to this earth are those that were kind of forgotten on the edges of the planet, on the banks of rivers, on the shores of oceans, in Africa, Asia or Latin America. They are caiçaras, Indians, quilombolas, aborigines – sub-humanity. Because there is a humanity that is, let’s say, cool. And there is a rougher, more rustic, organic layer, a sub-humanity, people who are stuck to the earth.

– Ailton Krenak

This thought reminds me of a poem written by Eduardo Galeano, representing the tragic destiny of the Indigenous people.

The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing.

Who are not, but could be.
Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police
blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”

― From Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

We have become alienated from the Earth, and have come to think that it is one thing and we are another: Earth and humanity.

My provocation about postponing the end of the world is exactly always to be able to tell one more story. If we can do that, we are postponing the end.

– Ailton Krenak

Are we able to postpone the end, now that we can’t prevent it?

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