Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon: The Kayapó’s Fight for Just Livelihoods

Indigenous groups are facing unprecedented global challenges in this time of unparalleled environmental and geopolitical change, a time that has intensified human-rights concerns and called for political and economic restructuring. Within this landscape of struggle, the Kayap?, an indigenous nation in the central Brazilian Amazon, emerge as leaders in the fight.

Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon sheds light on the creative and groundbreaking efforts Kayap? peoples deploy to protect their lands and livelihoods. Now at the front lines of cultivating diversified strategies for resistance, the Kayap? are creating a powerful activist base, experimenting with nontimber forest projects, and forging strong community conservation partnerships. Tracing the complex politics of the Kayap?'s homeland, Laura Zanotti advances approaches to understanding how indigenous peoples cultivate self-determination strategies in conflict-ridden landscapes.

Kayap? peoples are providing a countervision of what Amazonia can look like in the twenty-first century, dominated neither by agro-industrial interests nor by uninhabited protected landscapes. Instead, Kayap? peoples see their homeland as a living landscape where indigenous vision engages with broader claims for conservation and development in the region.

Weaving together anthropological and ethnographic research with personal interactions with the Kayap?, Zanotti tells the story of activism and justice in the Brazilian Amazon, and how Kayap? communities are using diverse pathways to make a sustainable future for their peoples and lands. The author interweaves Kayap? perspectives with a political ecology framework to show how working with indigenous peoples is vital to addressing national and global challenges in the present time, when many environmentally significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities.