Last week, six thousand Indigenous people of 176 distinct ethnicities from all regions of Brazil set up camp in the heart of Brazil’s capital to insist that their existence and voices be recognized and respected by the government.
They traveled for days on packed buses, some under the threat of ambushes, to be united for the “Struggle for Life” camp, the country’s largest Indigenous mobilization in the last 30 years, to demand Brazil’s Supreme Court reject the so-called “marco temporal” clause. If upheld, this deceptive legal theory would invalidate the land claims of Indigenous groups who did not physically occupy their territories on the day that the new constitution was signed in 1988, ignoring centuries of genocidal oppression that forced many peoples to flee their ancestral homes and flying in the face of the expressed intent of the document itself.