From mourning to struggle: lessons from the indigenous Northeast
Abstract: Transforming mourning (or death) into an engine of struggle (or of life) is not something new for indigenous groups. Over the last four years, and in the face of countless criminal acts - and an uncertain number of deaths, given the underreporting of the pandemic, for example, but also of what we are calling death - we were summoned by indigenous leaders from different backgrounds. places in the country to recognize this fact; to recognize that the extermination process employed as a State policy by the current Brazilian government is not different in nature from what these groups have been facing, in some cases, for more than 500 years. In this communication, I take this call as a starting point and establish an alliance with the past experience of the Xukuru of Ororubá – whose main leader was assassinated in 1998, during the process of fighting for land, and had his body planted in the land, so that new warriors are born from it -, which is also that of so many other groups in the indigenous Northeast, of retakes, of life and death for the land, of life and death with the land, to reflect to what extent the recognition of the common nature with which we are living in the present also goes through the recognition of what Marisol de la Cadena calls the unusual nature, in one case and in the other, of the limits established for what is considered what it is to be alive and, consequently, of the limits for what is understood as genocide.