With support from the Rainforest Fund and the Brazilian organization ISA, they have organized themselves in order to protect the reserve and defend their rights.
A reserve that protects indigenous people and the environment?
The reservation was established in 1961. Then it lay well protected deep in the Amazon jungle. Fourteen indigenous groups lived here together peacefully in a traditional way. Seven of these groups were relocated by the government in order to avoid extinction.
Deforestation threatens local life ways
Since that time, the rainforest in the area around the reserve has been chopped down for timber and new agricultural land, until the Xingu territory’s border. Furthermore, the territory was regularly exposed to invaders who chopped logs, fished and hunted illegally.
Cooperation between indigenous groups and organisationsr
When the ravaging of the rainforest became a serious threat to indigenous peoples, they founded the organisation ATIX to promote their rights and protected the reserve. The Rainforest Fund in Norway today supports several projects in Xingu through ATIX.
Focus on education and income
An education program for local teachers has developed. The education builds on a curriculum that the indigenous people themselves have helped to decide. Today most villages have a school with its own teacher, and most people in the villages can read and write.
Another project secures an income for the groups – and today honey production, handicrafts and seed collecting have become important sources of income for indigenous peoples. In this way, it becomes less attractive for them to move to the city to earn money.
Border guards in the rainforest
To protect the area, the indigenous population in Xingu developed their own border-patrol system. Ten border stations are manned with permanent local guards that are trained to patrol and defend the 900 km-long border. Regularly the border guards discover intruders and they have authority to detain these until the police arrive.
Results
On recent satellite pictures over Brazil, it is possible to se the Xingu reserve as a green lung in the agriculture land around it. This means that the indigenous people, with help of the program that Rainforest fund supports, have succeeded in protecting their area.
Therefore they contribute both to creating a buffer of protected areas that hopefully stop the pillaging of the Amazon, at the same time as they preserve their cultures and a substantial/meaningful area of the world’s richest ecosystem.
This text is a contribution from the Rainforest Foundation in November 2008.
