On a sultry morning last December, eight women and their chief left the Xavante Indian village of Ripá, in the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land, aboard a truck. After a few kilometers, at the end of the road, they began a single file walk along almost imperceptible trails, hidden below knee-deep grass.
The little shade came from the thin, low, twisted trees. “It’s the love we feel for plants, for their fruits and seeds that makes us walk under the scorching sun without complaining”, says Neusa Rehim’Watsi’õ Xavante, daughter of the chief.
Most of the roughly 20,000 Xavantes live in the Cerrado in Mato Grosso, a mosaic of forests and pastures, conservation and deforestation that covers 40% of the state. Despite being drier and less dense than the Amazon rainforest, the cerrado has exuberant and unique flora and fauna.
For this reason, biologists often call it the most biodiverse savanna in the world and estimate that 5% of the planet’s plant and animal species live in this biome.
In recent decades, however, approximately 12% of the Cerrado in Mato Grosso has given way to cattle pastures and grain monoculture fields.
For seven years, members of the Ripá village have been part of a group that works to restore part of the Cerrado vegetation. The objective is to protect their territory and, at the same time, improve the quality of life of the residents, selling seeds that they collect in the region.
For as long as they can remember, the Xavante people have made frequent trips to collect seeds. They are known as “dzomoris”. These expeditions during which men hunt and women gather fruits and roots are part of their cultural calendar.
In the Ripá village, women often accompanied by male guides, who know the geography better through its relationship with hunting, make these trips specifically to collect seeds that will be used to replant degraded Cerrado lands.
“With these seeds, we are going to reforest”, says chief José Serenhomo Sumené Xavante.
Ironically, however, the seed buyers are often the same individuals and companies responsible for the projects that cause deforestation and lead to the need to replant the cerrado.
The day after the seed-gathering expedition, the chief got up early to paint his body with red and black war paint. He carefully applied the mixture of annatto and plant root ashes to his back, chest and hair.
Under a cloudy sky, in the clearing where the village’s children used to play football, his healthiest warriors, also with painted bodies, gathered around him, chanting and striking the beaten earth with their clubs and bows.
The chief then made a short and eloquent speech, saying that the time had come to expel the outsiders who had dug a lime mine on the southern edge of his reserve. Imitating a bird, he called to the men with short, high-pitched cries, and they crowded into the back of the village’s old pickup truck.
A few hours later, the warriors were face to face with the miner and his family. In protest before the group of painted men, he produced documents that his wife hastily brought. She said the documents showed that the mine was not in indigenous territory. The indigenous people, trying to decipher the papers, spoke among themselves in Xavante, which irritated the prospector.
Tempers changed and the indigenous people continued to insist on knowing who authorized the operation. The man then said that one of the other Xavante chiefs had given permission to assemble it.
Indigenous leaders do not have the authority to allow outsiders to deforest and use the land or its mineral resources. But in practice this happens, and the cacique José Sumené is aware of this. There was nothing else to do. He and his warriors got back in the truck and drove away.
Most of the deforested areas of the cerrado are, however, private lands, outside the limits of indigenous reserves. Agribusiness occupies vast areas with industrialized monocultures of soy, corn and cotton. In the Jair Bolsonaro government (PL), this process accelerated.
It was to help restore the devastated forests of Mato Grosso, even if only symbolically, that the chief participated in the expedition to collect seeds the day before.
This expedition, by the way, got off to a rather frightening start. As soon as the pickers got out of the truck and started walking, a rattlesnake blocked their path. The women screamed after almost stepping on her.
The snake slithered quickly behind a tree. The leader then ran after her and killed her with a club.
As if nothing had happened, the expedition regrouped and continued up the gentle slope towards the slopes of the Serra do Roncador, a rock formation sacred to the Xavante people, according to the chief. The closer to the chapadas, the taller and closer the trees grow — and the stuffy air finally cools.
The expedition paused in a marshy area that covers a small valley between chapadas. The women fanned out into a labyrinth of streams, plucking handfuls of buriti from the sodden ground, placing them quickly in baskets they wove from the fiber of the leaves of the same palm—buriti palms thrive where the soil is soggy and are often indicators of its proper functioning.
The Xavante people know that there is a market for this fruit elsewhere. But the women of the Ripá village were also harvesting for their own consumption, planning to sell the seeds later.
The profit from the sale of seeds, for the entire community, is around R$ 6,000 per year. This supplements their income from the sale of handicrafts and government subsidies they receive, but it is notably insufficient to keep the group in a position to protect such a vast territory.
However, income is not the main reason for this work, say the Xavante: each “dzomori” helps to heal the damaged forest. “Non-indigenous people are destroying the Cerrado and do not understand nature”, evaluates Neusa.
In the journey accompanied by the report, the search yielded results beyond buriti. In all, each woman managed to collect more than ten kilos of fruits and seeds.
A woman on the team scaled the gnarled, squat canopy of a murici tree, vigorously shaking some branches. The tree vibrated, and a rain of firm, yellow fruit covered the ground.
A few trees ahead, other women picked up pale fruit that had fallen around an angelim.
The seeds collected by the people of the Ripá village find a market among landowners in the region due to the laws that provide for the maintenance of native vegetation.
In Mato Grosso, between 35% and 80% of the forest must be protected, although the reality is that farms often reserve less space than they should.
When there is deforestation beyond the limit — and its inspection — the owners need to replant native trees and can thus resort to seeds.
Residents of Ripá and 24 other indigenous groups in Mato Grosso sell their collection to a network that acts as an intermediary. The so-called Xingu Seed Network is the largest supplier of native seeds in Brazil.
In 2007, a coalition of indigenous and non-indigenous people founded it as a way to reforest the edge of the Xingu River, and the network has grown ever since.
The network doesn’t just sell seeds to farmers and other customers — it also offers to help plant them. Collectors inside and outside indigenous territories, even in urban areas, contribute to the stock.
In its 15 years, the network calculates to have sold more than 300 tons of 220 species of seeds, almost all just to Mato Grosso.
The replanted area is estimated at 74 kmtwo, an amount that does not even come close, however, to balancing what has been deforested. In 2021 alone, vegetation loss was 35 times greater (about 2,600 kmtwo) than the one replanted in the network’s 15 years.
After the chief, his daughter and the other women returned to the village, there was more work to be done. Djanira Pe’Wee Xavante picked the murici fruits she brought, choosing the best ones to eat and removing stems and soil from the others, in a bucket of water.
After peeling the fruit, put the seeds to dry. Future buyers, as the indigenous people sometimes do, will use these seeds mixed with dozens of other species, in a technique called muvuca.
It consists of combining the species according to their ability to coexist and releasing the seeds into the air towards small trenches previously opened. The idea is that, in a decade, the site will be able to imitate the native forest.
Bruna Ferreira, director of the Xingu Seeds Network, admits that the task of recovering the cerrado in the face of deforestation “sometimes seems daunting.”
She considers, however, that the achievements should not be judged only by the amount of land restored with the dedication of those involved in the network. The effort is “resistance work, strengthening these communities.”
Journalists Dado Galdieri and Daniel Grossman did the report with support from the Pulitzer Center.
