Ailton Krenak
Ailton Krenak (born 29 September 1953 in Itabirinha de Mantena, Minas Gerais, Brazil) is a writer, philosopher, journalist, and environmentalist of the Krenak people.
Quotes
[edit]- When we depersonalize the river, the mountain, when we strip them of their meaning – an attribute we hold to be the preserve of the human being – we relegate these places to the level of mere resources for industry and extractivism.
- from Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo (2019)
- Indigenous blood has been spilt over every hectare of Brazil’s 8m square kilometres. You are witnesses of this.
- from speech at Brazil's National Constituent Assembly (September 4, 1987). English translation quoted here
- Humans only talk about human rights, and environmental law is anthropocentric, it has no interest in whether the forest will die, the river will be polluted.
- Indigenous peoples have suffered from the invasion of their world by chaotic, predatory practices. The man outside the forest, who eats hamburgers in Europe, needs it dead. This is environmental racism.
- (Q: Is there a relationship between colonialism and the climate crisis?) AK– This relationship results from a way of looking at the world in which the human being is the measure of all things. Colonial thinking is powerful because it uses instruments such as economics, which globally institutes the possession of things and land. It is associated with the appropriation of technologies that accelerate extractivism in ecosystems, oceans, mountains and deserts. In the 20th century, we became capable of wrecking the entire planet.
- The relationship that resulted in the climate crisis has been foretold by native peoples from the outset...It is a sensitive intelligence to understand that there are things that need to be stabilized in the Earth’s organism. Colonialism does not recognize natural borders, it invades everything furiously.
- (Why do you criticize the idea of “sustainable development”?) AK– It’s a fabricated narrative announced after the realization, in 1976, that we were on an uncontrollable course towards climate change. Even when something is manufactured with all the controls, it requires materials that are not replaced in nature. How can you produce something sustainable if the extractive system is sovereign and changes the cycles of life on Earth? Sustainability is a certificate sold to fools that will last for as long as there are people buying it.
translation into English by Sara Hanaburgh
- To belong to a place is to be part of it, to be an extension of the landscape, the river, the mountain. It is having your elements of culture, history and traditions in that place. In other words, instead of giving meaning to the place, the place gives meaning to your existence. Human beings are not superior to any other living being on the planet and, therefore, the idea of wanting to own some portion of the Earth seems absurd to me.
- The ambition to own a place leads human beings to detach themselves from the Earth and observe the world from the outside, as if they did not participate in its wholeness. This detachment makes, for instance, some people look at a mountain only to calculate how many tons of ore they can extract from it.
- When the Federal and State Public Ministries began to put pressure on Samarco, Vale and BHP Billiton to provide reparations to the Krenak for the damages they suffered from the toxic sludge from mining, the first thing the consortium of companies wanted to do was remove us from our land. And we refused. They – the companies – asked us: Are you going to stay here like scourges now that the river is dead? And we replied: The river is an extension of our family. We’re going to stay here to watch over it. That can be incomprehensible to minds dissociated from the idea of belonging to a place.
- I say in my book that in order to postpone the end of the world, we need to reaffirm the meaning of life in society; we need to be able to experience the pleasure of being alive, of dancing and singing. We, human beings, need to keep our subjectivities alive, our visions and our poetics about existence and value diversity, because homogenizing humanity is a way of robbing us of our joy.
- In 2018, a little before the election of President Jair Bolsonaro, a Portuguese newspaper asked me: “How are Indians going to do with all of this?” I replied: “Indians have been resisting for 500 years. What worries me are the whites. What are they going to do to get out of this one?” And up to now, I haven’t seen a more forceful attitude on the part of the whites in relation to the government’s attacks on the environment, education, culture, and social policies. I thought the political parties would build a huge coalition to confront this neoliberal project, but nothing happened. People seem anesthetized. We indigenous peoples continue to resist, but I see Bolsonaro’s government as yet another chapter in our colonial struggle, which began in 1500, when the Portuguese invaded our territories, and continue to do so today. The model of occupation of America by the Europeans aimed at exterminating the native populations and throughout that time we never had peace. We’ve always been at war.
- this logic of corporations [is] that they can eat the world, as if they were an extraterrestrial entity.
- We need a global mobilisation that ore is an unsustainable economy. Just like fossil fuel, you can’t go on thinking that the world will continue to exist just like that. Some countries are already changing their energy matrix. Even though this transition takes decades, there is a movement to get out of this hell.
- These amazing guys who run these companies can tell us they are changing the world for the better, as their advertising says. But, if you are an ordinary, reasonable person, you will look and realise that these agencies that drive the climate debate are subordinate to the logic of capitalism. They won’t do anything that threatens corporate profits because it’s the corporations that even sponsor these conferences. This COP is going to be a test. It’s going to be a test to see if people are still serious or if they’ve screwed up in general.
- Capitalism throws all this crap at us, which makes it look like if we lose capitalism we’re going to starve. We are calling people to think about another ontology, another observation about existing, because “life is not useful” and being alive is wonderful.
- When we say that the future is ancestral, it has more to do with DNA than with genealogy. That’s the worldview: it’s the ability to go back to an event that created the world and that is alive in you. We want a constant creation of everything and of ourselves. This is what happens in the DNA, this code passed on by our ancestors. This can reintroduce us into the constellation of life within the planet, where we stop being an expert and realise we have a common origin.
- I will continue to live here, I will die, and this train will not stop. It’s the end of the world train, so to speak. It was, even provoked by this absurd situation, that I made the reflections that are in the book Ideas to Postpone the End of the World. This incessant violence against the landscape has a very violent dynamic. It doesn’t just happen here in Brazil. Engineering is failing across the planet. It focuses on natural resources, on water, on the landscape, on the mountains - it flattens everything. In a little while we will finally realise the dream of the deniers, which is to have a flat Earth. You are also deprived of a horizon. Your landscape changes arbitrarily: when you look at it, it’s different. So I think this is creating a state of illness in people, beyond the pandemic. It is this discomfort of people feeling powerless in the face of all this engineering, this machinery of the world, which has no affection for anything. It is as if the economy were the decisive factor for the functioning of the world. If you say that life is important, the person will say: “Yes, life is important, but with the economy…” There are those who lost their lives, territory, access to the river, who lost references. For many communities it is not possible to calculate a value. It is also a subjective loss.
Quotes about
[edit]
External links
[edit]
- Instagram page
- "Our Worlds are at War" (testimony, translated into English)
- "Life is Wild"
- video interview with Arika
- Goodreads page