Indigenous peoples and traditional communities in times of the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil:

strategies of struggle and r-existence

Abstract

The main objective of this text is to conduct a geographical analysis of the situation of indigenous peoples and traditional communities in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. The methodology combines qualitative and quantitative methods. We reflected on strategies to address the spread of the virus, such as the closure of villages through sanitary barriers, the use of applications for monitoring cases, herbal preparation by traditional medicine, and the making of masks by indigenous women’s organizations. Even with the negligence of the State and the risk of genocide, indigenous people are organizing themselves and adopting new strategies of struggle, articulated to multiple spatial scales. The strategies are guided by the cosmology of each people, by collective decisions, and by the autonomous forms of territorial organisation with knowledge that comes from ancestry.