This post is also available in: Portuguese (Brazil)
By Isabel Gakran, GLFx Zág Xokleng
I am a daughter of the Earth and mother of little Zágtxo.
As a Xokleng woman, I carry within me the ancestral memory of my people and the responsibility to keep our relationship with the landscape that forms us.
Our history is marked by strength and resistance amid environmental destruction and cultural erasure.
Today, as an environmental activist, I find a way to defend our identity, culture and territory.
We live in the Atlantic Forest, which stretches across the east coast of Brazil – one of the richest biomes in the world, but also one of the most threatened. This biome once covered the entirety of eastern Brazil, but only about 24 percent of the biome still remains.
The Atlantic Forest is home to the Laklãnõ Xokleng Indigenous Peoples and the sacred Zág (Araucaria angustifolia, also known as Paraná pine or Brazilian pine).
Studies show that the Zág once fed the dinosaurs and appears in our cave paintings dating back more than 10,000 years.
From the 1830s to the 1930s, provincial governments and colonizing companies financed militias called bugreiros.
These groups hunted, killed and kidnapped Xokleng to take their territories. In 1904, 244 of us were brutally killed in a massacre.
Between 1926 and 1932, we lost 70 percent of our population when German and Italian settlers tried to exterminate us to create their own colonies in the south of Brazil – with the support of the Brazilian state.
We used to have about 10,000 people. They killed all but 104 of us.
Despite the genocide, we resisted. Today, there are about 2,500 Laklãnõ Xokleng, reviving our ancestral traditions.
The colonizers didn’t just take our lands. They also disrupted our spiritual and cultural way of life.
But despite this historical violence – especially against our women, who have been raped, attacked and silenced in their bodies, territories and lives – today, we rise with the strength of the Zág.
These women carry the memory of our struggle: just like the Zág resists and sprouts again, we resist and flourish in our architecture of healing.
For us, land, culture and spirituality are inseparable.
We are not separate from the forest. We are the forest defending itself.
The Zág was the first tree our deity made. It has been present in our cosmovision for over 10,000 years and is sacred to our people.
It is more than a tree. The Zág is ancestral and divine: its seeds carry the DNA of the people who planted them before us.
Our people used to practice a Xokleng ritual called koplëg, where we started a fire by rubbing sticks from the Zág tree. We would talk to the spirits through the night and interpret the ashes as messages for the future.
The Zág sustains us.
Its pine nuts were a staple of our diet.
We stored pine nuts in conifer baskets, sealed with beeswax and kept under waterfalls to ensure food all year round.
Zág also provided shelter, clothing, community and continuity – symbols of resistance and life.
Today, however, the Zág is under threat: felled by deforestation, the climate crisis, logging and agricultural expansion – putting the future of our people at risk.
So, my husband Carl and I have dedicated our lives to reforesting our home.
Back in 2016–17, Carl was studying medicine and I was studying epidemiology, but we were getting more involved with the mission of our Xokleng people.
We left academia not because we rejected education, but so that we could be educated by the forest.
That is why we founded Instituto Zág (Zág Institute) in 2017 – to promote the restoration of the Zág and expand environmental education, because protecting the forest means protecting our existence.
We have already planted more than 100,000 tree seedlings in our territory as part of this commitment to life. We’ve also restored over 10,000 hectares of land and aim to protect 42,000 hectares.
It is said that centuries ago, a large part of what is now Brazil was a massive desert. So our ancestors – the Proto-Jê people – planted Zág trees to green these lands.
We like to remember that we have done this before – to remind ourselves that we can plant again.
We are not trying to protect nature. We are nature trying to protect itself.
We want to reach people’s hearts. We’ve never been able to express everything in words, so art is another powerful tool we have to share our story.
My husband, Carl, never studied painting or art. But one day, we were performing a ritual, asking the Zág tree what he could do to help protect her.
The message came to him to draw and paint. He began and had this gift. He kept going, and it was as if he’d always painted.
Through his works, Carl expresses our people’s vision of the world, our respect for nature and the worldview of our people. He shows why we must fight for climate justice.
Contemporary Indigenous art reinforces the collective.
These paintings show links to traditional life lived in community.
They rupture, reflect upon and manifest as a cultural intervention.
This art is a weapon of resistance.
Here is Zágbág – a three-piece collection by Carl Gakran about the Atlantic Forest, the Zág and the Laklãnõ Xokleng Peoples.
This piece, titled Connection, shows how the Atlantic Forest can be linked to Indigenous symbolism by showing how everything in the universe is one.
This painting, titled Kupleng of the Forest, showcases Zág trees full of magic.
This tells the story of the many visible and invisible beings that take care of the Atlantic Forest.
It aims to draw attention to the need for environmental preservation and the guardianship of the spirits that inhabit nature.
Lastly, the painting Pine Nuts is an expression of the fruit of the Zág tree. This work encapsulates how the pine nut is born and all the energy that comes from the Earth through its colors. The pine nut is a very sacred fruit for the Xokleng people.
These three works represent the connection between the sacred and the natural, revealing the presence of the forest, the spirits and the cycles of life.
As I contemplate them, I feel the force that protects us and inspires us to continue resisting.
My dream is that our people will be able to live in peace with their landscape – that the Zág will once again cover our hills and that our children grow up proud of their origin.
That art continues to be a bridge, that the forest continues to be a home, and that the world finally hears what we have to say.
On this path of resistance, my daughter Zágtxo is my greatest inspiration. Ever since she was born, she has participated with me in the activities of the Zág Institute and has already taken our voice to three COPs and to a UN session, where she sang in our mother tongue.
To watch her grow up rooted in her identity is to see the future flourish.
Finally…
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