Ed. note: This post is an excerpt from the Introduction of Ancestral Future written by Ailton Krenak, translated by Jamille Pinheiro Dias & Alex Brostoff, and published by Polity Books. This excerpt is reposted from the book with the permission of the publishers.
The rivers, those beings that have always inhabited different worlds, are the ones that suggest to me that if there is a future to imagine, it is ancestral, because it is already present. I like to believe that all those we are able to invoke in the form of becoming are our traveling companions, even if they are immemorable, because the passage of time becomes a distraction in our sensitive observations of the planet. But we are in the Pacha Mama, which has no borders, so it makes no difference whether we are above or below the Rio Grande; we are everywhere, because our ancestors, the river-mountains, are in everything, and I’m sharing the unrestrained wealth of being able to experience these presents with you.
Wherever I have been, whether in Brazil or in other parts of the world, I have paid more attention to the waters than to the urban structures that peer over them, because all our human settlements in Europe, Asia, Africa, and everywhere else have always been drawn to the rivers. A river is a path within a city that allows for movement, despite the fact that it has been some time since people decided to stay put in cities. Children are taught in classrooms that one of the world’s earliest civilizations originated in the delta of the Nile River in Egypt, where the river’s waters irrigated the banks and provided conditions for agriculture – this civilizing idea. We have always been near water, but it seems that we have learned very little from the language of the rivers. This practice of listening to what the waterways have to say has made me think critically about how cities (especially the big ones) are spreading over the rivers in such an irreverent way that we almost don’t show any respect for them anymore.
Our Krenak ancestors would place thirty-, forty-day-old babies in the Watu River, reciting the words, “Rakandu, nakandu, nakandu, racandu.” There, the children were protected against pests, diseases, and every other possible harm. This river of ours, called the Doce River[1] by the whites, whose waters flow less than a kilometer from the backyard of my house, sings. We listen to its voice and talk to our river-music when it is quiet at night. We like to thank it because it gives us food and this great water, it broadens our worldviews and makes our lives more meaningful. At night, the river’s waters run swiftly and murmurously, and their whispers travel down the rocks to form rapids that make music. At this time, the rock and the water are so wonderfully entangled with us that we can say “we-river, we-mountains, we-earth.” We feel so deeply immersed in these beings that we allow ourselves to leave our bodies, this anthropomorphic sameness, and experience other ways of existing. For example, we allow ourselves to be water and feel this incredible power that it has to take different paths.
Are we going to kill all the rivers? Will we turn all these marvelous, resilient beings capable of sculpting stones into a threat to life, causing them to disappear? In the early 1990s, a coalition called “Living Rivers” was created in the Amazon region to mobilize communities that opposed the construction of dams and waterways, to discuss river diversion projects and commercial navigation adaptation, to question all of this. Glenn Switkes[2] is a guy who was born in the United States and whom I met in the 1980s when he came to Brazil to make a film about the Amazon. He ended up dedicating the next twenty or thirty years to getting to know our rivers and to strengthen an international campaign to keep them alive. People say that the amount of water that exists in the biosphere of planet Earth is the same as it was billions of years ago when the terrestrial ecosystems that we enjoy were formed. Faced with this argument, someone might ask: “Well, if water never diminishes, what’s the problem?” The thing is, when we turn water into sewage, it goes into a coma, and it can take a long time for it to come alive again. What we’re doing by polluting the waters that have existed for two billion years is putting an end to our own existence. Water will continue to exist here in the biosphere and slowly regenerate because rivers have that gift. It’s we who have such an ephemeral existence that we’ll end up dried up, as enemies of the water, even though we’ve learned that 70 percent of our bodies are made of water. If I were to dehydrate completely, all that would remain is half a kilo of bones, which is why I say: respect the water and learn its language. Let us listen to the voices of the rivers, for they speak. Let us be like water in matter and spirit, in our movement and capacity to change courses, or we will be lost.
[1] TR. The Doce River is located in the southeastern region of Brazil, flowing through the states of Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo.
[2] TR. Glenn Switkes is an environmental activist who has worked on issues related to the Amazon rainforest for many years. In the 1980s, he produced a documentary film called Amazonia: Voices From the Rainforest, which was released in 1991.
