Terrestrial (re)forestations: The Laklãnõ-Xokleng struggle in Southern Brazil

Abstract

This paper will discuss the land struggles and reforestation projects of the Indigenous Laklãnõ-Xokleng community in Santa Catarina, southern Brazil. Drawing on short-term ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in February and March 2024 – as well as a review of existing legal and academic literature – it will argue that their case is significant for understanding the links between climate justice and land claims in the Global South. The paper engages how the struggles for land and the forest involve the intertwining of territorial, juridical and spiritual idioms. Local onto-epistemologies of the forest are mobilised to heal colonial dispossessions and wounds, respond to changing climatic factors, and navigate global climate finance regimes and institutions. The paper engages and advances Fraser et al.’s conception of the “Anthropocene tropical forest” published in The Anthropocene Review. Advancing their ideas on the relational aspects of forests that subvert the nature-culture divide, I propose the concept of ‘terrestrial (re)forestations’. This concept indicates the ways in which Indigenous claims to land and forests require territorial demarcations, though these are interpenetrated with evolving spiritual relations and wider historical and planetary processes.

Introduction

This paper argues that disputes around territory in the subtropical area of the Atlantic Forest Biome are critical for discussions on the Anthropocene: in many ways they form a microcosm of wider processes. It focuses on how the struggles of the Indigenous Laklãnõ-Xokleng ¹ people in Santa Catarina, southern Brazil – for their land and Araucaria forests – are connected to planetary processes of colonial dispossession and appropriation, postcolonial land struggles, and global struggles for climate justice.

This paper engages and critiques Fraser et al.’s (2024) concept of the “Anthropocene tropical forest” published in The Anthropocene Review. The Laklãnõ struggle for land, and a youth-driven reforestation project, exemplify many of the dynamics of the “Anthropocene tropical forest”. ² In particular, the case reveals the ways that contemporary struggles around land and climate justice require the incorporation of “forest peoples’ worldviews” (2024:15).

Fraser et al. (2024) aim to move beyond the conception of human-forest relations through “disturbance” (humans as extrinsic to nature as a destructive force) or through “landscape domestication” (humans conceived as external domesticators of nature) and to re-situate humans as actors among other non-human beings. Their article is generative for several reasons. It proposes that “it is necessary to draw the question of how culture and nature interact in shaping tropical forests into dialogue with the knowledges and ontologies originating in the ‘Global South’ ” (2024: 2). In doing so, it brings African philosophy – such as the work of Nyamnjoh (2017) and Etieyibo (2017) – into dialogue with Amazonian perspectives, particularly those formulated by Kopenawa (2013). In contrast to objectifying scientific visions, it promotes a conception of tropical forests through a decolonial project and emphasises an “eco-bio-communitarianism” that embraces “humans, God, spirits, ancestors, animals, and inanimate beings as together comprising a ‘community of beings’ irreducible to the culture-nature divide (moving beyond disturbance) and allowing for the agency and personhood of non-humans (moving beyond historical ecology)” (Fraser et al., 2024: 14). The article is careful not to reify the ontologies of forest peoples’ worldviews, and to situate the debates in a wider postcolonial perspective. It is also attentive to the limitations of the concept of the Anthropocene and raises attendant concepts of the Capitalocene and Plantationocene (cf. Mathews, 2020) to reveal the ways in which contemporary environmental struggles have been situated historically in relation to processes of slavery, colonialism and the formation of contemporary capitalism.

All of these dynamics speak to the present struggles of Laklãnõ people in their attempts to reclaim land taken from them through settler colonial processes that continue to this day, and to try and reforest their land with the sacred Araucaria (Araucaria angustifolia) tree whose forests have been devastated over the past two centuries. ³ Yet, I will argue here that the Laklãnõ case calls for a deepening of the political and planetary dynamics of tropical and subtropical forests. There are three lines of argument advanced here. First, giving attention to the inter-relational onto-epistemologies ⁴ of Indigenous worldviews requires understanding that forms of disturbance are constitutive of those worldviews: the intrusion of outsiders and settlers who have deforested and taken their territory is conceived of as a disturbance from the perspective of Indigenous communities. Secondly, the relational onto-epistemologies of Laklãnõ people do not exist in a discrete manner confined to the forest itself; the forest is not a demarcated space, but is rather a vital, generative and political form of becoming. Laklãnõ conceptions of the sacred forest persist through longer-term struggles against colonial land dispossessions, ontological and epistemic shifts through the intrusion of Christianity, and, presently, complex navigations with contemporary climate change, climate regimes and carbon finance. The onto-epistemic dimensions of Indigenous worldviews must be conceived historically (Barad, 2007; Povinelli, 2021). These conceptions of inter-relationality are also reconstituted through the “New Climatic Regime” (Latour, 2018) and the ways in which global politics, land struggles and finance are being realigned. Furthermore, ancestrality itself needs to be viewed as a form of political critique and a mode of futurity (Krenak, 2024; Povinelli, 2021). Finally, the classification of the “Anthropocene forest” itself risks recentering the human in the classification of tropical forests rather than amplifying an inter-relational conception of forests (cf. Haraway, 2016; Mathews, 2020).

Developing these thoughts, I propose the concept of “terrestrial (re)forestations” indicating the ways in which Indigenous struggles for the protection of their land, and for reforestation, are not merely the assertion of localised onto-epistemologies against external worldviews but are, at once, complex mobilisations around local territorial demarcations interpenetrated with wider historical and planetary processes. I use the term “(re)forestations” rather than “forest” not to indicate a clearly demarcated area, but rather ongoing processes of growth, ruination and renewal that constitute domains of struggle; the term also signals the tensions between reclamation, repair and generation.

This paper draws on fieldwork conducted in February and March 2024 in the Laklãnõ-Xokleng territory also known as Ibirama Laklãnõ Indigenous Territory (Terra Indígena Ibirama-Laklãnõ) in Santa Catarina, southern Brazil, and also in Santa Catarina more widely. The research involved short-term ethnographic research in the territory and conducting 13 in-depth semi-structured interviews with members of the Laklãnõ community along with an interview with a legal advisor on their land case. The research was conducted with the authorisation of the University of the Witwatersrand’s non-medical Human Research Ethics Committee and full informed consent was given for all interviews and the use of names either through written or recorded verbal consent. I’ve also situated this research within a review of the existing literature on the Laklãnõ case, including academic articles and chapters, media articles and legal documents which I discuss below. ⁵

The body of this article is structured into three sections. The first discusses the historical dynamics of the Laklãnõ case including archaeological discussions about the forests, the colonial intrusions of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and culminating with the present struggle for land demarcation and against the “marco temporal” thesis that seeks to limit land claims to land occupied in 1988. Here I will show that the relational onto-epistemologies of the Laklãnõ people must be understood as evolving through a series of historical ruptures. The second section draws on my interviews and ethnography conducted in the Laklãnõ territory. It focuses on how local spiritual conceptions of the forest have survived and been revived not through isolation but through their articulation with legal land struggles, and national and planetary engagements with climate justice. The final section offers a theoretical discussion where I discuss my concept of “terrestrial (re)forestations.”

The Araucaria forests: From the Southern Jê to marco temporal

The Atlantic Forest (Mata Atlântica) has been identified as one of the world’s most important “biodiversity hotspots” (Myers et al., 2000). The forest, which extends from northeastern to southern Brazil into northeastern Argentina and Paraguay, is composed of dense ombrophilous forest, mixed ombrophilous forest substantially formed by the Araucaria (Araucaria angustifolia), along with seasonal deciduous and semi-deciduous forests, and coastal plain forests (Saraiva et al. 2021, Vitória et al., 2019). As Schipper notes (2020), “Because of its unique features of climate, geomorphology and floristic composition, Brazilian Araucaria Moist Forests are easily delineated from other portions of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest” and are home to a great variety of endemic plant and animal species, including the howler monkey or bugio. The Araucaria genus is at least 190 million years old (Rossetto-Harris et al., 2020: 810).The Araucaria angustifolia is listed as critically endangered (Saraiva et al., 2021: 4) and its devastation was worsened during the years of Brazilian right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022) whose government weakened regulations and promoted the expansion of agro-business into the forests (Bourscheit, 2022). The forests are also threatened by climate change “given their narrow climatic requirements (i.e. low temperatures and high rainfall) and their fragmented distribution.” (Saraiva et al., 2021: 2).

The Laklãnõ-Xokleng people are part of the Jê linguistic group that is estimated to have migrated from central to southern Brazil around 3000 BP (c. 1050 BCE) and then divided between the Kaingang and Laklãnõ around 560 BP (c. 1390 CE) (de Lima et al., 2025: 3). The Southern Jê people had a direct impact on the expansion of the Araucaria forests. Using a test model “of natural ecosystem distribution against vegetation histories, paleoclimate proxies, and the archaeological record,” Robinson et al. (2018: 1) have convincingly shown that, while Araucaria forests spread in the south of Brazil in the late Holocene, between 4480 and 3200 cal BP (c. 2530–1250 BCE), the Southern Jê (or proto-Jê) people directly contributed to the expansion of the Araucaria forest and its replacement of grassland between 1410 and 900 cal BP (c. 540–1050 CE). They show that this forest expansion was directly tied to the spreading of regional settlements in a manner not attributable to climatic factors (Robinson et al., 2018: 4). ⁶

These expansions went alongside the expansions of “deathscapes” as the spread of the forests corresponded to the emergence of mound and enclosure complexes and cave burials (de Lima et al., 2025: 3–5). Post-950 BP (post-1000 CE) burial sites show that Araucaria seeds were used as funeral offerings, while the earliest Southern Jê archaeological sites date back at least 2200 BP (c. 250 BCE; ibid). The symbolism of these sites also alludes to an ontology in which “the landscape is not merely a product of natural forces but is animated by spiritual beings and ancestral presences” (de Lima et al., 2025: 8). These findings are significant as they indicate, not only the close relationship between the ancestors of the Laklãnõ and Kaingang people and the spread of the Araucaria, but also a longstanding metaphysical relationship with the landscape and the Araucaria forests that goes back at least over 1000 years and perhaps far longer. However, these dynamics were to be radically disturbed by the intrusion of colonialism.

Up until the early 19th century the Araucaria Forest occupied an estimated 250,000 km² of the higher altitude regions of southern Brazil, while the ombrophilous forest comprised around 47,000 km² primarily in the Uruguay River Basin (Nodari and de Carvalho, 2017: 43). The Araucaria forests, as Nodari and de Carvalho (2017) document, attracted German settlers who called the forests “the Black Forest,” drawing an inexact parallel with those in Germany. Even while Brazil was already a republic in 1889, expansion into the region exhibited many features of settler colonialism well into the 20th century. German and Italian settlement was facilitated by federal or state recruiting agents and by private companies, and this precipitated mass deforestation, as settlers encroached on land occupied by Indigenous and “caboclo” groups who were forced off their land in the 19th and early 20th centuries (Brandt and Moretto, 2022; Virgílio, 2023a). Timber loggers and companies, such as the Southern Brazil Lumber and Colonisation Company, drove mass deforestation in the region (Nodari and de Carvalho, 2017). This process got underway in Rio Grande do Sul and spread into Santa Catarina primarily in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, though deforestation and the theft of Indigenous land have continued throughout the 20th century and up until the present. The scale of the deforestation was immense. By the 1970s, the Araucaria Forest was estimated to be only 8% of its original size prior to colonisation and recently the estimate for remaining mixed ombrophilous forest is only 2% – 5% (Nodari and de Carvalho, 2017: 49–50).

The expansion of the settler colonial project was accompanied by significant violence. The year of the “pacification” of the Laklãnõ was 1914, the year in which the Platê River Post was created and in which contact between white settlers and approximately 300–400 Laklãnõ was established. Even after 1914, the Laklãnõ were subject to state-sponsored violence by mercenaries known as bugreiros (Alves, 2023; Gakran, 2005; Nodari and de Carvalho, 2017). The initial contact led to an estimated two-thirds of the population dying from violence and disease as only 106 individuals were recorded in 1932 (Henry, 1964: xxi, also cited by Heineberg and Hanazaki, 2019: 256). The territory was formally designated an Indigenous Territory in 1965. In 2003, the Ministry of Justice identified 37,108 hectares of land traditionally occupied by the Laklãnõ-Xokleng rather than the 14,084.80 hectares presently occupied and recognised by the federal government in 1996; the larger area serves as the basis for the community’s land claims (Ladik Antunes and Nunes Junior, 2023).

The attacks against Indigenous communities were not only territorial, but also onto-epistemic. Whereas colonial settlers viewed the forest as a resource for exploitation, Indigenous groups in the area engaged with the forest as a form of livelihood and spiritual relationship. This was evident even in the first ethnography of the Laklãnõ published by Jules Henry ([1941]1964). ⁷ Henry noted at the time that the Laklãnõ were nomadic, though he speculated that they were driven to the forest from the savannahs by their enemies (Henry, 1964: 3). He observed at the time that preserving the Araucaria seeds, pinhão, ⁸ was a way to deal with seasonal scarcity and hunger, particularly in winter and early spring. Survival was also based on hunting. Henry noted at the time that, for the Laklãnõ, the forest was an animated space. He wrote,

The spirits of the natural world dwell everywhere – in trees, under the water, in rocks and in cliffs. They inhabit the sun and the moon and the stars, and animate the wind and the storm. There are the spirits of the tapir, the deer, the squirrel, the snake, and all other animals and insects. These spirits may appear to humans in their natural form or in the shape of human beings. (Henry, 1964:71–72).

The general term he documented for these spirits was nggïyúdn, though the kupléng were the “ghost-souls” specific to humans. The spirits of the forest could be protectors and friends, but were not merely benign and could also be malevolent and lure one to harm. Trying to decipher the character of the spirits was the work of a shaman who would help select animals to be hunted; the spirits of animals might also be kin that have returned from the dead. The forest was a source, not just of food, but also of medicines. There was constant communication with the forest, for instance speaking to bees (Henry, 1964: 87). Ethnographies of the Laklãnõ following Henry have focussed on the relationships with animal rather than plant spirits (see Urban, 1978). During Urban’s research, hunting was still common, although pinhão provided important sustenance. Urban (1978: 113) does, however, mention that “a tree ngiyudn is mentioned in one myth, and Shokleng (sic) claim that shamans are capable of communicating with this and other spirits.” Wiik (2004) also documents how plants are considered to have spirits (which he spells as ngayung).

The terminology and orthography regarding spirits among the Laklãnõ-Xokleng hence differs across diverse ethnographies, perhaps a result of temporal and spatial differentiations or of the emphases of individual researchers. The most reliable recent linguistic source is by the linguist Nanblá Gakran, the first member of the Laklãnõ community to obtain a doctorate and also the father of Carl Gakran (one of the founders of Instituto Zág, and one of my interlocutors). According to Gakran (2005: 24, author’s translation), “Before the contact with non-Indian society, the Laklãnõ believed in spirits “gyjun” and “kuplẽg”, that lived between the trees, mountains, caverns . . . winds, and all the animals, small and big. Encountering spirits could be dangerous, or good, if they offered help with hunting. They [Laklãnõ ancestors] believed that animals have a spirit that controlled and protected them, permitted or prohibited humans to kill them.” Carl Gakran outlined to me the same distinction of kuplẽg associated with the human spirits and gyjun associated with natural spirits, including those of trees. He also elaborated the idea of dén jóg gy as a spiritual energy or power present in the Araucaria.

Another thesis written by Carli Xaxias Popó (2015) from the village of Figueira, where I stayed during my fieldwork, makes related points. Popó writes,

Being Laklãnõ is to live in harmony and symbiosis with nature, from which the consciousness of preservation, sustenance and survival arises. For the Laklãnõ, all spiritual things are equal in sustaining the comprehension, exchange and interactions between humans and non-humans. Furthermore, for these people there is no separation between people and nature, but an interaction, in dialogue with the birds, in orations sung to the ancestors. Nature and the supernatural can communicate with people, thunder, birds, among others, which we understand as the chain of life” (Popó, 2015: 11, author’s translation)

Popó also refers to the “kuplẽg” (which she spells “kuplê”) referring to the spirit of both human and non-human beings, and which every being of nature possesses (29). Popó also notes that “in the past, Laklãnõ Xokleng had their traditional beliefs in spirits of animals like the howler monkey, wild birds, thunder and even plants” (author’s translation, 29).

Heineberg and Hanazaki (2019) have published a contemporary analysis of botanical knowledge in Ibirama Laklãnõ Indigenous Territory, identifying 314 plants among which 77% were still being used: 29% of those used were for medicinal purposes, 35% for food and the others for tools, handicrafts, ornaments and other uses. Plants like the sassafrás or tutol were used for “protection in the supernatural realm” (2019; Henry, 1964: 79). Much of the knowledge was passed down within families for instance from a grandmother to grandchildren (Heineberg and Hanazaki, 2019: 261–262). The authors note that dynamics of knowledge transmission have changed in the region because of multiple processes, including the construction of a dam starting in 1976 which led to the breakup of communities into diverse villages and the introduction of Portuguese-language schools. The expansion of Christianity into Laklãnõ life, and, in particular, Pentecostalism in the 1950s has had a significant influence in the Laklãnõ community and brought major cultural shifts. However, as Wiik (2004) and Popó (2015) observe, local spiritual idioms have been assimilated into Xokleng Pentecostalism rather than supplanted.

Those displaced by the construction of the dam created the four new settlements including that of Bugio (Virgílio, 2023a: 126) which is on the borders of the State Biological Reserve of Sassafrás – an ecological reserve created in 1977 (Instituto do Meio Ambiente de Santa Catarina, n.d.). The reserve’s borders entered into the original 37,108 hectares of the Ibirama Laklãnõ Indigenous Territory (Heineberg and Hanazaki, 2019: 257) and this contested territory became the major frontier of land disputes around the infamous marco temporal thesis (literally “time mark” or “time frame”).

The marco temporal thesis stems from a 2009 case relating to the demarcation – the administrative delimitation and legal recognition of Indigenous land claims – of the Raposa-Serra do Sol Indigenous territory in Roraima state. The Brazilian Supreme Court (STF) judgement in the case established 5 October 1988, the date of the promulgation of the Brazilian Constitution, as a reference for Indigenous land claims (cited in Fachin, 2023: 16). The thesis held that if lands were not occupied on that date, they could not be demarcated. However, the general application of this rule was disputed in a case regarding the Ibirama Laklãnõ Indigenous Territory. The dispute started in January 2009 when the Santa Catarina state’s Foundation for the Environment (FATMA), an environmental protection institute, attempted to evict members of the Laklãnõ community who occupied land which was part of the State Biological Reserve of Sassafrás. According to FATMA (2009, author’s translation), the land was “invaded by approximately one hundred Indians [sic] who constructed shacks there, and with the use of chain saws began to cut down native forest.” Funai (the National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples), representing the occupiers, challenged FATMA’s attempt to expel the occupiers and lost. The regional federal court’s decision affirmed the marco temporal thesis. The Laklãnõ community and Funai appealed the judgement which was admitted to the STF in 2019 and became a case with “general repercussions” (Fachin, 2023), one which affected hundreds of pending cases of demarcation (Alves, 2023). Indigenous groups throughout Brazil mobilised around the case. The Laklãnõ won the case against the marco temporal thesis in September 2023, a victory widely celebrated by Indigenous communities throughout Brazil, though the final demarcation and recognition of their own territory remains pending. Its significance was noted by the NGO Amazon Watch which described it as “arguably the most significant victory of the Indigenous movement in the 21st century” (Alfinito and Oliveira, 2024). The struggle against the marco temporal thesis is far more than the struggle for territory and the Araucaria forests. It has both national and planetary consequences. Lima et al. (2024: 2) estimated that there were potentially 478 Indigenous territories that might be affected if the marco temporal thesis was enforced, representing 9046.432 km² of land. This has significant climatic and biodiversity implications. Indigenous lands host “more than 85% of Brazilian endangered terrestrial vertebrates” (Lima et al., 2024: 1) and their land’s carbon stock exceeds that of formal conservation areas. This reveals how the legal struggles of the Laklãnõ-Xokleng, and against the marco temporal thesis, are closely tied to planetary climatic and biodiversity concerns.

The Workers’ Party leader Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (or simply Lula) also defeated the right-wing Jair Bolsonaro in late 2022, becoming Brazilian president on 1 January 2023. His policies brought down deforestation by 60% by July 2023 compared to July of the previous year (Watts, 2023) and he created the first Ministry of Indigenous Peoples. Hence, there was much positivity among Indigenous and environmental movements in Brazil. However, almost immediately after the STF declared the marco temporal thesis unconstitutional, Brazil’s right-wing Congress passed the Law 14.701/2023 that attempted to reinstate the thesis. It was once again rejected by the STF in December 2025 (STF 2025).

The calling spirits: Reforesting in contested territory

The “village” of Bugio, one of ten in the Ibirama Laklãnõ Indigenous Territory, is on the frontiers of the land dispute around marco temporal. It has no centre but is rather a scattering of settlements along the borders of the State Biological Reserve of Sassafrás. It is the contestation around this area that catalysed the marco temporal case that went to the STF.

To get to Bugio, one drives up a mountain pass from the much-detested containment dam, on a road that passes through pine and eucalyptus forests (some felled for lumber), woodyards, and small settlements, up into the mountains where some of the original Araucaria forests remain amid land cleared for farming. Near Bugio, amid the outcrops of Araucaria, the wooden houses of settlers in the colonial style are nested amid lakes and soya plantations.

The settlement of Bom Sucesso also lies on the borders of the park in contested territory and the relation between the Laklãnõ and the primarily white communities, particularly of German ancestry, in Bom Sucesso is an uneasy one, underpinned by mutual fear, violence and threat. Along the road between Bugio and Bom Sucesso some of the old Araucaria outcrops remain. These were used in the past by the Laklãnõ for collecting pinhão and plant medicines and were the places that environmental agencies and the white settlers had tried to prevent Indigenous people from entering, and it was near this area that Indigenous occupations sparked the conflict leading to the marco temporal case.

“We want our land rights” a middle-aged Laklãnõ man told me, standing beneath the Araucaria. “The land is ours. All the Araucaria over here our grandparents planted. Where there are Araucaria is where they walked. Passing this to us. Where there are Araucaria, that is where we were, where we lived. Here are our spirits which speak. The spirits speak. Here, in this place, their spirits live. And because of this, they always call.” ⁹

In this quote, we see the close connection between the identity of the Laklãnõ and the Araucaria, between ancestral spirits and nature, and that the struggle to reclaim land is viewed not only through a territorial but also through a spiritual idiom.

Nearby, the previous year, a group of men had cut down an outcrop of eucalyptus to plant araucaria seedlings. Furthermore, in the wake of the marco temporal judgement of September 2023, some residents of Bugio, tired of the endless legal process tried to re-occupy contested territory, building shacks and occupying old houses. In December 2023, they were met with a violent response: one of the shacks was burnt down, its well filled with oil and a house broken apart. As Dilli Copaca who had built a shack with his wife between two farms told me, “So, since there is already a document from the Supreme Court that has already confirmed the Indian land, and where there are no inhabitants of abandoned houses, they can be occupied. That’s what’s in the document. Because of this, we went to look because we are already free.” ¹⁰ On the same road between Bugio and Bom Sucesso, I visited Copaca and his wife Rosenay Pedroso’s ¹¹ home, a wooden house surrounded by forest. They moved between this house and the shack that they had built between two farms.

They told me how the Araucaria in the area was almost extinct; the Tarumã that was almost gone (though there was one was growing outside their house); the Sassafrá, after which the park had taken its name, had also almost vanished. Dilli took me outside to show me some of the flora. He told me how he would speak to the plants when collecting them. The act of reclamation was also one of healing.

As Dilli, who grew up in the Bugio area told me:

I was raised by my great grandfather. And so I started with him. He started to teach me about the trees, which tree is good treatment for this, which tree is a good treatment for that. So, there we began to gain knowledge about nature, we spoke with the spirits, learning from them, because we needed to explain to them why we were going to put a hand on this, take bark or take a leaf. So, we talk to the trees, we talk to the spirits. I believe this is a very good thing for us to do . . . I speak with the trees if I want them to give a lot of fruit . . . ¹²

Dilli would wander the forest collecting plant medicines. He liked the cool air in the mountains compared to the polluted air in the city which gave him a headache. This communication also included other beings in the forest including birds and the howler monkey which warns if bad things might happen. This relational conception of the land to forest, one premised on conversation, movement, cycles, maps onto but exceeds a territorial notion of land based on demarcation.

I do not want to suggest that this relationship to the forest is a stable onto-epistemology. Certainly, the influence of evangelical Christianity in the territory has sometimes been hostile to this. But neither is it a relationship that simply disappeared. These dynamics are captured in the words of one of the community leaders Nicásio Antônio Mariano born in 1971. Mariano was one of the leaders of a community that had been displaced by flooding the previous October of 2023 when the containment dam built in the Ibirama territory was closed by the state government leading to flooding and displacement.

Mariano told me the construction of the dam had reshaped social life, how even in the 1970s and 1980s the family were reliant on fishing, hunting and gathering from the forest. These days they mostly bought cleaned fish ready to cook. He told me,

Our people the Xokleng, we’re born spiritualists [espírita]. Today we have different denominations. We have Evangelicals, Catholics, but the Indigenous people were always spiritualist. My grandmother spoke with birds; there was a bird that told her if things would go well or badly . . . When the bugio monkey made a noise, she knew what it meant, if there would be rain or sun, something good or bad. ¹³

The expansion of evangelical churches in the territory had reshaped conceptions of nature, but not erased this relational and communicative dimension.

I spoke to another former chief (cacique) of the village Palmeiras, Lazaro Kamlem. He was a member of an evangelical church but still retained the belief in the communication with non-human beings, telling me how birds could give omens of misfortune. He told me of the changes over the past decades:

I have many memories of my childhood. My father would hunt in the forest and meat always came from hunting. There were many herbs, many trees. The stream was fast and there were many woods. It was very beautiful. When we needed some herbal medicines, it was easy to find. Now we can still find them with difficulty. We have to walk far to find herbs. But they exist. ¹⁴

The quotes and scenes above, resonant of the wider struggles and contradictions in the Ibirama Laklãnõ Indigenous Territory, reveal how the ontologies and epistemologies of the Laklãnõ-Xokleng community – like the Araucaria forests themselves – are not fixed or stable; they are mutable and subject to erasures and regenerations; they are reshaped by political, topographical and metaphysical concerns. The Araucaria forests of the Ibirama territory have been devastated by histories of settler colonialism and the intrusion of agro-business. The onto-epistemologies of Laklãnõ have been reshaped by these violent histories, but also by Christianity. But these older ideas and relations are still politically mobilised in the struggles for land demarcation. Amid the changes of the past century, a sacred connection with the Atlantic Forest remains as a mode of becoming. The attempts to reforest, both in terms of the planting seeds, but also in allowing this relational conception of the forest to continue to exist amid the ruptures and socio-economic changes, involves processes of innovation and reclamation on different scales, and it is these that I refer to as “terrestrial (re)forestations.” The work of the youth movement Instituto Zág most clearly situates these dynamics in the context of the climate crisis.

Instituto Zág

One of the ways in which the struggles of the Laklãnõ-Xokleng for land and reforestation have become a global concern is through the project Instituto Zág, zág referring to the sacred Araucaria tree. The institute was founded in 2017 by a young couple who met studying medicine in Florianópolis before they decided to dedicate their lives to the reforestation of the sacred Araucaria. Carl Gakran, born in 1990, is the son of the late Laklãnõ linguist Nanblá Gakran, while Isabel Prestes da Fonseca, born in 1986, was from the Munduruku community in the Amazon though is also Laklãnõ through marriage.

Instituto Zág was formed both in response to the consciousness of the colonial past and continuing land disputes, and as a result of an ancestral injunction to reforest the tree. What started out as a small project gained rapid momentum. The couple have been highly effective at mobilising national and international alliances, along with gaining local political support for the project. Local chiefs (caciques) have put their support behind the project. In fact, when members of the Laklãnõ community developed an operation to cut down pine forests near Bugio in 2023, it was the seedlings of Instituto Zág that were to be used to reforest the area, until police intervened to stop the logging.

Araucaria is explicitly seen symbolically as a form of land reclamation that contrasts with the pine and eucalyptus plantations associated with white settlers. But nonetheless, rituals involving “ancestral technologies” reveal a logic distinct from that of territorial demarcation. Those involved in the project sing and speak to the seedlings in order to foster growth.

As Isabel Prestes da Fonseca explained:

So, we need to speak to the plants before planting them . . . We are part of this forest and the forest is part of us. We are one. So, before we plant we make a ritual for the seeds so the tree lasts forever, so that nothing happens to her, so that she is not cut down and she stays firm and carries the air that people can breathe and maintains equilibrium with the earth . . . We always speak to the plants too, asking them for healing . . . ¹⁵

This communicative and inter-relational conception of the forest was striking among the older members of the community that I spoke to and was also very important in the work of Instituto Zág. It is significant that Isabel grew up in the Amazon, so her cosmology of the world draws from the Amazonian region and from her life in the Xokleng territory. But this is not isolated; there are significant national connections and forms of exchange between Indigenous groups in Brazil through civil society; participation in activism, for instance against the marco temporal thesis; at universities; and through international forms like the UN Climate Change Conferences. These onto-epistemologies are thus not bounded and enclosed but evolve through exchange at both national and planetary scales.

Instituto Zág started planting Araucaria seedlings which, with the involvement of community volunteers, they distributed to households throughout the Ibirama Laklãnõ Indigenous Territory to plant. Giving up their studies to pursue this aim, the couple had a vision to reforest the territory to provide food, shelter and healing for the time of the climate crisis. In the few years since founding the non-profit Institute, they have had remarkable success. By 2024 they estimated that they have planted over 85,000 seedlings. ¹⁶ Through connecting their work explicitly to the struggle against marco temporal and for climate justice, the institute has entered into global networks and debates around climate justice, a just energy transition and climate finance. Their mobilisations have led them to win the Equator Prize, a biannual award offered by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) “to recognise outstanding community efforts to reduce poverty through the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.” ¹⁷ Isabel also won the Global Landscape Forum’s (GLF)’s 2024 Gender-Just Climate Solutions Awards ¹⁸ and the Institute has received various grants for their reforestation project.

Virgílio (2023b) argues that Instituto Zág have used online media to promote a different vision of the Laklãnõ in relation to past images that seek to erase their identity. As he writes, “Through such uses of social media, they have recovered their collective self-understandings, and they started to talk about why and how they understand the world, what type of actions need to be taken and by whom” (2023b: 319).

Isabel became the first Indigenous woman to open the United Nations Climate Change Conference – the annual Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Her speech opened COP28 in Dubai in late 2023, addressing global leaders, and she was granted a private conversation with President Lula. Her speech spoke precisely to the close connections between humans and the forest:

The zág tree, our millennia old Araucaria ancestor, is on the verge of extinction. Our ancestors predicted this. They warned us about the future when the world would need our knowledge. Today we face environmental imbalances, climate catastrophes, drying rivers, crumbling mountains and melting ice. The planet heats up due to human action . . . We are no longer just protecting the future, but acting in the now. In the name of the Indigenous lives, the forest and biodiversity. Join us in this fight. We are nature trying to defend itself. This is a call to action. ¹⁹

Involvement in spaces like the COP held both opportunities and risks. As Isabel noted to me,

I believe the COP (in Dubai) had the largest Indigenous representation. There were many Indigenous people from the whole world. Not just Brazil, but Asia and Africa. This was really important, because we exchanged. Truly, it was my dream to know about Indigenous lands worldwide. And at the COP we had the chance to exchange information about forests all over the world through the wisdom of the original people that still exist.

But she also expressed cynicism about many of the meetings in particular the influence of oil and carbon markets on the proceedings. “I believe that 20% of all discussions were really effective and genuinely concerned with the environment and climate actions. The rest, unfortunately, I believe . . . How can I say it. In truth, in my opinion, it’s a big farce.” ²⁰ The COP in Dubai was widely criticised for its failure to reach an agreement to phase out fossil fuels (Carrington, 2023).

Carl too, spoke of these dynamics: “It was a very enriching experience, very inspiring because I could meet other people struggling for the climate for the forests. I could also perceive that there is a global movement and in this we can potentialise the idea of protecting the forests.” ²¹ He noted that,

Yes, I participated in some discussions, there are still several discussions about the possible entry of the carbon market within the Laklãnõ Indigenous land, of which we are part. But I still have a little fear, in truth, of everything that comes from outside. We, the Indigenous peoples, due to our history of suffering and neglect and being deceived by non-Indigenous peoples, we are still very afraid, very afraid.

For Carl and others, the memory of past deceptions and violence is very present. Furthermore, the planetary dimension of their work is not seen in opposition to the local and ancestral but precisely a continuation of ancestral visions within the planetary space. As Carl continued,

I believe that one of the greatest results was that we are part of a global network of organisations based in nature that are doing local work. We are also sharing our work, becoming part of global discussions where we can share our ideas, the ideas of our ancestors. I believe that what we are living is a dream, but a dream not dreamed by us, but by our ancestors ²² where we would be occupying spaces to speak for and defend the forest.

The experiences of Instituto Zág at the COP resonate with the wider experiences of Indigenous groups in international climate forums. For instance, Chaplain (2024) has analysed statements from the International Indigenous People’s Forum on Climate Change, one of the main international forums for Indigenous rights. She found that the movement revealed a form of transnational storytelling “worldmaking” that “braids together temporal, place, and felt knowledges – three relational ways of knowing – into constellations of resilience rhetorics, or rhetorics tethered by the idea Indigenous People’s relationships with lands and experiences on the frontlines of climate colonialism are vital knowledges for imagining and creating more just worlds.” (Chaplain, 2024: 371–372). This reveals how Indigenous movements are both embedded in a decolonial critique of international economic and climatic regimes and also offer an alternative vision for responses to climate change.

My argument that the struggle of the Laklãnõ-Xokleng reveals a terrestrial politics – one that is simultaneously highly localised and planetary – is an idea that can be applied to Indigenous movements in Brazil and more widely. These movements are not merely struggles for territorial recognition and forest protection but aim to foster alliances and reshape global climatic institutions and politics. My concept of terrestrial (re)forestations aims to indicate how these national alliances and worldmaking processes are planetary in their imbrication within political and climatic processes. These dynamics inform my discussion below on “terrestrial (re)forestations.”

Discussion: Terrestrial (re)forestations

The dynamics presented above reveal many elements outlined by Fraser et al. (2024) in their discussion of the “Anthropocene tropical forest”. There are, however, dynamics that empirically and theoretically require deepening and which the ethnography above reveals: in particular, the ways in which disturbances are interpreted through local onto-epistemologies, and, in turn, the manner in ways these are mobilised through national land struggles and planetary climate regimes.

To supplement the idea of the “Anthropocene tropical forest” with that of “terrestrial (re)forestations” is to highlight that a relational concept of the tropical and subtropical forest, one characterised by communities of both human and non-human beings, must consider the ways in which an animated and lived forest is saturated with history. Indigenous onto-epistemologies – themselves unstable and historically situated – are mobilised through diverse and unequal systems of power relating to contestations over land demarcations; the reparative work of trying to heal colonial dispossessions and wounds; responses to changing climatic factors; and navigating global climate finance regimes and institutions. These mobilisations – the decentering of the anthropos in the Anthropocene – are inscribed both in local territorial disputes and on a planetary scale. Terrestrial (re)forestations indicate the ways in which struggles for the forest are taking place at multiple scales: modes of becoming that are localised – struggles over specific clearings, forests and borders – are also woven into wider legal contestations and planetary systems.

Latour’s (2018) concept of the “Terrestrial” is valuable here. First, it resonates with the Portuguese term of terra which refers to the soil, land and to the planet – the English ‘earth’ resonates with this but does not have the same political valence. This semantic dimension speaks to the wider theoretical concern of how “all forms of belonging are undergoing metamorphosis – belonging to the globe, to the world, to the provinces, to particular plots of ground, to the world market, to lands or to traditions” (Latour, 2018: chapter three). Latour argues for a politics of the Terrestrial, which is grounded in local struggles for territory, but planetary in the sense that the planet is itself an actor in these domains:

this Terrestrial . . . is no longer the milieu or the background of human action . . . how can we say where we are if the place “on” or “in” which we are located begins to react to our actions, turns against us, encloses us, dominates us, demands something of us and carries us along in its path? . . . how are we to act if the territory itself begins to participate in history, to fight back, in short, to concern itself with us – how do we occupy a land if it is this land itself that is occupying us? (Latour 2018: chapter nine)

There is an obvious resonance here between what Latour is speaking of at a planetary scale and the inter-relational dimensions that Fraser et al. (2024) indicate regarding the tropical forest. The concept of terrestrial (re)forestations aims to connect these scales without making one the representational mirror of the other, or reverting to a binary between the local and global.

It is precisely in the attentiveness to this vitalism, the agential force of the earth, of terra,of forests, that we can see the connection between a localised and a planetary politics. For as we see in the case of the Laklãnõ, as with the Yanomami (Kopenawa, 2013), the struggles for land, for the forest, are not merely struggles of a localised and bounded onto-epistemology pitched against a capitalist modernity. The struggles for the demarcation of land are also about struggles over what terra, earth, is.

Porto (2024: 512) makes a related point in his reading of Kopenawa’s The Falling Sky when he writes that “indigenous people are not worried only about themselves. Their struggles for their land and the conservation of forests are also moved by a concern about the general livability of the planet.” Kopenawa’s (2013) perspective is a shamanic view of ecology as an interdependence of various beings that requires mediation, diplomacy and respect to avoid entropy: it is a form of politics bound to the “forest-land” but requires a reckoning with colonialism and other historical forces (Porto, 2024). Virgílio (2024: 99) has also pointed to the connections between the struggles of the Laklãnõ and other Indigenous movements like the Yanomami and that these “constitute an indigenous front that is fully articulated with other uprisings.” My concept of “terrestrial (re)forestations” may therefore be applied to other Indigenous forest communities whose aim is not just to protect the territorial boundaries of their lands, but also to form planetary networks and amplify their struggles.

Furthermore, emphasising the terrestrial does not negate the importance of territory or territórios, a widely used theoretical and political category in Brazil. As Ferreira et al. (2025) argue the idea of the território in Brazil as a site of resistance for Indigenous communities and quilombos is not just a spatial concept but one connected to cultural autonomy, ancestrality and forms of life. The use of the concept of the terrestrial is precisely not a negation of the território, but rather indicates its imbrication in wider planetary processes. In this sense, while the terrestrial does not have the same linguistic valence in English as it does in French or Portuguese, it offers a vital concept to grasp the multiple scales – ones encompassing the living soil, land, territory, and planet – of Indigenous political projects.

It is here that we need to move beyond the conception of Fraser et al. (2024) focussing on an “eco-bio-communitarianism” to see that the struggles for forests among Indigenous groups is not merely for the demarcation of distinct territories or relations within the forest; they are planetary in the sense that they are enmeshed in, and fundamentally disruptive to, nationalist projects and global institutions. The terrestrial is the unveiling of the forest within local territories and, through legal and transnational institutions, planetary processes.

These dynamics resonate with the type of politics which Indigenous activist and philosopher Ailton Krenak (2024: 54–56) calls for: “To escape from servitude is also to open to the idea of occupying spaces, including the space of politics and the state, and I hope that we can help breathe new life into these environments as much as possible, as well as our rivers which generously flow together.” Krenak (2024) views Indigenous struggles as constituted through “affective alliances” which, rather than based on stable onto-epistemologies and worldviews, are based on bonds “between worlds that are not equal” (2024: 49). In Krenak’s view, the affective bonds operate not only within the forest, but through national and planetary alliances, formed around unequal power relations, and which encompasses both human and non-human actors including mountains, rivers, and forests along with nationalist and planetary political projects.

The struggles of the Laklãnõ are not merely a claim for a precolonial past, but a political strategy to carve out a space within the Brazilian state and in the planetary context of the climate crisis. One cannot view these onto-epistemic struggles outside of the violent histories of colonialism, state formation and the contemporary dynamics of the climate crisis. Furthermore, the community of beings in relation to the forest is an unequal one: the historical intrusion of settlers into Indigenous territory is conceived as a disturbance but not by humans into nature. Rather, the encroachment of violent, dispossessing and commodifying processes into the living forest involves a set of relations that seeks to cut off human relationality from that of other non-human beings. The onto-epistemic and political struggles against these processes are also central to conceiving climate justice at a planetary scale (cf Milanez et al., 2022). The concept of terrestrial (re)forestations indicates the ways in which Indigenous struggles to reforest and reclaim their land are both attempts to repair violent pasts and struggle for territorial demarcation, but also to foster and cultivate the inter-relationality of the forest through national and planetary processes. They are not merely projects of asserting local onto-epistemologies and cultural identities amid the dangers of the Anthropocene.

Conclusions

The politics of Laklãnõ, like that of the Yanomami and other Indigenous groups, reveals the radical nature of the politics of Indigenous groups. The struggles by Indigenous groups like the Laklãnõ are not merely for the legal demarcation of territory, are not merely for the enclosure and protection of local knowledge systems (although these are important), but are struggles against the apparatuses that inscribe the distinction between nature and culture, humans and spirits, the forest and the world. The concept of terrestrial (re)forestations indicates the ways in which the people, spirits and beings of the forest might animate and disturb the very institutions and forms that have unsettled them. Local onto-epistemologies of the forest are mobilised to heal colonial dispossessions and wounds, respond to changing climatic factors, and navigate global climate finance regimes and institutions. This concept indicates the ways in which Indigenous claims to land and forests require territorial demarcations, though these are interpenetrated with evolving spiritual relations and wider planetary processes.

The intra-actions (cf. Barad, 2007) between human and non-humans in forest ecologies cannot be re-inscribed within distinct borders and territories, or even within the forest, but are terrestrial – disrupting and exceeding these borders and inscriptions. Developing Fraser et al.’s (2024) argument that we need to understand forests through the inter-relations between humans and non-human actors – and move beyond conceptions that place humans as central to the life of forests – I have argued here that these insights require a deeper political analysis: first, situating conceptions of disturbance historically and, secondly, grasping how these inter-relations inform a planetary politics. Disturbance here is not necessarily alien to Indigenous onto-epistemologies; settlers have fundamentally disturbed and disrupted Indigenous life and these threats remain in the time of the climate crisis.

Elders collecting pinhão on occupied land, wandering the forest and speaking to the plants or bees; community members building houses amid the soya farms of white settlers; the cutting down of pine forests and planting of the sacred groves; youth singing for the flourishing of seedlings and appearing at international climate conferences – these are manifestations of the ways in which the forest’s fecundity, its vitalism, is agential and saturated with multiple layers of history. Reforestation projects attempt to recultivate and repair landscapes through appeals to ancestral pasts, while oriented towards a long-term planetary future. The struggles of the Laklãnõ collecting food or plant medicines from the forest are directly connected to national legal struggles for the demarcation of Indigenous territory, which in turn are directly connected to struggles against the insurgent colonial discourses represented by Bolsonaro and his compatriots in Brazil, and by Trump globally. The project to reforest the land with Araucaria is a reparative project against colonial dispossession, but simultaneously requires a navigation of global climate institutions including the UNFCCC’s Conference of Parties, where alliances are made with other Indigenous groups. These are not abstract mirrorings between the local and the global, but empirical connections between human and non-human actors through which the evolving vitalism and ruination of living forests is immediately connected to planetary processes.

Postscript

The violence against Indigenous groups continues. In late March 2024, the house that Rosenay Pedroso and Dilli Copaca built beside the soya farm was attacked, and in May 2024, Pedroso’s son was murdered, forcing them to flee the territory. Though a suspect has been arrested, and the investigation is ongoing, many in the Laklãnõ territory believe the killing to be a response to Indigenous land struggles.