By Helen Gloege ’23
Sônia Guajajara is a 48-year-old Indigenous activist, environmentalist and politician from Brazil.
Graphic by Sofia Savid ‘24
Guajajara is known as the coordinator for Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil or the Association for Indigenous People of Brazil, according to Believe Earth. Guajajara also participates in larger world forums like the U.N. Human Rights Council and the U.N. Climate Negotiations to share experiences of Indigenous people in Brazil to a global audience, according to Indigenous Rights International. In an op-ed for The New York Times, Guajajara pointed to how climate change and the destruction of resources like the Amazon rainforest have begun “threatening our way of life” and culture.
Informed by this pressure, her activism has taken place across many different stages, including a music festival called “Rock in Rio” where, in 2017, singer Alicia Keys invited Guajajara to “take the stage and speak to the thousands watching there, and the millions watching from home,” Global Alliance reported. While onstage, Guajajara said, “There is a war in the Amazon, [where] Indigenous people and the environment are being brutally attacked.” From this platform, she also called for senators to block the Renca Project proposal. The Renca Project would have opened “a huge Amazon reserve to commercial mining,” according to Al-Jazeera, but federal courts have since suspended the project.
Guajajara has also had a political career, participating in the Brazilian national elections of 2018. According to photographer Pablo Albarenga, who has worked with Guajajara, she became “the first Indigenous woman to compete for the vice presidency of the country,” campaigning with Guilherme Boulos. Guajajara recently spoke on climate change at COP26. There, according to Greenpeace, she said, “without the participation of Indigenous Peoples, there will be no solution.”