We, Indigenous women, are engaged in many struggles at the national and international levels. We are seeds planted through our songs for social justice, for the demarcation of our territories, for standing forests, for health, for education, for containing climate change, and for the “Healing of the Earth.” Our voices have already broken through the silences imposed upon us since the invasion of our territories.

Brazil’s Indigenous population is composed of 305 Peoples, who speak 274 languages. We are approximately 900,000 people, including 448,000 women. We, Indigenous women, fight for the demarcation of Indigenous territories, against the authorization of mining and the leasing of our lands, against attempts to weaken environmental licensing, and against the financing of weapons in rural areas. We face the dismantling of Indigenous and environmental policies.

Our leaders are engaged in a permanent struggle to defend rights and guarantee our existence, which is embodied in our bodies, spirits, and territories.

Gathered at the 15th Free Land Camp (Acampamento Terra Livre – ATL), in April 2019, we built an organic space for action. We brought important agendas to the center of the mobilization debate that resulted in the First Indigenous Women’s March, with the gathering of 2,500 women from 130 Peoples in Brasília, on August 9 of that year, the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.

The March, under the motto “Territory: Our Body, Our Spirit,” had been envisioned since 2015 as a process of formation and strengthening, sustained through articulation with different movements.

August 2020. One year after the First Indigenous Women’s March, we, Indigenous women from across Brazil, carried out a historic mobilization! Faced with the escalation of violence against Indigenous Peoples during the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided to mark our presence on the screens and organize the largest virtual mobilization of Indigenous women. Thus, on August 7 and 8, our great online assembly took place under the theme “The Sacredness of Existence and the Healing of the Earth.”

We, Indigenous women, are also the Earth, because the Earth is made within us. Through the strength of our songs, we connect across all places where our enchantments are present — the enchantments of our ancestors. The Earth is sister, daughter, aunt, mother, grandmother, womb, nourishment, and the healing of the world.

How can we remain silent in the face of an attack? In the face of a genocide that makes the Earth cry even when we are silent? Because the Earth has many children, and a mother cries when she sees and feels that the life she created is now threatened. But there is still a chance to change this, because we are the healing of the Earth!

In response to the pandemic, we created spaces of connection to strengthen the power of Indigenous women’s articulation, reclaiming matriarchal values and memories to advance social demands connected to our territories, confronting attempts to exterminate Indigenous Peoples, as well as attempts to invade and exploit our territories through genocidal actions — actions that have intensified during the pandemic. In this way, we also strengthened the Indigenous movement by incorporating gender and generational perspectives.

Indigenous women assumed a fundamental role in articulating networks of support during this period. In addition to their ongoing work at sanitary barriers, they led the strategic development of Territorial, Regional, and National Plans to confront COVID-19. Many Indigenous women have played significant roles in defending the rights of Indigenous Peoples — often while facing multiple forms of violence.

Due to the constant violations of rights, intensified during the pandemic, it is urgent to strengthen the contributions of these defenders, expanding and qualifying their actions in spaces of political participation and decision-making, and supporting the meaningful participation of Indigenous women as protagonists and multipliers.

We are acting not only in response to COVID-19, but also on the frontlines against the “systematic COVID response of the Federal Government” and its ongoing attacks on Indigenous rights.

As a result, we recognized the need to move further forward, strengthening our organizational capacities in order to officially establish ANMIGA as an articulation, including strategic planning and the strengthening of our networks.

We are many, we are multiple, we are thousands of women: chiefs, midwives, healers, spiritual leaders, farmers, teachers, lawyers, nurses, and doctors within the multiple sciences of the Territory and the university. We are anthropologists, representatives, and psychologists. We are many, moving from the ground of the village to the ground of the world.