The Kayapo (Portuguese: Caiapó[käjäˈpɔ]) people are the indigenous people in Brazil who inhabit a vast area spreading across the states of Pará and Mato Grosso, south of the Amazon River and along Xingu River and its tributaries. This pattern has given rise to the nickname the Xingu tribe. They are one of the various subgroups of the great Mebêngôkre nation (people from the water’s source). The term “Kayapo” is used by neighbouring groups rather than the Kayapo themselves. They refer to outsiders as “Poanjos”. The type of sweet potato that forms an important part of the Kayapó diet is sometimes named “caiapo”, after the tribe. It is cultivated under that name in Japan, and has been found to have health benefits. The Kayapo tribe lives alongside the Xingu River in the most east part of the Amazon Rainforest, in the Amazon basin, in several scattered villages ranging in population from one hundred to one thousand people in Brazil. Their land consists of tropical rainforest savannah (grassland) and is arguably the largest tropical protected area in the entire world, covering 11,346,326 hectares of Neotropical forests and scrubland containing many endangered species. They have small hills scattered around their land and the area is criss-crossed by river valleys. The larger rivers feed into numerous pools and creeks, most of which don’t have official names.
The Kayapo indigenous people of the southeastern Amazon have struggled to acquire and protect their land rights over 40 years since the frontier of settlement and resource extraction began to explode around their territories. Twenty-first century alliances of the Kayapo with conservation non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have
enabled protection of almost ten million hectares of their contiguous ratified territories. Key to success has been the development of resource management and income generation activities within Kayapo indigenous territories, and territorial surveillance and protection that is essential given the lack of government enforcement.
The Kayapó live in villages dispersed along the upper course of the Iriri, Bacajá and Fresco rivers, as well as affluents of the voluminous Xingu river, outlining a territory almost as large as Austria in Central Brazil and almost entirely covered in equatorial rainforest, with the exception of the eastern section, filled by some areas of scrubland. Their cosmology, ritual life and social organization are extremely rich and complex, while their relations with non-Indian society and environmentalists from the world over are marked by their intensity and ambivalence. The term Kayapó (sometimes written ‘Kaiapó’ or ‘Caiapó’) was first used at the start of the 19th century. The people do not call themselves by this term, a name coined by neighbouring groups and meaning “those who look like monkeys”, which probably derives from a ritual lasting many weeks during which Kayapó men, adorned with monkey masks, execute short dances. Although aware that this is how others name them, the Kayapó refer to themselves as Mebêngôkre, “the men from the water hole/place.”
The Kayapos are part of the South American Amerindian peoples who speak languages of the Macro-Ge group. The Ge peoples inhabit the east of Brazil and the north of Paraguay and consist of a wide range of different tribes located in different geographic zones. The Northwestern. Ge tribes include the Timbira, Northern and Southern Kayapo, and Suya. The central Ge peoples divide themselves into Xavante, Xerente, and Akroa, while the Southern Ge, or Kaingang, include the Coroado and others. The Ge community, as whole, probably does not exceed 10,000 human beings. The Kayapos are one of the main Ge tribes that remain in the Amazon basin in Brazil. There are several theories about the origins of the various South American Indian groups, and it is thought that they may have migrated thousands of years ago from Central Asia, crossing into North America and making their way southwards. There are others who believe that this may be true for some but not all Amerindian groups. The Kayapos resisted assimilation and were known traditionally as fierce warriors, raiding enemy tribes and sometimes fighting among themselves.
A glance at the territories of the Kayapó people on Google Maps shows how they stick out like a green barrier against the surrounding deforestation. The Kayapó maintain legal control over an area of 10.6 million hectares (around 26 million acres) of primary tropical forest and savanna in the southeastern Amazon region of Brazil. They number approximately 7,000 people scattered across 46 villages in five territories. Their area is rich in biodiversity and their frontier characterized by violent land conflicts and the highest rate of deforestation in Brazil. Despite their place in the center of Brazil’s so-called “arc of deforestation,” the Kayapó people’s deep respect for nature has led to their spirited protection of their lush forests, rivers and savannas.
For more than four decades, Kokoró Mekranotire has watched with dismay as outsiders have laid waste to ever-larger swaths of his Kayapó homeland. Loggers, gold miners, farmers, and land grabbers have streamed illegally into and around the Indigenous territory, a 40,000-square-mile expanse of forest the size of South Korea. The patch of forest where Mekranotire used to collect Brazil nuts — a dense canopy of deep golden-brown trees standing almost 100 feet tall — was stripped. Stands of cumaru trees, a Brazilian teak, were felled to make decks, cabinetry, and flooring. Loggers have repeatedly entered Kayapó land, removed what was in their way, and taken the rest to make a profit. “Those trees never should have been touched,” says Mekranotire, now 49 and working for the Kabu Institute, a nonprofit that helps protect Kayapó land and develop sustainable businesses among its people, including Brazil nut cultivation. “We had to fight to hold onto our land and let more trees grow.” Outsiders started arriving in droves in the 1970s with the opening of the federal BR-163 highway, which stretches 1,320 miles from Cuiabá in south-central Brazil to Santarém in the heart of the Amazon. BR-163 parallels Kayapó land and was fully paved by 2020, spurring a boom in soybean farming, with the highway providing easy access for millions of tons of the commodity crop to reach Brazilian ports.
The Kayapó of Brazil are a colourful and influential indigenous Amazonian group, dispersed across the Central Brazilian Plateau. As an extremely politically active community, the Kayapó play a key role in environmental campaigns, using the rich aesthetics of their culture as a political symbol, campaigning for indigenous rights and a cultural identity. In 2003, the population was estimated at approximately 7000 people. Although they are an indigenous tribe living in the Amazon, the Kayapó have a long history of interactions with outsiders. Such interactions have not always had the best consequences. With the initial arrival of the Europeans approximately 500 years ago, Portuguese colonisation encouraged the forced migration of various Kayapó communities further into the rainforest. Taken from them were vast amounts of land and habitats, accompanied by the introduction of a number of diseases – previously uncommon – from the arrival of outsiders. However, outsider contact has also meant media and commercial influences. Anthropologists such as Bruce Parry, for example, have used their influence and role in the media to promote the voices of the Kayapó in their struggles for indigenous rights. In the 1980s, the Kayap, prospered greatly through employing white outsiders to log species on their lands, yet this ended when logging on indigenous lands became outlawed. But from this point onwards, the Kayapó as a community began to significantly place more importance in the preservation of the rainforest and have since continued to raise awareness about the destruction of the Amazon.
The Brazilian tribe that played by our rules, and lost
The Kayapó traditionally practised slash-and-burn agriculture on small farms cut into the jungle. The rich resources of their lands (minerals, timber, and potential hydroelectrical power) have brought pressures from outside. Although the Brazilian constitution explicitly prohibits the displacement of “Indians” from their traditional lands, it provides for one convenient exception: where the National Congress deems removal of the people to be “in the interest of the sovereignty of the country“. Proponents of the dam argue that its construction is in the nation’s interest. The Belo Monte dam will be the world’s third-largest hydroelectric dam (after China’s Three Gorges dam, itself with numerous problems, and the Brazilian-Paraguayan Itaipu dam). It will flood 400,000 hectares of the world’s largest rainforest, displacing 20,000 to 40,000 people – including the Kayapó. The ecological impact of the project is massive: the Xingu River basin has four times more biodiversity than all of Europe. Flooding of the rainforest will liberate massive amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas far more damaging than carbon dioxide. But the impact on Chief Raoni’s people, on an entire society, is unimaginable.
The Kayapo (Portuguese: Caiapó[kɐjɐˈpɔ]) people are an indigenouspeople in Brazil. They are found along the plain islands of the Mato Grosso and Pará in Brazil, south of the Amazon Basin and along Rio Xingu and its tributaries. Kayapo call themselves “Mebengokre”, which means “people of the wellspring”. Kayapo people also call outsiders “Poanjos”. The Kayapo tribe live alongside the Xingu River in the eastern part of the Amazon Rainforest, near the Amazon basin. They live in several scattered villages ranging in population from, one hundred to one thousand people in Brazil. Their land consists of tropical rainforest savannah (grassland). It is arguably the largest tropical protected area in the world covering 11,346,326 million hectares. They have small hills scattered around their land and the area is criss-crossed by river valleys. The larger rivers feed into numerous pools and creeks, most of which don’t have official names.nIn 2010, there was an estimated 8,638 Kayapo people. which is an increase from 7,096 in 2003. Subgroups of the Kayapo include the Xikrin, Gorotire, Mekranoti and Metyktire. Their villages typically consist of a dozen huts. A centrally located hut serves as a meeting place for village men to discuss community issues. One of the Kayapo tribes, all of the women shave a distinctive V shape into their scalp.
The Kayapo have a long history of contact with others. Since the initial arrival of Europeans around 500 years ago, the Kayapo have experienced forced migration further west into the rainforests as a result of invasions, they have lost land and habitat and they have also suffered from the introduction of diseases that accompanied the arrival of outsiders. Yet the Kayapo have prospered through contacts with media and commerce. The tribe became rich in the 1980s when they employed white outsiders to log species on their lands but this practice ceased when logging was outlawed on indigenous lands. Then the Kayapo decided that their future lay in the preservation of the forest and in 1989 worked with Sting and the late Anita Roddick of The Body Shop to raise awareness about the destruction of the Amazon. They were an important and vocal part of a global media campaign that brought the Amazon to the forefront of environmental debates.
Rain Forest Warriors: How Indigenous Tribes Protect the Amazon
The destruction of the Amazon in Brazil can be seen by satellite: Where logging roads have spread their tentacles and ranchers have expanded their grazing, all is brown. Beginning in the early 1980s, these photos from space lost more and more green, so that by 2004 the destruction seemed unstoppable. Brazil’s deforestation rate had reached an alarming 27,000 square kilometers (nearly 17,000 square miles) per year. But stop it did—not everywhere, but at the borders of what appears from space to be a green island the size of a small country. The brown spreads around this protected zone in the southern Xingu river basin of Brazil, but doesn’t penetrate. These are the borders of the lands of indigenous tribes.
The Kayapo people are a tribe of about 8,638 indigenous (native) peoples who live in the Amazon rainforest. They like to call themselves Mebengokre, meaning ‘the men from the water place’. The Kayapo tribe live alongside the Xingu River in several scattered villages ranging in population from one hundred to one thousand people. They have small hills scattered around their land and the area is criss-crossed by river valleys. Their villages are typically made up of about a dozen huts. A centrally located hut serves as a meeting place for village men to discuss community issues. Their appearance is highly decorative and colourful, using: face and body paint, beads and feathers. The Kayapo believe their ancestors learnt how to live communally from social insects such as bees, which is why mothers and children paint each other’s bodies with patterns that look like animal or insect markings, including those of bees. Men wear the flamboyant Kayapo headdress with its outwardly radiating feathers (representing the universe) at ceremonies to mark the changing of seasons as well as rites of passage. The Kayapo people use shifting cultivation where land is farmed for a few years, after which the people move to a new area. New farmland is cleared (using cutting and burning) and the old farm is allowed to lie fallow and replenish itself. Crops they grow include: sweet potatoes, yams and papaya. Since the initial arrival of Europeans around 500 years ago, the Kayapo have experienced forced migration further west into the rainforests. They have lost: land, habitat and they have also suffered from the introduction of diseases from the outsiders.
Indigenous Peoples Literature 
