Against Natural Resources: Engaging With Indigenous Knowledge to Imagine the Past and the Future of the Amazon

While writing these lines, heavy rains flooded my hometown, Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, for over a month. This city became another icon of the global climatic crisis, submerged in an unprecedented tragedy that affected more than 90 percent of the municipalities in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. On the opposite side of the country, the Amazon is experiencing the worst drought ever recorded. As scientists, environmentalists, and politicians debate the reasons for these crises and strategies to mitigate their impacts, the concept of “natural resources” takes on a prominent role, describing unbalanced relationships between nature and people.

Drawing from the definition by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP 2009, 9), “natural resources are actual or potential sources of wealth that occur in a natural state, such as timber, water, fertile land, wildlife, minerals, metals, stones, and hydrocarbons.” Naturalized as it is, this concept reinforces the division between nature and culture and its exploitative basis. It implies a hierarchical relationship in which humanity occupies a superior position and thus commands nature. Nature is a “source of wealth.”

This division has guided archaeology, a discipline that relies on our expertise to distinguish between nature and culture, as we learn to separate—for example—flaked rocks from naturally broken pieces or an anthropogenic mound from a natural feature. Our ability to discern between anthropogenic and natural processes sustains our disciplinary specificity.

Here, I intend to challenge and blur this distinction to incite our archaeological imagination to envision different possibilities of being human, of social existences, and of explanations.

I engage with the work of three Indigenous and Afrodiasporic scholars from Brazil: Ailton Krenak (2023), Antônio Bispo dos Santos (2023), and Glicéria Tupinambá (2023). Their work emphasizes the active, sentient, and affective character of land/earth.1 I will use it along with lessons I received from the Wajãpi Indigenous People, with whom I have worked since 2009 (Cabral 2015, 2022).

Drawing from discussions in Indigenous ethnology in South America (De La Cadena & Blaser 2018; Gomes et al. 2020; Oliveira et al. 2020), I use the concept of different worlds to emphasize the understanding that, beyond cultural difference, there are diverse definitions of what reality is. Anthropologists Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser (2018) invite us to use the concept of “Pluriverse” to open space in our imagination for the existence of multiple worlds. Embracing this concept, we create room to challenge ourselves to think with different worlds.

Beyond recognizing differences, this choice is also a political stance, allowing other categories to exist. It reveals their boundaries and limitations as a path of dismantling and contextualizing these categories. It emphasizes that, beyond differences, there are also divergences among worlds.

I argue that the category “natural resource” hinders our ability to envision an existence (past, present, or future) for the Amazon where Indigenous populations and other forest peoples can thrive in fullness, not just as surviving bodies but as bodies of resilient knowledge. They are the stewards of the Amazon's long-term history, a highly connected history of the relationships among humans and an extensive array of other beings (Van Velthem 2003; Esbell 2018; Oliveira et al. 2020), including those that would not be seen as living beings from Western settings, such as land/earth.

The scholars mentioned earlier call our attention to this point. Ailton Krenak (2023, 238), a prominent Indigenous scholar, states, “We don't have to ‘take care’ of the land, we have to respect this living organism that is the earth.” Quilombola leader Bispo dos Santos (2023) explains, “There is an understanding among us that the land is alive, and that if it can produce, it should also rest.” Indigenous artist Glicéria Tupinambá (2023) reports that “the earth dreams. The river sleeps.”

They assert that land/earth is a living organism that dreams and needs rest. These statements can be seen as poetic metaphors, expressing ideas that mainstream concepts struggle to capture. However, appreciating the poetic beauty of their statements could inform the recognized authority of science, as Brazilian archaeologist Lara de Paula Passos (2019) has suggested. She challenges the conventional view that poetry is unscientific, arguing that it can be a powerful tool for transforming how we understand and communicate scientific knowledge (Passos 2021). In this sense, the poetic expressions of Krenak, Bispo dos Santos, and Glicéria Tupinambá should not be dismissed as mere literary exercises but rather as vital contributions that reshape scientific discourse, expanding its boundaries to include diverse, often marginalized ways of knowing.

What happens if we take their assertions about land and earth seriously2—not as poetry, metaphors, or myths, but as expressions of alternate worlds and different regimes of existence (Almeida 2013)?

I have been engaged in this effort since I first began working with the Wajãpi Indigenous people in Amapá in the Amazon region of Brazil. The archaeology project in Wajãpi Indigenous Land, developed with the Wajãpi, has offered many opportunities to put into practice knowledge aligned with Krenak, Bispo, and Tupinambá. This knowledge not only diverges from our conventional concepts of archaeology but also exposes different worlds.

With the Wajãpi, I learned that stone axe blades and ceramic shards snore beneath the earth, which is a perfectly acceptable way to find these artifacts (Cabral 2017). One can also learn the path to ancient places through dreams and conversations with nonhuman beings (Cabral 2015).

Once, while navigating a medium-sized river in Wajãpi Land, I saw traces of a small landslide on the riverbank (Figure 1). The landslide tore down trees and deposited sediments into the river. When I asked the knowledge keeper Ajareãty Wajãpi why the landslide happened, she promptly responded that it was due to deforestation by non-Indigenous Brazilians more than 30 miles away from the border of the Indigenous land. The forest felt it and got angry, throwing the earth and trees into the river as revenge.

Ajareãty also explained that Brazilians do not know how to live with the forest. They (we!) take everything they can, hunt all the animals, and only know how to extract. As Bispo warned, they do not let the land rest. She then gave me the example of cipó-titica (Heteropsis flexuosa), a vine widely used in the Amazon and valued for craft making.

This vine grows on large trees. Indeed, for the Wajãpi, trees adorn themselves with the “cipó-titica,” which are trees’ necklaces (Figure 2). Necklaces are important adornments for Wajãpi people, used for embellishment, an essential characteristic of social beings.

Following Viveiros de Castro (1998) and Stolze Lima (1996), who summarized Amerindian Perspectivism, the Wajãpi acknowledge a shared personhood among diverse social beings. For example, in origin stories, animals and humans were once indistinguishable—they were all people. According to these narratives, different beings transformed into the bodies we recognize today, but this transformation is not limited to the distant past. On one occasion, an elder named Kasiripinã Wajãpi explained to me that all animals wear clothes that make them appear as they do. He pointed to a tiny hummingbird and said: “You see, they look small, but it is only because of their clothes; if they take them off, they will look just like us.” For the Wajãpi, animals and other beings, such as the large trees where cipó-titica grows, are people, even though we perceive them as having different bodies.

When Ajareãty explained the landslide at the riverside to me, she drew from the Wajãpi knowledge system. The white Brazilians living at the Wajãpi Land border extracted cipó-titica in large quantities, leaving the trees stripped of their vines. The trees felt dispossessed, unable to adorn themselves, and in their anger, they sought revenge. A landslide is a sign of these unbalanced relationships.

Maintaining harmonious relationships among social beings is a key political asset. For the Wajãpi, as with many Indigenous peoples in the Amazon, this social network extends far beyond humans, encompassing a much broader community of beings. I engage with Isabelle Stengers's (2018) “cosmopolitical proposal” to emphasize that Wajãpi's relations with their surroundings do not conform to human-nature binaries. As Stengers (446) proposes, the concept “cosmos” is not meant to denote a “good common world;” instead, it aims “to slow down the construction of this common world, to create a space of hesitation regarding what we do when we say ‘good.’”

I engage with this space of hesitation to experiment with the Wajãpi ideas, conceptions, and understandings. That is why I challenge the notion of “natural resources.” Taking seriously their perspectives and their philosophical system has led me to work in this space of hesitation. I began to hesitate in using the term “natural resources” as an adequate category to name cipó-titica, the rivers, the trees, the clay, and the stones. This category erases the rich connections that the Wajãpi foster with their surroundings, silences shamans’ conversations with enchanted beings, and reduces living and social beings to mere economic assets or “sources of wealth,” as defined by UNEP (2009).

Words are weapons; translations are disputes. I am trying to change the words in my work to align with the people I work with. Now, when I look at archaeological collections, I cannot help but think those pieces are part of cosmopolitical interactions that have been ongoing for thousands of years. They, too, are alive. As floods and droughts affect our daily lives, perhaps we should listen more carefully to what the land/earth can teach us. As stewards of this knowledge, Indigenous peoples are central to guiding archaeologists into imagining different pasts and futures of the Amazon.