GUARDIANS BLOG

September 2024

Working with women survivors
by Bella Harden

As an intern for GWW working to support the Unheard Daughter’s Project, to immerse myself in the work I began by reading the women’s stories. Reading their stories, I was struck by their remarkable strength and resilience in the face of unspeakable violence and horror. But more than that I was struck by their ability to speak about the unspeakable.

Reading their stories I must confess that I wanted to look away. To stop reading the page. To protect my peace. Peace, both of a personal nature and of the absence of conflict in a world rife with it—is an enormous privilege. Our ability to disconnect—to turn off the news, to scroll past upsetting stories, to look away—is a shocking luxury of the digital world. When so much of the news we consume is hard to read, it is hard not to turn away. Reading the Unheard Daughter’s stories was not my first time encountering conflict from a removed place. For six months I worked as an open-source investigator at an organisation which verified human rights abuses in conflict-torn regions. In this role, I scoured social media for evidence of mass atrocities, often coming across triggering content. At night I would go home, switch off, and protect my peace to be able to wake up and work another day. The world may look away, but organisations like ours ensure that their stories are told. If these women are brave enough to share their stories, then we must listen. We must raise and amplify their voices, their truths. Please let this blog be a preamble to their stories, a reminder not to turn away, even when listening is hard. Their stories deserve to be heard.

August 2024

Working and studying human rights is a huge challenge. Behind the instruments for protecting and preserving rights and peoples, there are real human beings with totally different histories, contexts, and cultures. It means understanding that rights are universal, but that they cannot be applied equally. All activism and struggle must be transformed into practical, impactful actions that produce real results for those in need of support. My name is Lucimar Prata; I'm a Brazilian researcher of Indigenous descent, born in the Brazilian Amazon, and finishing my master’s in international human Rights Law in the UK. I have spent many years of my professional and academic life studying Brazilian indigenous peoples and their struggles against the destruction of their lands and beliefs by big business. This trajectory has encouraged and moved me to learn more and be more aware of my origin as an Amazonian, as well as driving me to take this struggle to the international level. In November 2023, I started organizing an event called 'Forum Brazil UK', an initiative of Brazilian researchers in the UK. The aim of the event is to promote dialogue on important topics for the Brazilian political, economic, social, and cultural scene. This year, our slogan was 'The future is Brazilian', as we believe that Brazil has the strength and capacity to improve and be an example to other nations. While organizing the event, I proposed and planned two panels: How to save the Amazon? The relationship between violence and deforestation and Golden Law and contemporary slave labour. The first aimed to put the Amazon and Indigenous peoples on the agenda, demonstrating the challenges of preserving the forest, the protective capacity of Indigenous peoples for nature, etc.; the second dealt with legal and social developments in Brazil regarding slave labour, especially for black and Indigenous people. Our aim, however, was not just to talk about the issues but also to draw the attention of Brazil's government and essential institutions. This led us to invite and have federal government representatives, international NGOs, banks, institutions, and foundations. In the panels I organized, for example, we had the participation of Joênia Wapichana (President of FUNAI), Sônia Guajajara (President of the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples), the Ministry of Racial Equality, a representative of the Brazilian Federal Police, the Igarapé Institute, the Federal University of Minerals, as well as funding from the Lemman Foundation, Magazine Luiza, FCDO and the Itaú Foundation. The event had a very big impact not only on the academic community but also on the groups and issues discussed, opening speaking slots and funding for future projects at the national and international levels. It also strengthened the Brazil-UK partnership within diplomatic dialogues. We can promote human rights through projects and initiatives like this. Being at GWW represents another step towards expanding my knowledge and further strengthening the struggle of indigenous peoples around the world through research, support, and funding. More critical than defending human rights is acting!

The Urgency to Act

Lucimar Prata

July 2024

It has somewhat blown my mind over the past month, how from my small and remote cottage in the Lake District, I have been able to have such beautiful and rich conversations with a woman living deep in rural Africa, to hear first-hand her stories of her community and what it is to be a woman in the Endorois community today. Thanks to the powers of WhatsApp, Josephine and I have been able to spend many hours over facetime identifying the issues most pressing for the community, with the goal being to work out how GWW can be of most assistance in their fight for self-determination. The community are up against increasing threats from climate change, the Kenyan government and capitalist and corporate interests, which continue to threaten the subsistence and wellbeing of the Endorois today. This direct communication has felt like a breath of fresh air, having just arrived to this internship fresh from an intense year of academia, where the closest anyone seems to get to an indigenous community is a case study, void of names or faces, missing the deeply unique and complex stories that make up the lived experience of different indigenous communities on the frontlines of a whole range of environmental and social challenges today. It continues to be an education…I have learnt names of native tree species that can help with salt encroachment emerging from the local Lake Bogoria, a salt lake vital for the community and of drought resistant crops that could help with more subsistence. I have learnt of the expectations of women within the community and how these ideas leave limited time for their own economic pursuits, and together we have identified how Western education for those 30 and below in the community is creating a knowledge gap in the transference of specific place based Endorois knowledge. Community does not have to be local, working with GWW I have come to learn just how global it can be. There is such power in the co-creation of plans, and the empowerment potential is immense when a truly indigenous led approach is taken. This is the work! This is the stuff of impact, not essays theorising indigenous justice, but action plans that aim to make impact for the community. My role is to facilitate this change, and my next port of call is to identify potential funding for a place-based women led project with the Endorois community. Having heard of Josephine and the communities’ resilience and fight and the multitude of ideas they have, I feel galvanized into action, and I am excited to see where this global community can go, united in a desire to strengthen environmental protection and enhance self-determination for all indigenous peoples.

June 2024

My name is Pietra Martins, a Brazilian student of International Cooperation on Intercultural Heritage at University of Bologna, Italy. Last week Nic Salazar and I had a call, in which he introduced me to the Montado cultural landscape of Portugal, of which I knew nothing. I looked at the map and saw…nothing. I didn’t understand what could exactly happen in this place. I grew up in highly humid and green place, with a soil that grows whatever one plants and Montado seemed different. It tends to be dry, with trees that are resilient to a harsher climate, when compared to the region of Brazil where I grew up. I started to read and read. Did you know that the holm oak is one of the trees that best stands the test of time for its resilience and capacity to adapt? I didn’t. The fact that cork oak stores up to five times more carbon after being harvested so it regenerates its bark was also naively surprising to me. I didn’t know either all the possible activities one can do with cork. From wine bottle stoppers to sustainable fashion. All this in an area that seemed to me at first isolated and perhaps precarious. Seemed. As Nic told me, the area is home to an abundant life of different insects, and part seems to be untouched by humans for a while now. With this also comes the responsibility of developing projects together with the land and people that live around it. As many scholars likes to put creativity is key in sustainability. The possibilities are many, from soil schools that value regenerative life cycles to mental health projects with intergenerational groups. Protection work of the sobreiras, of the waters, of the biodiversity present can happen with locals. for instance welcoming art residences and oral heritage projects with local communities stories, memory and lore much can indeed develop.

On the Montado

Pietra Martins

March 2023

What is food consciousness?

Vandana Shiva

Food consciousness is the awareness that food is the currency of life. The web of life is a food web, woven through the nutrition cycle. Food embodies the gift of the sun, the gift of soil organisms, the gift of the pollinators, the gift of the farmer.

Food is life.

The right to food is a right of all earth beings, including all human beings.

MARCH 2023

The Indigenous Vision

Tawana Kariri-Xoko Fulkaxo

This is indigenous vision, what I share. By indigenous I mean what I am and what is in me. The importance of the food we eat. Food is a very important part in the life of a human being. Food is understanding. We have to grow that understanding together, always respecting the plant and the animal we eat. When you are ready, grow plants with love. Pay close attention to that cradle of love that is the exchange happening every time you feed, because only when you feed well can your health be good. Today it is totally different as there is little understanding. We live in a society that consumes but does not feed, because although we put things in our mouth that we call food, we do not know what these things actually are. So that's it, that's what I see in this culture of great agribusiness. That is the question of consciousness, or lack of consciousness, which results from the condition of people who live without actually knowing where their food comes from, or what it actually is. Why do we perform rituals? To understand what we eat, to gain consciousness. Ritual and prayer are aimed at god, who gives us good corn, beans and the other things we plant. We give thanks every time we eat, to the Mother Spirit that keeps our body alive with the earth, to be able to be fortified in the spirit. Because food does not only nurture the body That is only the old physical part. We need more strength, right? For spiritual fatigue. This is very important for us, the food of the earth nurtures both our bodies and our spirits. Talk to God to gain a sense of respect, to find your consciousness of how life flows from one living being to another, the flow of spirit. This understanding is what our people keep. This spirit full of consciousness. We need consciousness to address the challenges we face, the deforestation and river pollution, the lack of food sovereignty and the impact of agribusiness. These forces seek to take away consciousness from the body and spirit of people, in order to leave us blinded, so that we may have to pay money to those who seek to control food production, and thus keep us in this dark maze. Money does not pay for consciousness, only work and struggle with the earth does, only respect and understanding. In general, people today are very ambitious, and are losing their way. They allow the great agribusiness and supermarkets to blind them from the awareness of what food is, the spiritual understanding of food, and in this way, cultures forget the very basis of respect between sun and water, between elements and plants, between plants and animals, between humans and the whole world that surrounds us. Rituals will bring us back to a loving understanding. We will realise that everything that feeds ultimately comes from the earth, and has a meaning, and therefore seeks understanding.

FEBRUARY 2023

Ruminating

Nicolas Salazar Sutil

The word ruminate means to chew on ideas, to try to make sense. When someone dies, when you break up with someone, when an injustice is committed against you-- you ruminate, that is, you chew over the problem trying to make sense. Like cows, we chew and chew.

So, I am chewing on this: where does a cow go to chew up the injustices committed against her in the name of food?

Cows are not food, they are cows.