In the past few years, the Indigenous movement has emerged as one of the strongest social movements in Brazil, embedded in a long history of resistance to settler colonialism and genocide. The land struggle carried out by the Tupinambá of Serra do Padeiro, in Southern Bahia, in the Northeast of the country, provides a striking example of Indigenous mobilization to assert territorial rights. In 2004, they began to carry out direct actions, called retomadas de terras, to recover their territory, which, from the end of the 19th century onwards, had been turned by non-Indigenous settlers into cocoa farms and resorts. By doing so, they have been able to revert the diaspora triggered by the loss of their lands. Despite being heavily targeted by criminalization, paramilitary attacks, and police brutality, after 95 retomadas, they regained possession of around two-thirds of the territory, even though the official demarcation of their land, which also began in 2004, is not over yet. Through their mobilization, the Tupinambá has forged a thriving collective project aimed at creating conditions for viver bem (living well), which forms part of broader ongoing decolonization processes. This presentation focuses on the territorialization process among the Tupinambá, examining both the history of dispossession and the territorial recovery carried out by the Indigenous community, also drawing connections between the retomadas and the reversion of the Tupinambá diaspora.

Daniela Fernandes Alarcon (Ph.D. Social Anthropology, National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 2020) is a postdoctoral fellow at the National Museum. Over the past two years, she worked at the Brazilian Ministry of Indigenous Peoples as a general coordinator in the Department of Mediation of Indigenous Land Conflicts. From 2021-22, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Project “Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present” at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, from 2017-18, she was a visiting scholar at the LLILAS Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. Over the past 15 years, she has developed in-depth studies among Indigenous peoples and other traditional communities in Brazil, focusing on territorial rights and the mobilizations of these groups to defend their territories, lifeways, and collective projects. Her master’s thesis, published in book form in 2019, earned the Norm and Sibby Whitten Publication Subvention Award for Anthropological Monographs on Lowland South America by the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America. Her Ph.D. dissertation, awarded Honorable Mention for the Brazilian Ministry of Education’s National Dissertation Award, was published in 2022.