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This text is an adaptation of an essay produced for the extension course in Indigenous Histories and Cultures, promoted annually by the Indigenous Missionary Council (Cimi) and the University of Latin American Integration (Unila).
"What is urgent? Ensuring that the community endures”.
Jurema Werneck's speech at the Periferies Literary Festival in November 2024 was a powerful call to action for supporting traditional peoples and communities, such as indigenous collectives and organizations. In recent years, the Brazilian indigenous movement has gained increasing strength, recognition, and visibility, expanding and diversifying its political activities. However, this has not necessarily translated into more resources, support, and partnerships to sustain their work.
This article aims to reflect on this question, based on concepts such as territory and Buen Vivir and interviews with two leaders of organizations working to strengthen Indigenous initiatives and decentralize resources for Indigenous populations: Claudia Soares Baré from Podáali —Fundo Indígena da Amazônia Brasileira and Janaina Oliveira from APIB—Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil.
I will begin by addressing the challenges of the current funding scenario for Indigenous organizations and collectives, characterizing the meager and bureaucratic support that reaches the communities. I will then reflect on how philanthropy can decolonize itself and get closer to an Indigenous worldview. Finally, I will propose buen vivir and territory as key concepts and horizons of action for the philanthropic field.
Although Indigenous peoples are the greatest defenders of Brazil's forests and biodiversity and are increasingly organized in collectives, associations, networks, and articulations, less than 10% of funding for socioenvironmental and climate projects reaches them.
In 2021, at COP 26, the governments of the UK, USA, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands, together with 17 foundations, announced the Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities' Forest Tenure Pledge – a promise to donate US$ 1.7 billion from 2021 to 2025 for indigenous peoples and local communities to protect their territories and play their fundamental role in the fight against the climate crisis.
However, a recent report by Agência Pública showed that only 7% of the funds made available fall into the “direct support” category - in other words, funds directed to indigenous organizations without the existence of intermediaries, such as non-profit organizations or governments. Most of the funds went to large international NGOs.
As the report shows: “Following international NGOs (51%), governments received the largest share of donated funds in 2021 (17%), followed by multilateral agencies or funds (10%), international regranting mechanisms or regional funds (8%) and then indigenous organizations themselves.”
This is a trend in philanthropy and socioenvironmental and climate funding: resources are managed by large international NGOs, which operate projects with indigenous peoples but are not led by indigenous people. "Indigenous peoples still have almost no direct access to the climate funding directed to their communities by governments and philanthropic entities,” says the report.
This is particularly troubling because these international donors make up the majority of philanthropic support for Indigenous communities. APIB's project coordinator, Janaina Oliveira, says that “90% of the funding received is from external sources, " a concern echoed by Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) and Fundo Casa Socioambiental representatives.
“We don't have philanthropy in Brazil that looks at indigenous peoples,” says Inimá Krenak, Program Manager at Fundo Casa. "What's more, much of this philanthropy is focused on protecting forests. That's important. But we must look at other agendas, such as cultural initiatives."
Fundo Casa released a study last year that drives home this challenge. They write: “Funders, in general, don't know the reality and local demands; they don't recognize the difficulties, the lack of structure, and the cultural differences of these groups. Even when aware of this, their support mechanisms make direct support unfeasible. They end up opting to strengthen large organizations that carry out projects for these communities. However, this ends up, albeit unintentionally perpetuating the shock of colonialist thinking on the populations affected”.
Fortunately, this is starting to change. A more intentional form of Indigenous-led philanthropy is arising from Indigenous communities themselves.
Podáali is the first Amazon-wide mechanism for raising and redistributing funds to Indigenous peoples, organizations, and communities. It starts by listening to the communities and has as its guidelines greater decentralization and flexibility of resources. For Janaína Oliveira, the decolonization of philanthropy involves rethinking processes and procedures: “At the same time as Indigenous people learn to work within the rules of non-Indigenous people (having an invoice, collecting tax, etc.), those who are donating also have to understand the particularities of each place. When a coordinator is out and about in the territory, they need money in hand, whether it's for food, medicine, or other needs that can't wait. Thus, the importance of greater flexibility”.
She also highlights the need to tackle the racism present in the sector. “ Indigenous people are paid less and have their work and skills less recognized, for example."
Many funders, especially in Brazil, still have criteria that don't relate to the reality of the territories, as well as bureaucracies that limit access for smaller organizations - which “despite” being smaller, play fundamental roles in their communities,” explains Claudia Baré."The resources have to get into their hands, but they have to arrive in a careful and respectful way, in their own time, respecting their processes. And with that, unfortunately, philanthropy is not patient in general. It's very tough, very bureaucratic, very rigid,” says Maria Amália, founder of Fundo Casa Socioambiental. For the Fundo Casa team, the answer lies in distancing themselves “from the ‘white way of being’: listening to the communities about their real needs, supporting their strengthening, trusting in their ability to identify and solve problems, accompanying them as an ally, a partner, side by side, respecting their autonomy in the application of resources and guaranteeing the tools to manage the projects, with flexibility and course adjustments.”"Each indigenous people, with their language, traditions, and history, has a different way of being in the world, relating to nature and the cosmos of which they are inseparable. Dreams are fundamental spaces of relationship with other dimensions, other beings, and they determine many decisions. Just like the knowledge of elders, the needs of children, the suffering of animals or plants, and the mood of mountains and rivers. All elements to take into account when thinking about a project, changing the course of a proposal that at first seemed good, or abandoning a venture that would bring a bad result for the community,” explain Maíra Lacerda Krenak and Inimá Lacerda Krenak.
To speak of decolonial philanthropy is also to talk about support for projects of life and buen vivir - not the “good living” captured by capitalism, which has become an adjective for individual projects, but the collective philosophy of life aligned with the recovery of being, with the re-sacralization of the ground and the transformation of relationships towards the re-enchantment of the world.This idea of buen vivir, in addition to being a utopian and decolonial project that serves as a south for an ancestral future, is the ground, bread, and daily life of many groups living throughout Brazil. Traditional, Indigenous, Quilombola, riverside, and other communities are those that produce experiences of “regenerative cosmo nucleation,” as Iran Xukuru de Ororubá, a leader in the Boa Vista Village in the Agreste region of Pernambuco, explains. They practice ways of existing that enable us to see and experience other logics beyond the human and visible world.What unites these diverse initiatives are principles such as relationality, correspondence, reciprocity, and cyclicity: the understanding that reality exists as a set of interrelated beings and events, with correspondence at the cosmic level between microcosm and macrocosm, between the big and the small, and that each act (whether in intra-human interactions, between human beings and other beings of nature or with the divine) corresponds to a reciprocal act.Who forms alliances with agroforestry, afroecological, circular economy, holistic protection, regenerative, feminist, anti-racist, anti-capacity, anti-speciesist initiatives that nurture a cosmovivence and a nosotropic, “we”-based, radically communitarian way of thinking? How can philanthropic organizations contribute more and better to expanding and multiplying projects like these? To better support these initiatives, get to know them in their places: in the territories. "The place - regardless of its size - is the seat of this resistance of society”, according to Milton Santos. Therefore, a philanthropy of buen vivir must necessarily be a philanthropy of the territory - one that steps on the ground, feels the rain, and looks it in the eye. Life happens in the territory: the place of speech and knowledge, the space of struggle and dreams. “Place - like local culture - can be considered the ‘other’ of globalization, so a discussion of place should offer an important perspective for rethinking globalization and the question of alternatives to capitalism and modernity,” writes Arturo Escobar.
In this sense, we need a philanthropic practice dedicated to expanding “horizontal unions”, also in the words of Milton Santos. It should help us to “think about building new horizontals that will allow us, from the base of territorial society, to find a path that frees us from the curse of the perverse globalization we are experiencing and brings us closer to the possibility of building another globalization, capable of restoring man to his dignity”.
May these reflections sound like an invitation to sustain and expand horizontalities to ensure the community's endurance.
Proximate is an independent media platform covering movements for participatory problem-solving. We look at the news through the lens of money: how it’s given away, how it’s invested, and how it’s distributed by government.
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