Ancestral Future

Brazil’s indigenous peoples are shaking off Western ideas of the future to preserve and create worlds in the present.

Shooting fish on the Amazon. Brazil, 1890-1923

Shooting fish on the Amazon. Brazil, 1890-1923 | Library of Congress | Public domain

As we project increasingly improbable futures, the idea of an ancestral future asserts that tomorrow’s world must arise from habitable presents. To this end, we must enable interspecies relations and connect with the planet through recognition and respect.

A group of indigenous children paddle a canoe. The eldest one gives voice to their collective experience: “Our parents say we’re almost back to how it used to be in the old days.” Ailton Krenak uses this image of children from the Yudjá ethnic group, who live along the banks of the Xingu River, one of the main tributaries of the Amazon, as the opening scene for his book Ancestral Future (Penguin Random House, 2024).. Throughout its pages, Krenak, the only indigenous member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL), challenges the Western idea of the future. “First of all, the future doesn’t exist – we can just imagine it. To say something will happen in the future (…) is just an illusion. The truth is that we are projecting increasingly improbable futures, and we prefer to keep this lie in the present.” Krenak, who has been a bestselling author in Brazil since the publication of his book Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (Prometeo Libros, 2021) simultaneously rejects both visions of apocalyptic futures and those that include the possibility of atonement, as both make us act “as if all the problems of the present could be magically solved later.”

The ancestral future envisaged by Krenak has more to do with DNA than genealogy. It is more about the ability to go back to the event that created the world, to the original genetic code that lives on in us and connects us to all species, than about walking backwards. “The rivers, these beings that have always inhabited the worlds in different forms, are the ones who suggest to me that, if there is a future to be considered, that future is ancestral, because it was already here,” Krenak clarifies. The canoe full of Yudjá children “approaching the past” and the movement towards an ancestral future evoke an image of circularity. They trace out a curved, spiralling and sinuous sense of time. A time that envelops us and blurs linearity.

In a recent interview, indigenous writer Daniel Munduruku defends the importance of circularity in indigenous worldviews: “I can generalise without fear of being unfair. In general, indigenous peoples have an understanding of time as being circular, like the cycles of nature. They don’t see time as being linear, but as something that feeds into itself, unfolding and projecting itself forward. The past tells us who we are, where we come from, and the present is where we experience the result of all that.” Munduruku is wary of the Western idea of the future, the flipside of which is a linear, productive, extractivist economy. “Looking to the future alienates people from the more immediate need to build our existence in the present. It’s a vision that educates people in selfishness,” he argues.

There will be no future without the present. We will not get to any subsequent point without preserving the recipe for survival that brought us to where we are now. And human beings will not survive without indigenous peoples, without the guardians of the rainforests. This is not just a poetical way of voicing an emergency, but a matter of empirical evidence – indigenous lands are responsible for 80% of the rainfall in Brazil’s agriculture and livestock sector. The colossal rivers of mist that rise up through the Amazon thanks to the phenomenon of tree evapotranspiration would not exist without a forest that the native peoples protect like no one else. The young indigenous activist Txai Suruí, who became a global icon after her opening speech at the COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, and who was one of the speakers at the exhibition Amazons. The Ancestral Future, calls for a new “grandchild generation” to cultivate the present. By nourishing the here and now, the grandchildren of ancestral wisdom become mediators between the past and the future.

To reclaim time, to worldify

The ancestral future stands in stark contrast to the “no future” of punk. It simply denies a western future that, in its relentless push forward, turns away from habitable presents. The notion of the future is only acceptable if worlds can flourish in the present, if human action is directed towards the action of worldifying. Inventing worlds, in the words of Krenak, is much more interesting than inventing futures. The ancestral future, swirling in a living and diverse present, creates worlds and fosters alliances between a constellation of human and non-human beings. The Tucano people of the upper Rio Negro regard every tree as a home for various forms of life. To destroy is to strip the land bare, and it affects all living things. João Paulo Barreto, one of the most prominent voices from among the Tucano people and a guest at the Amazons exhibition, often talks about how, in the understanding of his people, the human body is made of clay. There is no boundary between this clay body and the organisms that surround it. The forests are an extension of the body, and the body is an extension of the forest. In indigenous worldviews, the division between culture and nature is an artificial, counterproductive separation.

Nature, then, is not an idealised wilderness, a romanticised natural world that draws a radical dividing line between itself and a denaturalising human being that is a source of problems for other species. Nor is the environment The World Without Us (2007), the title of Alan Weisman’s work of speculative non-fiction in which the planet is reborn into health after the near-extinction of the human species. The environment is a “world with them,” with all non-human actors. It is a political arena that enables interspecies relations and shapes worlds. The Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena investigates how indigenous Andean civilisations give a voice to earth-beings (mountains, rivers, rocks, lagoons) and how they establish earth practices – relationships of respect that defy the distinction between humans and nature.

The Amazon rainforest is not a human desert. It is another kind of garden. By caring for, cultivating and subtly intervening in the forest, indigenous ancestry has developed a sophisticated system of environmental management. And it has succeeded in creating small plots of agro-forest that make the destruction of the rest of the forest unnecessary, as shown in the documentary Forest, a Garden We Cultivate (2024). The ancestral future makes it possible to negotiate with the forest, with earth beings, with another time free from anxiety. The ancestral future, as it worldifies the present, disrupts the extractivism and productivity of modernity’s mechanistic linearity.

Brazilian indigenous member of congress Célia Xakriabá, in collaboration with the leading international DJ Alok, released Manifesto O Futuro É Ancestral to “enter another time of more sensitive listening.” In the song, with its electro base and shades of triphop, part of an album in which Alok collaborates with eight indigenous ethnic groups, Xakriabá invokes the “warrior women of ancestry,” proclaiming that “our struggle is to retake time.” The ancestral future is the “time of nature,” “the time of water,” “of drought,” “of cold,” “of wind.” Célia, a doctor of anthropology, floating in the flow that connects her to the grandchild generation, sings and recites that the ancestral future is “caring for the ground we tread on.” And that this is the only way to recover the meaning of life and to keep the heart beating. Her verses and stanzas bring Ailton Krenak’s intellectual provocation full circle: “We are the possibility of healing the planet / of ending all forms of evil / we are the root of the past that connects with the present / And the future is ancestral / The future is ancestral.”

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