In the creation narrative of the Sateré-Mawé, an Indigenous people of Brazil, before Earth existed, there were only extraordinary beings who created everything through their words alone. One day, one of these extraordinary beings imagined a new planet where life could be spoken into existence. The being placed all creatures upon this new world, but the planet remained still, and the creatures were without life.
All the extraordinary beings gathered in council to discuss what to name the new planet and how to make it spin. Only when a being named Iy Wato sang out her name did the planet begin revolving, infused with life and motion through the power of naming. From the word the creature sang out, life began and Earth was thus named Iy Wato.
Through collaboration and the act of thoughtful naming, all creation was bestowed with dignity.
“It is from these stories that our ancestors teach us how to think before acting, speaking or responding,” Bernardo Alves told America. “They teach respect for nature and the universe. Sharing this story is rare, but we believe that communicating with the wider world can strengthen relationships among peoples.”
Protecting Indigenous territory, protecting creation
Mr. Alves, a tuxaua, or Indigenous leader, coordinates the Sateré-Mawé Health and General Monitoring Base in the Andirá-Marau Indigenous Territory in Brazil’s mid-Amazon region. As base coordinator, Mr. Alves oversees the entry and exit of boats—the primary mode of transport in the Indigenous territory.
The Brazilian Constitution recognizes Indigenous territories as sovereign, but enforcement of territorial integrity is weak. Ongoing threats to Indigenous sovereignty and security derive from illegal invasions by commercial businesses and extractive industries, including wildcat logging and mining, prostitution and drug trafficking.
Mr. Alves explained that many abuses of Indigenous rights remain invisible to elected officials, police and media, forcing Indigenous communities to defend themselves. The monitoring station was established as a grassroots effort to protect the territory and its people.
The Andirá-Marau territory includes more than 3,000 square miles. The vastness of the land makes full protection impossible, but monthly councils of Sateré-Mawé leaders attempt to coordinate collective governance.
Mr. Alves recounts the Sateré-Mawé’s historic struggle against invasion and resource exploitation. Today, new troubles emerge. Recently “white boats,” named for the narcotics they transport from the region’s cities to Indigenous communities, have been seen entering Indigenous territory along the Amazon River and its tributaries.
Cristina de Souza, Mr. Alves’s wife, is an Indigenous teacher and respected lay leader. She has dedicated her life to defending Sateré-Mawé territorial integrity and preserving Indigenous culture. “We once were autonomous, guided by traditional wisdom,” she said. “Today our land suffers constant invasions by miners, loggers and traffickers. The territory is part of our humanity, yet there are constant attempts to dominate and devalue it.”
Indigenous Brazilians have not been fully sovereign since the Portuguese landing 500 years ago. According to Ms. de Souza, modern encroachment of Sateré-Mawé territory escalated in the 1980s with the arrival of a French oil company, Elf Aquitaine. Given a green light from the Brazilian federal government, the company began exploring for oil in Indigenous territory. Indigenous leaders were not consulted or offered compensation.
Ms. de Souza recalled that time as a landmark shift for the worse in the region. The company’s operations ultimately led to dozens of deaths after residue from dynamite detonations used for geological surveys or in mining polluted water sources. While the oil company never made any official apologies or compensation, the episode is documented in Brazilian filmmaker Aurélio Michiles’s 1984 “O sangue da terra” (“Blood of the Earth”).
The intrusion accelerated the loss of the Sateré-Mawé’s traditional culture, one based on agriculture and animal husbandry and centered on communal life. Mining companies continued to promise Indigenous people jobs that would provide a living, but ended up exploiting their labor, holding them indentured against their will. Many lost their lives under grueling labor conditions because they could not meet quotas set for them.
Over the ensuing decades, Indigenous men took jobs in extractive industries, which provided family income but deprived the community of fathers who often lived at faraway work sites. Many Indigenous laborers were supplied with alcohol and drugs by these outside companies, beginning a blight of addiction and alcoholism within the Sateré-Mawé community.
In recent months, the Brazilian federal government has authorized renewed oil exploration at the mouth of the Amazon River. Ms. de Souza said that in order for the Sateré-Mawé to protect themselves from this latest threat and restore communal autonomy, ancestral knowledge must be esteemed on equal footing with contemporary scientific and academic knowledge.
The Sateré-Mawé people have maintained a mastery of medicinal plants and their therapeutic uses. They continue to read natural signs to guide planting and harvesting. They have detailed knowledge of river routes and territories and rely on their own systems of social organization and conflict resolution. This knowledge—based on continuous observation, experimentation and collaboration across generations—carries technical complexity and historical depth that has sustained generations.
“Postmodern colonialism”
The Sateré-Mawé today number an estimated 29,000 people and live primarily in two Indigenous territories—Andirá-Marau and Coatá-Laranjal. Individual Sateré-Mawé communities are typically small and composed of extended families whose livelihoods depend on agriculture, fishing and forest resources.
According to members of Sateré-Mawé communities, visited by the authors of this report in 2024, modern-day invasion and exploitation continue to threaten their ancestral language, culture and educational system. But in spite of an often exploitative relationship with modernity, Indigenous leaders, Mr. Alves said, are not opposed to engagement with the outside culture and its technology.
He and Ms. de Souza agree they simply want the freedom to choose from the modern without suppressing the traditional. For example, they seek to preserve their mother tongue but still hope for an education for their young people comparable to what other Brazilian families can expect.
Public schools in remote towns are often staffed by a single teacher in a classroom shared by several grade levels. Indigenous young people receive teaching materials that are outdated and make little mention of Brazil’s complex history of the treatment of Indigenous peoples or that credit Indigenous knowledge.
They know the worth of that knowledge. In Andirá-Marau, the landscape is deeply intertwined with cultural and spiritual life. Fertile soil enriched by Terra Preta—an anthropogenic soil cultivated by Indigenous peoples—reflects ancestral knowledge, while resources like andiroba—also known as the crabwood tree—hold medicinal and ritual importance.
Guaraná, a fruit traditionally made into a milky beverage, according to Mr. Alves, “purifies the person and facilitates communication with nature.” The place of guaraná is almost sacramental: the mild stimulant is passed from a common gourd cup around a circle of partakers sitting as equals on the ground. Alongside these traditions, community initiatives also protect fauna, including terrapin preservation projects carried out of respect for creation.
The Indigenous community’s relationship with Catholic institutions has been central to Sateré-Mawé resistance to environmental exploitation and government neglect. Sateré-Mawé are primarily Catholic, and in an Indigenous climate where government and police are mistrusted, men and women religious and lay leaders have earned their respect.
Mr. Alves emphasized the importance of support from organizations like the Indigenous Missionary Council; the Amazonian Service for Action, Reflection and Socio-environmental Education; and pastoral teams made up of Jesuit priests and diocesan workers. These partnerships provide material resources and political support while respecting Indigenous autonomy, local Indigenous leaders said.
Father Oziel Cristo is the coordinator of the Indigenous pastoral ministry for the Diocese of Parintins. The diocese is located some 200 miles from the border with Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana in the northwest state of Amazonas. Father Cristo spoke with this article’s co-author, Hannah Lima Farbiarz, for a 2025 documentary. He said that the Brazilian government has largely abandoned its obligation to respond to the material needs of the Indigenous towns and communities in his diocese.
The state government, he said, seems to believe that it is the church’s “job” merely “to visit communities, perform the sacraments, baptize relatives [and] talk about Jesus.” But many Indigenous communities may need to drill a well, install solar energy arrays and educate their young people. And since the government does not perform these jobs, according to Father Cristo, “the church steps in to supply things because it is a [human] right to have healthcare, education and protection of the territory.”
The ecological worldview of the Sateré-Mawé people—a spirituality of interconnectedness—is echoed in contemporary Catholic social teaching and its emphasis on integral ecology and care of creation. This resonance animated the Amazon Synod, which explored themes of environmental and Indigenous justice and Christian evangelization in the 21st century as intrinsically linked, urging “listening to the Amazon…to discern the voice of the Spirit who leads the Church to new paths of presence, evangelization and intercultural dialogue” (No. 5).
The pontificate of Leo XIV already shows signs of awareness of the Amazon church’s unique challenges, particularly in seeking a balance between Christian and Indigenous traditions. But as important as church leadership is in setting this course, the local church reveals a way of living both Christian and Indigenous, where spirituality, politics and communal care converge.
Sateré-Mawé leaders describe contemporary Catholic engagement as a form of historical reparation, contrasting with religious interventions that once pressured communities to abandon ancestral practices. Other Sateré-Mawé community members interviewed say that the same pressure continues among other Christian ministries and interventions in the region as some evangelical efforts demand that Indigenous people renounce traditional practices, including festivals that act out mythology or the use of Indigenous metaphors and terms for God.
Miguel Martins, S.J., vice president of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, situates the relationship of the local church and the Sateré-Mawé community within broader ecclesial changes. “The church has learned that it must listen before speaking,” he said.
Father Martins acknowledged pastoral challenges in the Amazon. Among them is the region’s priest shortage, one exacerbated by vast distances between communities and river-bound geography. Lay leaders—often women—sustain faith communities where sacraments may be celebrated only once or twice a year.
“There are lay women and men here who are already doing the work of a priest,” he said. “They teach, provide pastoral care, education [and] communal support.” In this region, he explained, “people realize who Jesus really is through closeness and encounter.”
The Amazon Synod in October 2019 brought into focus conversations about the contemporary church in the region that the Indigenous communities in Brazil grapple with every day. The post-synodal exhortation, “Querida Amazonia,” called for “social and spiritual inculturation” of the Christian faith and a church that recognizes the “strength and gifts of women.”
And post-synodal discussions drew attention to questions about women deacons and ordaining married men—proposals rooted not only in pastoral concerns but in Indigenous cultural norms where married male leadership and strong female authority are longstanding realities. Equally pressing in the life of the church, according to Indigenous leaders, is linguistic justice.
Portuguese dominates liturgical life, and the Roman Missal has yet to be fully translated into many Indigenous languages, limiting the church’s capacity to fully incarnate the Gospel within the cultures it seeks to serve. The Amazon Synod also proposed research into the development of a unique inculturated Amazon Rite for the sacraments.
Yet decision makers in business and mining, Ms. de Souza warned, are not much interested in what the church and Indigenous wisdom has to say about human dignity and environmental stewardship. They remain locked into a “technocratic paradigm” described by Pope Francis, focused on profit, not people.
But the Sateré-Mawé are not a commercial “resource,” Mr. Alves said. “We are…a people, a culture that must be preserved, must be defended.”
“All civilizations have a right to remain alive, to be treated with dignity, not [to be] used up, not destroyed,” he said.
Interviews were conducted in Portuguese and translated into English by Hannah Lima Farbiarz. Ms. Farbiarz also worked with Sateré-Mawé leaders to create a documentary that was presented at COP30, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Belém, Brazil, in 2025. She and Mr. Kyle Desrosiers-Levine first traveled to Sateré-Mawé territory in 2024, as part of a delegation with Boston College’s Clough School of Theology and Ministry, the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and the Apostolic Preference of the Amazon.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts