Seeing Into the Heart of Things: Connection

<p><em>Connection</em> is the first episode of the new series <em>Seeing Into the Heart of Things: Earth and Equality Within Indigenous and Ancestral Knowledges</em>. It features Brazilian artist and activist Vandria Borari, from the Borari people of Baixo Tapajós, in Pará, Brazil. Borari is the first law graduate from her region, holding a law degree from the Federal University of Western Pará. In addition to her artist and activist practices, she works as a producer and cultural manager.</p> <p>The contributions to the symposium, moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer, were devoted to discussing Indigenous thought, decolonial feminisms, and the political possibilities of the mythic imagination, raising questions like: How do Indigenous cosmologies create forms for resistance? How does the Western imaginary of the Amazon, from its roots in racial capitalism to its corporate-tech, paternalistic present, cloud our understanding of how its peoples and nonhuman spirits narrate themselves?</p> <p>Since the long sixteenth century, the organization of the world has found its hegemonic form in hierarchies of power and possession, between those who exploit and expropriate and those who are exploited and whose lives and lands and resources are expropriated. This is not the past, nor a function of ideology only. If the projected supremacy of one form of life over all others is only made possible by manifold forms of violence, one of these forms remains the invention (and constant reinvention) of nature by colonial cultures. This invention rests on an idea of progress in which nature is construed as what one emerges from. Indigenous ancestral epistemologies hold a different understanding of the real, though. “The land owns us,” Aboriginal Australians might say.</p>