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But why do these elected despots offer up a past that never existed? Herein lies another secret. The answer is that they have no future to offer. The future is the climate collapse, which they try hard to deny, but it is happening. The future is bad. To win power and hold on to it, they must sell a past that never existed and deny the future. It is vital to understand that they only win and hold on to power by denying the future and replacing it with neofascism’s foundational lie. So the fight for the future is also by consequence a fight for the past.

— Banzeiro Òkòtó by Eliane Brum, Diane Grosklaus Whitty

I destructured in the Xingu and went to pieces. And going to pieces is risky, because once it happens there’s no going back. It means you can no longer conform to a single-minded structure, and so you’ll never go back to feeling comfortable, perhaps you won’t even go back to being coherent. You’ll find yourself dis-conformed. Before, you had been deformed by form, but once you are dis-conformed, you can transmute into multiple forms, and this is amazingly scary.

— Banzeiro Òkòtó by Eliane Brum, Diane Grosklaus Whitty

Being discovered is the curse of all those who can only exist if they are forgotten.

— Banzeiro Òkòtó by Eliane Brum, Diane Grosklaus Whitty

When Brazil began importing European settlers, latifundiários—owners of vast ranch lands—were the dominant political and economic force in Rio Grande do Sul. A large slice of the northern half of the state, which has nothing in common with the ecosystem of the pampa, was still what white people usually consider “no-man’s-land” or “wilderness.” Throughout Brazil’s history, whenever these expressions have been used, the lands in question were occupied by the Indigenous or, more precisely, they were lands where the Indigenous had not yet been driven out or fully exterminated. What they call “no man” are the original peoples, people who today are regarded as “almost human” by rulers such as Jair Bolsonaro and by grileiros—the ones in the Amazon and the ones in Congress. During the centuries of the first invasions, the Indigenous people, like Black people, were not considered human, not even “almost.” They didn’t even have souls, according to the whites who had been endowed with souls but used them to enslave and kill.

— Banzeiro Òkòtó by Eliane Brum, Diane Grosklaus Whitty

Even though people never descended to our underground, we actually gained all kinds of information about the mortals above us. I don’t know what sort of channel this information came from. It is said that it was very mysterious, and that it had something to do with our builds. I’m an average-sized, ordinary individual of my genus. Like everyone else, I dig the earth every day and excrete.

— Vertical motion by Canxue