Paper Short Abstract:

This paper reflects on how Agroforestry Systems (SAFs) cultivated in damaged ecologies inside the Caititu Indigenous Land (Brazilian Amazon) facilitated access to food and to healing purposes, both matters which became central to the construction of the Apurinã body.

Paper Abstract:

Amazonian indigenous people have historically enhanced agrobiodiversity through forest management. The indigenous Apurinã, who faced a violent past in the rubber boom epoch, spread out in the Purus River and forcibly changed their relationship with the forest and their diet. Several Apurinã found shelter in the Caititu Indigenous Land, demarcated in the urban periphery of the city of Lábrea in 1991. Nowadays, they reclaim a better life among ruins of extractivism and urban displacement by cultivating Agroforestry Systems (SAFs). Though not a new practice, it was only in 2013, with their partnership with the Brazilian NGO Operação Amazônia Nativa (OPAN), that the Apurinã started to systematically cultivate SAFs through workshops and mutirões [communal works]. The partnership’s aim was restoring the Caititu’s damaged ecology while diversifying food production, but the Apurinã (re)appropriated several plants for medicinal usage.

In the Caititu Indigenous Land, the proliferation of a grass-type plant that increases fire’s incidence and suffocates seedlings, furão (imperata brasiliensis), is undermined during SAFs implementation, in which specific plants feed the soil and reforest its environment, such as ingá (inga edulis). While food is proscribed and/or restricted for the construction of the Apurinã’s body, several SAFs plants were (re)appropriated in different forms to heal and strengthen the body, as by snuffing tobacco with cumaru (dipteryx odorata) ashes. This ethnography of Amazonian indigenous human-plant relationships reflects on how the Apurinã’s SAFs blurs usual distinctions between ‘food’ and ‘medicine’ by interconnecting the construction of the Apurinã’s body with their reclaim of environmental health