Ashaninka, Seeders of the Forest: TV Cultura documentary shows the people who replanted 87,000 hectares in Acre

Where there was once pasture, there is now forest. That is what the documentary Ashaninka, Semeadores de Floresta ("Seeders of the Forest"), from TV Cultura's journalism department with the Amazon Rainforest Journalism Fund and the Pulitzer Center, attributes to the Ashaninka people, who live between Acre and Peru. Reporter Laís Duarte traveled to the Serra do Divisor, on the border between the two countries, to meet a people who, according to the film, spread along the bends of the Amônia River, a tributary of the Juruá, long before the world worried about climate change.

Thirty years of planting

According to the channel's description, the Ashaninka sowed and planted 200,000 trees and 300,000 açaí palms 30 years ago, forming 87,000 hectares of forest in an area that had been large pastures. The land shelters species such as the samaúma, a giant tree that rises above the rivers. The film also recalls that the people resisted the arrival of the Spanish in Peru and the expansion of the rubber boom in the Amazon.

A culture that renews itself

The documentary shows annatto, the dye used for body painting, and fabrics made thread by thread on looms of ancestral tradition, with cotton picked from the plant. It also shows an ephemeral architecture: the house is built and taken down so that young people learn to raise it again. It speaks of the meeting between forest knowledge and that of indigenous university students who returned home, a combination of practical and academic knowledge.

Threats

Today, the description says, the people fight roads, agricultural and mining projects, illegal loggers and drug trafficking, activities that threaten the survival of the culture. The production cites the Milton Nascimento song inspired by the territory.

Why it is worth watching

This is a portrait in journalism, not a work of spiritual teaching: the interest lies in seeing how an indigenous people turns ancestral knowledge into concrete action on its land. The figures on trees and hectares are the film's and the channel's; check the cited sources in the video. The film is spoken in Portuguese and has no manual subtitles.