14 Thinking With Your Head

on Earth
Ailton Krenak

About 15 years ago, I had the opportunity to publish the text, The Place
Where the Earth Rests (2000). What is this place where the earth rests?
Is the place where the earth rests in me, or is it in the landscapes through
which I move, and to which I ascribe value and meaning? If there is a
place where the earth rests, then this suggests that the earth can tire, since
the earth can be thought of as a living organism. This perspective does
not conform to rational and scientific thinking. And it is from here, from
this place of privilege that science steamrolls, and it bears mention that
a few centuries ago, science decided that this living organism could be
surveyed, divided, and eventually ground up and sent to different corners
of the world as a resource. Just as you can go to a field and harvest wheat
or harvest corn, you can go to a landscape and reap a mountain. You
decimate a landscape as if it were something that could be replaced with
each harvest, each season.
I come from a region of our country made up of mountain ranges.
It is this topography that inspires the natives of that region, and that
inspired us to name that place Minas Gerais. And this mountainous
place, this region of mountains has undergone such radical change over
the last 50 years that if you travel by land from Rio de Janeiro or São
Paulo to the heartland of Minas Gerais, you will be struck by how many
mountaintops are removed from the landscape every five or six years.
Along with mountaintop removal, the rivers, springs, and other bod-
ies of water that form the landscape are disappearing. They are being
seized by an absurd logic, which does not recognize that the earth also
needs to rest.
And how to translate this into pluralistic thinking, to a complex soci-
ety like the one we’ve ended up constructing, where there is no longer a
shared world vision? A world where, if I tell you that we’re going to dance
to lift the sky, you might even acknowledge that I do it, but insist that I do
it back in my backyard? Because you still don’t admit that your sky, that
sky in your landscape, can commune with the earth, with you, and with
all the other beings that share these landscapes with you.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003243991-19
236 Ailton Krenak
Self-absorption and absurd anthropocentrism were the thinking
that guided and sustained the colonization of the Americas. It brought
white reasoning that then occupied the landscapes of the Americas, and
impressed on them the vision of a plain, the vision of a flat place, where
plundering all the wealth, all of nature’s abundance, constituted the civi-
lizing project, the project of conquest, the project of consolidating a form
of society. It is a type of society that we unwittingly fit into, like this
Brazilian society that we have constructed. It is an abstraction, because if
we are so diverse and have such different demands, desires, and such dif-
ferent world-building projects, then how can we be constituted like this,
freely, in an agreement called “Brazilian identity,” “Brazilian people”?
On the few occasions that we’ve had to show how this agreement
works, we’ve seen almost half the people dressed in green and yellow,1
shouting in the middle of the street: “death to them, death to them, death
to them, flay them, flay them, flay them.” They were expelling the other
half of the people from the country to live elsewhere on the continent. And
a part of that community, that divided community, was trying to justify
why they felt so inferior in the place through which they were moving.
I remember a striking image: a young man wearing a red shirt and a
backpack, crossing an avenue in downtown São Paulo, surrounded by
a mob of 20 or 30 individuals dressed in green and yellow, about to
murder the boy dressed in a red T-shirt. It was March 2016. At the time,
they were swearing in the man who now occupies the Presidency of the
Republic. His campaign incited hatred against Indigenous peoples, against
Black and Brown people, against racial and ethnic demographics, against
anything that wasn’t fixated on green and yellow; that is, ultimately, the
thing they call our shared Brazilian identity.
If this is the symbolism that represents what we have in common, as
Brazilian identity, if this serves as a uniform for a mob of fascists who go
out flaying people who are not like them, who do not resemble what they
recognize as a citizen, as a Brazilian, then where can we feel at home?
When will someone who leaves the Northeast be able to feel at home
anywhere in this country? When that happens, we’ll be able to start
thinking we can create a community, which, in all its diversity, finally
respects difference. And we’ll be able to construct something resembling
a nationality.
Constructing a nationality is not about displacing identities and masking
our conflicts and our differences. The State, through its different branches,
attempts to create lists, such as “traditional peoples,” “communities”
or “populaces,” to discriminate and implement their targeted policies of
segregation in an orderly way. But beyond these lists, our differences are
what constitute the true power that will give us the strength to prevent
the state from yoking us all together in order to subdue us. A small por-
tion of our people continues to feel ashamed in some places. But there is
strength in this shame because shame is estranging. This is the shame of
 Thinking with Your Head on Earth 237
refusing to surrender one’s last stronghold to colonial domination. And
furthermore, refusing to make oneself into an apparatus or instrument
for the reproduction of colonial thought. Because the tragedy is when
some of us, domesticated by colonial thinking, begin reproducing it so
efficiently that we create colonies of subjugated peoples around us. These
subordinated and humiliated people will always feel inferior wherever
they are because they are mirroring a model of life that is not about what
one carries within oneself, but rather, what has been given.
In this sense, it would be naïve to think of the University as outside
of this apparatus that the State manipulates and manages. Universities
belong to the apparatus, to the system of domination through which the
National States extends its little fingers to achieve its aims, seeking data,
knowledge, and all the input that it obviously needs to sustain itself and
remain informed about how best to govern our differences, our diversity.
It is interesting that this institution called the University isn’t, by nature,
universal. It betrays the very meaning of its roots, which is to make space
for all worldviews, for all modes of creativity, for invention, for thinking.
This institution which could refuse to betray its point of origin does betray
it when it starts to establish, for example, that 80% or 90% of its students
will be, I don’t know, pink. And the other 9% will be checkered, and some
others are going to be striped. These statistics are justified for planning,
for the budget, but they are unjustifiable from a moral and ethical point of
view. It is unjustifiable for an institution to accept such identity markers.
When the institutions coexist, accept, and integrate these distinctions,
they constitute an extension of the State apparatus, which only wants
to dominate, subdue, and enslave our capacity to revolt, our capacity
for creation. If we accept that universities continue to be apparatuses of
the State, and extensions of it, like the police are, then we will allow our
children and the future generations to become increasingly subservient
people, people who reproduce colonial thought.
In countries on the periphery like Brazil and some of our neighbors
Latin America, what our universities do best is to convince our children
that the best bibliographies are those in German, French, or English—in
any other language, but never their own, never in the voice they recognize
as the voice of their grandfather, father, or family. Foreign voices produce
knowledge; they are voices from another place, which will always make
us feel smaller in the world.
If the earth is a living organism and if we are rooted in this living
organism, we must embody the potency of this living organism wherever
and on whatever trip she takes us on. We have to be able to move around
the planet without feeling the humiliation of walking under surveillance.
With that cry, the boys here in these hallways are expressing the wild
rage of wanting to end the daily repression and domination that we expe-
rience in our form of societal organization, which is reflected grotesquely
in the educational experience. When young people are educated, they
238 Ailton Krenak
should find a supportive place, a nurturing garden that encourages think-
ing in their educational experience, not a place of repression where they
always feel threatened and ashamed. This is not education. The University
advances the same narrow pipeline as elementary and secondary edu-
cation, bringing people into this humiliating, intimidating environment,
which makes an individual feel, at most, like an empty shell to be filled
with alien bibliographies and ideas, and made prostrate to become a clone
of one’s dominators. If this is what the University does, then it would
be better if it just turned into a nursery, a garden, or a park, instead of
deceiving people in the way it currently does.
My concern is with the fact that many young people from different
so-called “Indigenous nations” feel attracted to this flowerbed that is
the University. What is this attraction that the University provokes in
young people from the Xukuru-Kariri and Pankararu nations, from the
Northeast region, from the Tikuna, who live along the Solimões river, and
others like the Yanomami, who are there in Roraima. We could think:
well, the Yanomami live in a region so far removed from the culture
shock that the Midwest and the Northeast have been experiencing for so
long, that maybe they can consolidate a worldview and they won’t be so
overwhelmed by the appeals of this incredible symphony of the market,
and of the commodity, as Davi Kopenawa Yanomami (2015) says about
this commodity civilization that manages to transform even knowledge
into something to sell.
Some people get frustrated that they can’t pay what some universities
demand them to get through the system and in the end leave with an
MBA, a doctorate or a master’s degree. In that case, they would have
bought their way into heaven, like when Catholicism was the dominant
religion and the Catholic faith, the Christian faith, produced a subject that
pulled gold and diamonds out of the mountains of Minas Gerais. At least
1/10 of that wealth was withdrawn to obtain a ticket to heaven. It may
seem baroque, but you can be sure that the price they paid for gold there
and the amount they pay here are more or less equivalent. People pay the
hell out of themselves to be colonized.
What we should have done was provoke the most rebellious thought
possible to think, along with every place where we live, the power that
the land must be respected. If it’s a living organism, it must be respected.
We don’t have to “take care” of the land, we have to respect this living
organism that is the earth. And we’re only here because it still supports
us, welcomes us, shelters us, gives us food, puts us to sleep, wakes us up.
With our limited patience and ability to listen, we think that we can
destroy this wonderful organism, of which we are cells. This isn’t a mys-
tical statement. I’m not performing any kind of transcendence. I’m just
reminding you that this living organism merges with us as well. We are
cells of this living organism. And it is an absurd betrayal to ignore our
earthly origins and discriminate against all the other beings who come
 Thinking with Your Head on Earth 239
from the living organism that is the earth that could reconstitute, or con-
stitute, with each one of us, a web of full creative experience with the
living organism that is the earth. We have surrendered to a brain diet and
we have little communion with all that the earth makes possible for us.
We are the cells of this wonderful organism that someone has said is a
blue ship traveling in space. One would have to be very narrow-minded
to be unable to think about it.

Curated by Jamille Pinheiro Dias.

Translated by Alex Brostoff.

Note
1. Supporters of the far-right in Brazil have appropriated the green-and-yellow of
the Brazilian flag to demonstrate their opposition to left-wingers. (Translator’s
note)

Works Cited
Kopenawa, Davi, and Bruce Albert. A queda do céu: Palavras de um xamã Yano-
mami. Companhia das Letras, 2015.
Krenak, Ailton. O lugar onde a Terra descansa. ECO Rio/Núcleo de Cultura
Indígena, Rio de Janeiro, 2000.