tree and the red paint came from urucum seeds. Environmental changes Xingu people have historically used fire as a landscaping tool. For centuries, they have understood and utilized the environment based on oral traditions. Xingu tribes from the twenty-first century are noticing changes in the level of fire in the rainforest as well as hotter temperatures, changing rain patterns, and higher river levels. For generations, the Xingu and other tribes in the South American lowlands have been using the emergence of the Pleiades to predict the start of the rainy season, but now this method is not able to be used as consistently. Evidence of the rising river is seen in a meeting of Waurá elders about the year 2005, when turtles failed to hatch because the river rose at an earlier point in the year than what was observed in previous years. Activism and land In May 2019, Xingu women held a women’s conference with around 200 attendees in the Ilha Grande where they discussed issues concerning climate change, deforestation, concerns about president Jair Bolsonaro’s treatment of indigenous peoples, and the distribution between gender, occupations, and leadership. In some families, the men carried out household tasks while the women participated in the conference. Between July and August 2019, 147 square kilometers or 57.8 square miles of the Xingu’s land was destroyed, which was a 172% increase from the July to August period in 2018. Factors that contribute to the loss of land include invasions, illegal activity, and forest fires. The recent changes in Xingu land have caused the loss of plants used in medicine. In August 2019, Xingu women joined the First Brazilian Indigenous Women’s March in Brasilia. The purpose of the march was to promote the defense of indigenous lands and allow indigenous women to be seen in and participate in places outside of their tribes. Notes Further reading Stenzel, Kris & Bruna Franchetto (eds.) (2017). On This and Other Worlds: Voices from Amazonia. Berlin: Language Science Press. . . Open access. External links The Indians of the Xingu: Cultural Homogenization in the Amazon Rainforest A Report on the Xingu Peoples and the Land A Xingu case study, the Rainforest Action Network Xingu, on Povos indigenous no Brasil Sounds from Xingu: Indigenous Ethnographers in Brazil, Baltic + George Catlin, Four Xingu Indians, 1854/1869, National Gallery of Art Indigenous peoples in Brazil Indigenous peoples of the Amazon