Apne Ixkot Hâmhipak
Forest School Village
Maxakali
Itamunheque region
Rural area of the municipality of Teófilo Otoni
Minas Gerais
The Forest School Village is an initiative of the Tikmũ’ũn Maxakalicommunity, who has lived in a temporary site in the municipality of Ladainha (MG). More than 90 families who makeup the community, along with their main leaders, Sueli Maxakali and Isael Maxakali – master-teachers, artists and filmmakers – have struggled and are, today, in a land where they can build their good life (buen vivir) and guarantee joy and dignity for their children. In this land, they keep on dreaming of Forest School Village, a project that aims to: organise regular meetings of shamans in order to provide ability development for new specialists in culture; structure joint endeavours in order to open food gardens and reforest areas; practice agroecology; provide workshops for audiovisual production and contemporary indigenous art; all of this in peace and prosperity. At this place, based on the teachings and strength of their spirituality – the Yãmĩyxop –, they want to re-encounter their lives’ balance with the waters, animals and forest.
Life in the villages is largely organised around and based on their relationship with the spirit-peoples of the Atlantic Forest, the Yãmĩyxop, and its sets of chants, which comprise almost an index of all the elements which are present in the Tikmũ’ũnlife, such as plants, animals, places and objects. Most of these chants are sung collectively, since they are the most fundamental way of relating to the Yãmĩyxop spirits, who are invited to visit the villages to sing, dance and eat during the ritual. Performed many times with the purpose of healing and transforming the world, the act of singing is rehearsed, among the Tikmũ’ũn , as a structuring element of life, because it is through singing that one perpetuates memories and constitutes communities.
All chants, together, compose the Tikmũ’ũnuniverse, which is made up of everything these people see, feel and interact with, but also by the memory of plants and animals, such as the various species of bees, which no longer exist, or that have remained in places of their original territory, from which the Tikmũ’ũn were expelled during the colonial war.
The Tikmũ'ũn peoples, known as Maxakali, are traditional dwellers of the Atlantic Forest. Through their chants, they guard all the wisdom of great savants of the forest's biodiversity. Today they include a population of almost 3 thousand people, living in villages in Santa Helena de Minas, Bertópolis, Ladainha and Teófilo Otoni, in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil.
The Tikmũ’ũn sobreviveram a vários massacres, expulsões e desafios e seguem resistindo às dificuldades de se concentrarem em territórios reduzidos e degradados, sem acesso a água limpa. Nos últimos tempos, a cultura Maxakali vem recebendo reconhecimento em todo o mundo através do cinema, da fotografia e das artes plásticas, com obras exibidas em festivais e galerias internacionais.
Isael Maxakali was born in 1978, in the village of Água Boa, in Minas Gerais, where he grew up listening to and learning the songs and stories of the Yãmĩyxop (spirits). Today he lives in the village of Ladainha, in Minas Gerais. In 1993, he married Sueli Maxakali, his life and work companion. At the turn of the century, he took over the kuxex (chanting house), becoming a young leader of his people. He was appointed as a teacher by local leaders, has approached the non-indigenous universe and began to participate in activities related to the university in Belo Horizonte. He has graduated from the Intercultural Formation for Indigenous Educators (Fiei) course at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). Compelled by the desire to show the Maxakali culture, he began his journey through cinema. Today, he is one of the main indigenous directors working in Brazil, developing a work comprising ritual films, documentaries and animations. Isael's cinema is inseparable from his journey as a political leader, teacher, researcher, designer, translator, shaman's apprentice and singer, a connoisseur of part of the vast repertoire maintained and recreated by the Maxakali. In 2020, he received the Carlos Reichenbach Award for Best Feature Film at the 23rd Tiradentes Film Festival with the film Yãmĩyhex: the women-spirit (2019), directed together with Sueli Maxakali, and the PIPA Online Award, one of Brazil's main awards of contemporary art. Currently, he dreams of acquiring the land where he moved in with more than one hundred Maxakali families, to create his Forest School Village project.
Sueli Maxakali was born in 1976, in the municipality of Santa Helena de Minas, and is a Maxakali leader, from an indigenous people living in a region between the current states of Minas Gerais, Bahia and Espírito Santo. The Tikmũ'ũn, forced to move from their ancestral lands to resist the aggressions accumulated over centuries which have put them at risk of extinction in the 1940s, hold their language and culture alive. Today they are divided into communities distributed through the Mucuri Valley, in Minas Gerais. In addition to being a leader, educator and photographer, Sueli is also an audiovisual director. Together with Isael Maxakali, she has produced some of the most emblematic films of the Contemporary Indigenous Art production, in an effort to record and disseminate ancestral rituals and traditions, while with her poetry, she transcends the engagement in the struggle for indigenous peoples rights. At the 34th Bienal, the artist presented the installation Kumxop koxuk yõg (The spirits of my daughters), a set of objects, masks and dresses that refer to the mythical universe of the Yãmĩyhex, spirit-women.
