Indigenous Wisdom Reclaim Brazil’s Lost Medicinal Plants and Forests

Biocentric Revival Gains Strength in Xukuru Lands
Indigenous Knowledge Restores Degraded Caatinga Forests 

Pernambuco: As dawn breaks over the Ororubá Mountains in Pernambuco, Brazil, a group of Indigenous youth from the Xukuru do Ororubá people gather at the edge of a nursery where they tend to native plant and tree seedlings, especially species used for medicinal purposes that were once lost but are now being revived. The working team, around a dozen strong, forms a human chain to pass the more mature seedlings into an old white Kombi van, which then transports them to chosen forest restoration sites.

Ângela Neves Pereira, known as Bella and recognised as a spiritual guardian of ancestral knowledge, leads the team. The 20,000 seedlings she has grown, almost all native, represent far more than reforestation; they symbolise the restoration of the community’s cosmogony, identity, culture and balance. “We face many challenges, but we face them with calm, patience and wisdom,” Bella says. “We transform challenges into strength and resilience to continue our work of resistance, reforesting, living, changing and recovering degraded areas that we see as being ‘ill’ and in need of care.”

Since 2023, the Indigenous Peoples Unit of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Xukuru people, represented by the Jupago Kreká Collective, have been collaborating to restore the Ororubá forests under the Global Programme of Indigenous Peoples Biocentric Restoration. This programme, co-designed by the FAO Indigenous Peoples Unit and Indigenous Peoples’ organisations, was launched in 2019 in India, Thailand, Ecuador and Peru and later expanded to Brazil, Costa Rica, Bolivia and Nepal.

The core approach is Indigenous Peoples’ biocentric restoration, which prioritises the well-being of all living beings within an ecosystem and places Indigenous Peoples at the centre of recovering the lost memory of their territories through their food and knowledge systems, spiritual beliefs, territorial management practices and cosmogony. The method is inter-generational, involving elders, youth, traditional healers and re-foresters, and explicitly recognises women as protectors of biodiversity and custodians of knowledge.

The Government of Brazil, together with FAO’s AIM4Forests programme, has now joined these efforts to scale up the results achieved so far. AIM4Forests includes USD 9 million in funding from the United Kingdom for the initiative Accelerating Innovative Monitoring for Nature Restoration (AIM4NatuRe), which seeks to improve the monitoring and reporting of ecosystem restoration progress toward the global goal of restoring at least 30 per cent of degraded ecosystems by 2030.

The AIM4NatuRe support to the Indigenous Peoples Biocentric Global Programme in Brazil and Peru, which began in 2025, provides training in community nursery management, facilitates the recovery of Indigenous knowledge, strengthens ecosystem restoration monitoring capabilities and enables the scaling-up of Indigenous-led biocentric restoration.

After decades of struggle to reclaim ancestral lands lost during European settlement, the approximately 12,000 Xukuru people obtained legal recognition and control of their territory in 2001, yet much of the land had become degraded, deforested, eroded and stripped of biodiversity. One objective of the current collaboration is to assist more Indigenous communities, as rights-holders and knowledge-holders similar to the Xukuru, in reclaiming degraded areas, protecting biodiversity and restoring forest health.

Chief Marcos of the Xukuru people describes the mission as sacred, stating that land, spirit and identity are inseparable. Standing in Espaço Mandaru, the community’s spiritual assembly grounds, he explains, “We believe that taking care of this territory, where we live today and will return to as ancestors, is part of becoming an enchanted being.”

At 70 years of age, medicine woman Dona Socorro teaches children and youth in the Xukuru “Schools of Life” about the healing properties of plants, the importance of sacred forests and the interconnection of all living things. Together with Bella and others, she maintains spiritual and medicinal knowledge that is rarely found in textbooks, insisting that healing the land and healing people are one and the same act.

The Xukuru territory lies within Brazil’s Caatinga biome, an area recognised as critical under the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and particularly vulnerable to species loss due to unsustainable livestock practices and climate change. Although FAO assistance has supplied training, knowledge exchange and monitoring tools, it is the Xukuru’s own leadership and science that directs the restoration in culturally and spiritually meaningful ways.

Iran Neves Ordonio, a lifelong Xukuru environmental restorer and storyteller, emphasises the need for Indigenous Peoples to recover ancestral roots both symbolically and practically. “If the forest isn’t healthy, nothing is. Nature speaks—even in silence, when the birds no longer sing,” he says when explaining biocentrism, adding that honouring familial and cultural inheritance means moving the community, especially its youth, toward restoring the land’s biodiversity and its spirit.

Brazil has committed to restoring 12 million hectares of native vegetation by 2030, and collaboration with Indigenous Peoples forms a central pillar of that pledge. The Xukuru are the first Indigenous people to formally participate in the Global Programme of Indigenous Peoples Biocentric Restoration, now reinforced by AIM4NatuRe, and their experience is being positioned as a model for other communities as both programmes expand.

When Indigenous leadership, cultural inheritance and scientific support are combined, restoration becomes not only ecological but also spiritual, cosmogonic, educational and social, ensuring long-term sustainability and granting nature the same respect and dignity as humankind. For the Xukuru, protecting Brazil’s forests is regarded as a sacred duty; when the forest is healthy, birds sing again, medicinal plants flourish, the territory thrives, and the benefits extend to the entire nation and the planet.

Source: The FAO News And Media Office, Rome

– global bihari bureau