"A mãe do Brasil é indígena." The mother of Brazil is Indigenous.

When Célia Xakriabá — activist, educator, and Brazil's first Indigenous woman elected federal deputy for Minas Gerais—says this, she's not being metaphorical. She's stating a fact that's been systematically erased from textbooks, classrooms, and national consciousness for over 500 years. And now she's part of a movement demanding Brazil rewrite its origin story from scratch.

"Antes do Brasil da coroa, existe o Brasil do cocar," Xakriabá insists. Before the Brazil of the crown, there was the Brazil of the headdress.

It's a direct challenge to the dominant narrative: the one where Brazilian history begins in 1500 with Portuguese ships and a flag planted in the sand. The one where Indigenous peoples appear as scenery, obstacles, or footnotes. That story, Xakriabá and a growing coalition argue, is backwards. Worse — it's a lie that props up ongoing violence.

The Film That Moves the Starting Line

Enter O Brasil Antes de 1500 ("Brazil Before 1500"), a documentary co-produced by Canal Nostalgia and Maria Farinha Filmes in partnership with Instituto Alana. Released full-length and free on YouTube in April, the film does something Brazilian school curricula have largely failed to do: it treats Indigenous peoples as the centre of Brazil's story, not the margins.

The documentary showcases what was happening on this land long before any European set foot on it. We're talking about sophisticated agrarian systems — like the terra preta do índio, the Amazonian dark earth that Indigenous communities engineered over millennia, creating soil so fertile it's still more productive than surrounding rainforest today. We're talking about complex trade networks stretching thousands of kilometres, connecting communities across river systems and mountain ranges. We're talking about cosmologies, governance structures, and technologies that sustained millions of people.

"My goal is to show how ingenious, advanced, and capable our ancestors were — to once and for all deconstruct the false idea that, before the Portuguese, there were no sophisticated civilizations in Brazil."

The film features voices from multiple Indigenous nations — Xakriabá, Guarani, Pataxó, Tupinambá — who aren't just subjects but co-creators of the narrative. It's not a film about Indigenous history. It's Indigenous history telling itself.

The Classroom as Battleground

For Xakriabá, the fight to reclaim this timeline isn't academic. It's visceral. She recalls being the first Indigenous doctoral student at her institution—the Federal University of Minas Gerais—and the isolation of that experience. "Very lonely," she said. The absence wasn't just personal. It was structural.

"A universidade, como outras instituições, precisa romper com o racismo da ausência," she's argued repeatedly. Universities and institutions must break with the racism of absence. It's not enough to add Indigenous history as an elective or a special week. The knowledge-holders themselves must be present. In the room. Holding the mic.

On paper, Brazil already mandates this. Lei 11.645, passed in 2008, requires schools to teach Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous history and culture. In practice? It's a disaster. Many schools ignore it entirely. Others relegate it to a single lesson during "Indigenous Heritage Month," often taught by non-Indigenous educators working from outdated, romanticised materials that still frame Indigenous peoples in the past tense.

The barriers are both ideological and practical. Many teachers weren't trained in Indigenous history and don't know where to start. Textbooks remain Eurocentric. And in conservative regions, there's active resistance — politicians and parents who view Indigenous curriculum as "ideological" or "divisive," the same rhetoric weaponised against racial justice education worldwide.

That's why the documentary comes with free pedagogical materials designed for teachers: lesson plans, discussion guides, ways to integrate Indigenous perspectives across subjects — history, yes, but also science, literature, geography. The goal is to make Indigenous knowledge inescapable, unavoidable, undeniable.

The Headdress in Congress

The cocar — the traditional feathered headdress — is more than adornment. At a moment when Indigenous territories face unprecedented assault from deforestation, illegal mining, and legislative rollback under hostile administrations, the headdress has become a symbol of refusal.

"Eles decidiram que era esse lugar para nós e nós decidimos passar com o nosso cocar," Xakriabá has said. They decided this was our place, and we decided to walk through wearing our headdress.

In 2022, she did exactly that. Xakriabá won a seat in Brazil's Chamber of Deputies representing Minas Gerais under the left-wing PSOL party, part of a historic wave that saw a record number of Indigenous representatives elected to Congress. Her mandate centres on Indigenous land rights, environmental justice, and women's leadership — issues she's pushing not as separate causes but as interconnected survival strategies.

She's introduced legislation to strengthen Indigenous land demarcation and opposed the "Marco Temporal" (time frame) thesis, a legal argument that Indigenous peoples can only claim lands they physically occupied in 1988 when Brazil's current constitution was signed — a ruling that conveniently ignores centuries of forced displacement. In speeches on the chamber floor, she's called out the hypocrisy of celebrating Indigenous culture during Carnival while supporting policies that destroy Indigenous life the rest of the year.

Her presence in Congress isn't symbolic. It's strategic. But she's under no illusions that institutional politics alone will shift the paradigm.

The Urgency Is Now

"A nossa hora é quando já não der mais para suportar o genocídio [e] o etnocídio. Nossa hora é agora." Our time is when we can no longer endure genocide and ethnocide. Our time is now.

Xakriabá's language is blunt because the situation is blunt. Indigenous communities continue to face murder, displacement, and erasure. Between 2018 and 2022, during Jair Bolsonaro's presidency, deforestation in Indigenous territories spiked, environmental protections were gutted, and violent invasions of protected lands surged. The Yanomami humanitarian crisis — where illegal gold miners brought malaria, malnutrition, and death to remote communities—made international headlines in 2023, though Indigenous activists had been sounding alarms for years.

The cultural violence is quieter but no less destructive. When history classes skip over Indigenous civilisations, when universities lack Indigenous faculty, when museums display sacred objects as colonial trophies, the message is clear: you don't matter. You're relics. You're past.

That's the racism of absence Xakriabá talks about. And it's what makes narrative work — films, education, political representation — not supplementary to land rights battles but integral to them. If Brazilians don't know Indigenous peoples built this land's first cities, shaped its ecology, and survived apocalyptic colonisation, they won't understand why those communities' survival today is non-negotiable.

Rewriting the Map

There's pushback, of course. Conservative politicians have attacked the documentary as "revisionist history" and accused Indigenous activists of "dividing the nation." Some argue that emphasising pre-colonial civilisations somehow diminishes Brazil's Portuguese heritage — as if acknowledging Indigenous brilliance erases everyone else, rather than simply correcting the record.

But younger Brazilians are hungry for this reframing. The documentary has racked up millions of views. Indigenous influencers on TikTok and Instagram are translating traditional knowledge into viral content. University students are demanding Indigenous faculty and decolonised curricula. This isn't a fringe movement. It's generational.

What Xakriabá and her collaborators understand is that this fight is about authorship. Not just being included in Brazil's story, but writing it. Not asking permission to exist in the narrative, but insisting the narrative was always theirs.

When you accept that the mother of Brazil is Indigenous, everything shifts. Environmental policy becomes Indigenous land stewardship. Agricultural innovation becomes learning from millennia-old techniques. National identity becomes something rooted not in conquest but in continuity.

The headdress comes before the crown. The land existed before the flag. And the people were here, thriving, for thousands of years before anyone arrived to "discover" them.

That's not revisionist history. That's just history. And Brazil's classrooms — its Congress, its memory — are only beginning to catch up.