An Indigenous person carries a flag for the campaign ‘Let the A’uwẽ-Xavante Keep Dreaming’ in front of the UN building in Geneva, Switzerland. Photo by Cultural Survival, used with permission.
This article, written by Djalma Ramalho (Aranã Caboclo), was originally published on the Cultural Survival website on August 17, 2026. It is republished here in an edited version with permission. Learn more about their campaign here.
This post is part of Global Voices’ August 2026 Spotlight series, “Indigenous Rights.” This series offers insight into the lives and experiences of Indigenous peoples to build connections across regions, center Indigenous experiences, and share the stories of leaders, activists, community members, and more. You can support this coverage by donating here.
Under a heavy sky, on the shores of Lake Léman in Geneva, Switzerland, red words cut across the landscape. In front of the Jet d’Eau of Bains des Pâquis, Geneva’s emblematic fountain, two messages appeared: “Let the A’uwẽ-Xavante Keep Dreaming” and “Stop the megaprojects fragmenting Ró, the A’uwẽ-Xavante territory.”
The intervention marked the international launch of a campaign led by A’uwẽ-Xavante leaders, communities, and organizations, during the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP) in July 2026. They are an Indigenous group from Brazil’s Centre-West region, with a population of around 25,300. According to the 2022 Census, Brazil has 1,694,836 people who identified as Indigenous, from 391 ethnicities.
While government representatives debated international policies and standards inside the United Nations, the Indigenous delegation occupied public space to convey a message: There can be no legitimate development when its realization depends on the destruction of the material, spiritual, and political conditions that sustain a people’s existence.
Dreaming is not a metaphor
For the A’uwẽ-Xavante people, dreaming is a concrete dimension of social, spiritual, and political life. In her research on dream performance among the A’uwẽ-Xavante, anthropologist Laura Graham demonstrates that dreams establish relationships among the living, ancestors, and immortal beings. Songs received during sleep are shared with the community and may become collective performances that bring together narrative, music, dance, memory, and cultural continuity.
In one episode documented by Graham, an elder recounts receiving songs from ancestral creators intended for the living, so that by singing them collectively, the A’uwẽ could continue to exist as A’uwẽ. The dreamer, therefore, does not appear as the individual owner of a creation, but rather as a mediator of knowledge that belongs to, and circulates among, the people as a whole, and becomes part of the community’s living heritage.
In recent years, according to the leaders who developed the campaign, dreams have also begun to convey warnings related to growing pressures on their territories. The expansion of railways, highways, hydroelectric projects, monocultures, and other large-scale developments is, therefore, understood not merely as a physical transformation of the landscape, but as a threat to the relationships that make it possible to receive, transmit, and enact this knowledge.
To defend the right to dream, then, is to defend the territorial conditions that make dreaming possible.
Ró: Cerrado, world, territory, and life
The word Ró also has no full equivalent in the conventional translation of “territory.” Geographer Maria Lucia Cereda Gomide explains that Ró can simultaneously mean “Cerrado, world, our land, everything.” It refers to a territorial and cosmological complex that extends from the village space to the Cerrado [biome in Central Brazil], encompassing its waters, animals, plants, and the spirits that inhabit this world. Ró is a living network of relationships. It encompasses hunting, gathering, and fishing grounds; ancient villages; burial grounds; rivers and pathways; medicinal plants; ceremonial sites, and ancestral presences that sustain collective life.
A technical note by the Brazilian Anthropological Association, published in 2025, emphasizes that A’uwẽ-Xavante territoriality depends on practices such as journeys through the Cerrado, the gathering of roots, fruits, and fibers, fishing, hunting, and circuits of reciprocity that connect families, clans, age groups, and different Indigenous lands. Territorial fragmentation, therefore, compromises not only access to natural resources but also the ability to perform ceremonies, transmit knowledge, and maintain the social and cosmological relationships through which the A’uwẽ constitute themselves as a people. It would also cut across relationships that cannot be contained within the administrative boundaries drawn by the state.
So, the message projected in Geneva – “Let the A’uwẽ-Xavante Keep Dreaming” – is a demand for the protection of the integrity of Ró and for the continuity of their existence itself. A’uwẽ-Xavante leader Hiparidi Top’tiro states in the campaign’s document: “Any project that affects one of our territories is a problem for the entire A’uwẽ-Xavante People.”
Territories, lives, and dreams cut by tracks
The campaign’s central demand is protection of the rights of the A’uwẽ-Xavante people in the face of the construction of the Center-West Integration Railway (FICO), also known as EF-354. Presented by the Brazilian government as a strategic project to reduce logistics costs and expand freight rail transport, it is part of a broader corridor designed primarily to move soybeans, corn, and other commodities produced in the region. By advancing the project without ensuring adequate free, prior, and informed consultation, the Brazilian state has failed to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples.
The FICO Railway is a federal project of approximately 1,641 kilometers (1,020 miles) under the responsibility of Infra S.A. Its first section, covering approximately 363 kilometers (226 miles), between Mara Rosa, in the state of Goiás, and Água Boa, Mato Grosso state, is currently being built by the mining company Vale as compensation for the early renewal of another concession. Studies and administrative processes related to the route have identified Xavante territories within its area of influence, raising serious concerns about territorial, environmental, social, and cultural impacts.
In May 2026, Infra S.A. itself reported that approximately 80 kilometers (50 miles) of the final portion of the section currently under construction depended on the completion of the Basic Environmental Plan – Indigenous Component (PBA-CI) and on negotiations with Xavante communities. This makes clear that the relationship between the railway and Indigenous territories is not merely indirect, but a central issue affecting the project’s implementation.
The technical note issued by the Brazilian Anthropological Association states that the railway affects areas of traditional occupation, claimed lands that aren’t yet demarcated, gathering areas, former villages, burial grounds, waterways, and sacred sites. The document recommends suspending construction and the installation license until adequate consultation has taken place, and altering the route so that the railway does not cross A’uwẽ-Xavante territoriality.
The campaign’s advocacy brief, Let the A’uwẽ-Xavante Keep Dreaming, launched in Geneva, argues that FICO cannot be assessed merely as an isolated railway line. It is part of a broader architecture of highways, railways, waterways, and export corridors that is likely to intensify commodity flows, non-Indigenous occupation, and economic pressure on already fragmented territories.
Consultation under dispute
In February 2026, the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB) denounced irregularities in the consultation process related to FICO. According to the organization, meetings scheduled for some Indigenous lands were held at very short intervals, leaving communities insufficient time to conduct internal discussions in accordance with their own decision-making processes. They also documented reports of pressure on Indigenous leaders, the absence of independent technical assistance, and communication difficulties among communities distributed across territories that have historically been fragmented. The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) opened an administrative proceeding to monitor the consultation process.
Both the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples establish that states must consult and cooperate in good faith with Indigenous Peoples before approving projects affecting their lands, territories, or resources, to obtain their Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC).
Consultation does not simply mean informing a community that a project will proceed but also respecting their decision-making timelines, freedom from coercion, and ability to withhold consent from measures that could compromise their future.
To Europe: Coloniality also travels by rail and electric car
The intervention in Geneva carried a particular symbolic weight. The city is home to the United Nations Office and to numerous institutions connected to the international human rights system. Indigenous representatives are often given only a few minutes to present territorial conflicts shaped by decades of violations.
The campaign also challenges the contradictions of the so-called green transition. Railways, logistics corridors, mining operations, and large-scale infrastructure projects are frequently presented as necessary instruments for building a low-carbon economy. Yet when they advance without the effective participation of affected people, they can reproduce long-standing colonial mechanisms: territorial appropriation, the concentration of economic benefits, and the transfer of environmental and social costs onto Indigenous peoples and traditional communities.
The projection in front of the Jet d’Eau confronted this paradox. Europe, historically implicated in the colonization of Indigenous territories, remains connected to these regions through networks of finance, consumption, mining, agribusiness, and export infrastructure. Changing the energy source without transforming these relationships is not enough. A transition that continues to treat Indigenous territories as sacrifice zones may be technologically new, but it remains politically colonial.
For the A’uwẽ-Xavante, a fragmented territory does not simply mean a reduction in physical space. It means the interruption of pathways, songs, ceremonies, memories, and ancestral relationships. No megaproject can claim to represent the future if its existence depends on destroying the dreams of those who have always cared for the land.
