Cacique Raoni

Ropni Metyktire, the great leader known as Cacique Raoni, was probably born in the early 1930s in an old Mebêngôkre (Kayapó) village called Kraimopry-yaka, in the northeast of the state of Mato Grosso. In 1954, when the Mebêngôkre people established definitive contact with whites, Caciquef Raoni was approximately 24 years old and played a fundamental role in the process of pacifying several villages. He met the Villas-Boas brothers, with whom he learned to speak Portuguese and to become aware of the non-indigenous world. From then on, Raoni became the main interlocutor between the Mebêngôkre and Brazilian society. Throughout his career, Cacique Raoni was a protagonist in several struggles in favor of indigenous peoples and the Amazon, becoming internationally recognized as a leader and spokesperson for environmental preservation. He played a key role in the demarcation of the Mebêngôkre territories, one of the largest continuous blocks of tropical forest in the world, and in 1987 and 1988, he worked in the Constituent Assembly to include the fundamental rights of indigenous peoples in the 1988 Federal Constitution. He mobilized the world press to cover the First Meeting of the Indigenous Peoples of the Xingu, in Altamira, Pará, and against the construction of the Xingu Hydroelectric Complex, resulting in the abandonment of the project. Faced with a dramatic national political scenario for indigenous peoples and the environment, Raoni once again took the front line in the fight for the rights of indigenous peoples and the defense of the Amazon. In January 2020, Raoni called a historic meeting of leaders of forest peoples, in which he reiterated the importance of their unity against attacks and setbacks on indigenous and environmental rights and policies. In 2025, he will release a memoir, the first major record of his life. The work was based on more than eighty hours of interviews in the Mebêngôkre language, which were transcribed and translated into Portuguese in partnership with indigenous intellectuals, in work coordinated by the anthropologist Fernando Niemeyer.