What are reparations for? In Brazil Amazon community, its culture.

On the lush banks of the Amônia River, where Brazil meets Peru deep in the Amazon, the Ashaninka Indigenous community is quietly spending $3 million in reparations for illegal logging.

Traditional thatched roof homes are being rebuilt larger and sturdier, and villagers speed down the muddy river on canoes equipped with new motors.

Yet the most meaningful transformation is taking place under the surface, locals say, and began long before the reparation settlement was reached.

“Our dream is not the money. Our dream is protecting this,” says Moises Piyãko, a member of a family of village leaders, gesturing to the expanse he helped rebuild, covered with groves of plentiful fruit trees, grassy clearings, and reservoirs for fishing.

The Ashaninka of the Amônia River spent generations as manual laborers for outsiders who denigrated and at times prohibited their culture. Bouts of large-scale logging decimated close to a third of their forest in the 1980s. By 2020, the community received a formal apology and began receiving monetary compensation from one of the logging companies in a historic legal feat.

With land invasions still an active threat, the reparation money came with a feeling of cautious triumph. Villagers see it as a form of cultural justice, which will serve its purpose to the extent that it ensures the survival of their Ashaninka identity. Giving communities the agency to correct past wrongs on their own terms is a trend gaining steam in the world of reparational justice.

“We’ve used the money to have the freedom and the time to rebuild ourselves and reposition ourselves as a society, operating under our own conditions,” says Francisco Piyãko, the eldest brother of Moises.

“A lot of times reparations will fall short because they don’t respect the needs and priorities of the communities,” says Thomas Antkowiak, a professor at Seattle University School of Law. “But only that way are they going to maintain some sort of restoration that matters to them.” 

History of exploitation

Hunters and loggers began arriving to this area in the mid-1900s, launching what villagers remember as an era of shortage and hunger. White patrões, so-called bosses, exchanged goods for their labor instead of wages and discouraged them from wearing traditional clothing, holding cultural ceremonies, or organizing meetings among themselves.

In the 1970s, as they started fighting for their legal rights and land recognition, close to half the village left, scared by rumors they would starve if the settlers were kicked out. 

Meanwhile, logging companies saw a lucrative opening. Over the course of the 1980s, two companies cleared 25,000 acres of valuable cedar, mahogany, and cherry trees for sale in European furniture markets, using heavy machinery that decimated large swaths of the forest. The roar of chain saws drove wildlife away. Oil spills polluted nearby waters. 

The community opened a legal dispute against the loggers in 1996, four years after gaining its formal land rights. One of the companies, owned by the governor of the state at the time, offered the Ashaninka village three cattle ranches, a storefront in the closest city, and $100,000 to give up the case, remembers Moises Piyãko. They refused.

“We wanted an end to the exploitation,” he says. Even if it meant waiting decades for justice. 

That’s a common trend Indigenous communities face across Latin America, says Professor Antkowiak. Typically, “these cases just sit in the courts for years and years, and that has serious consequences for the communities themselves.” 

The Ashaninka people had no intention of waiting idly. They were deep in their own work of repairing their cultural identity, from the inside out.

The overarching goal was to re-create the self-sufficiency practiced by their ancestors. They hashed out a land and environment management plan, cataloged native seeds, planted over 15,000 mahogany and cedar trees, and set up agroforestry groves. They relocated their village along the river to better monitor potential invasions.

They turned to other sources of funding for conservation and land protection efforts, like the Brazilian National Development Bank and Conservation International. The Apiwtxa Association became their political arm, while a workers cooperative grew to represent the community economically. Today they sell local handiwork, crafts, and agricultural products across Brazil.

When the Supreme Court ruled in their favor and a settlement was reached, over two decades after they launched the case, the Ashaninka were ready. 

“We traded our bows and arrows for our minds, our capacity to communicate and touch hearts,” says Mr. Piyãko.

The final word 

In addition to a formal apology, the reparation consists of 6 million Brazilian reais ($1.2 million) earmarked for a human rights and environmental defense fund, and 14 million reais ($2.9 million) paid to the Apiwtxa Association, distributed every six months through 2025. The community is still in negotiations for reparations from a second logging company.

A council of two dozen villagers organizes the spending, with input from the whole community during regular assemblies where topics like education, grazing, fishing, hunting, and protecting the land from invasions are debated. The funds are used as needs arise, from improving infrastructure to financing travel for conferences on Indigenous and environmental issues.

“We never make decisions individually. The community always has the final word,” says Dora Piyãko, president of the cooperative. The council decided against dividing the money into individual proportions, opting to invest collectively in the community’s future and in supporting other Indigenous peoples in the area.

Reparation funding will be used to build a center for Ashaninka education, so that future generations remain rooted in traditional knowledge, culture, and spirituality alongside the Western education they receive at school.

Gloria Silva lives across the river from the main village in a house recently equipped with electricity, thanks to reparation money. In addition to raising her three children, she makes woven bags, beaded earrings, and traditional kushma dresses, which she sells to the cooperative.

“Now we can store food,” she says, her youngest daughter’s arms wrapped around her neck. “Now I can work in the evening.” 

“Fight for what we are”

Scars of the past are healing. Today, children roam the peaceful village freely, and people of all ages gather on weekends at celebrations that end only when gourds scrape the bottom of communal batches of food and drink. 

The Ashaninka settlement is considered an exception. Many communities in similar situations are not taken seriously by legal systems, cannot access lawyers to take on their cases, or are granted sums of money that pale in comparison with losses. Yet the tide may be turning.

“This is a decision that will be taken into consideration for all other processes that deal with environmental damage and the defense of Indigenous peoples,” says Antônio Rodrigo Machado, the lawyer who represented the Ashaninka people during their reparations negotiations.

In May, their case was used as precedent in another court battle denouncing environmental damage caused by a freeway on Indigenous territories in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. 

Bianca Piyãko sits cross-legged and quiet as a regular Saturday gathering winds down and women around her chat. As the night darkens, elders on this airy veranda pull out their flutes, each blowing a different note in the bittersweet harmony.

At age 18, Ms. Piyãko didn’t live through the years of land struggle and death threats, but feels the weight of that past on her shoulders. It will be up to her generation to navigate the village’s relationship to the outside world, deciding what to adopt – and what to reject.

“Out in the world, they think differently. They think about gain,” she says. “Here in the forest, we have just one objective: to fight for what we are. The root and the strength of our people is unity.”

This story was produced as part of a special Monitor series exploring the reparations debate, in the United States and around the world. Explore more.

Editor’s note: a previous version of this story misstated the name of Seattle University School of Law.