Since his groundbreaking address to the Brazilian congress in 1987, the 72-year-old Indigenous leader has challenged assumptions and championed rights, urging us to 'have the courage to change'
After 21 years of military dictatorship in Brazil, it was a pivotal moment. Wearing a suit and tie, Ailton Krenak, then an Indigenous leader in his 30s, stepped on to the rostrum in congress. It was 1987, a new constitution was being drafted for the re-established democracy - and Indigenous people were finally being heard in Brasília.
"I hope that my statement does not violate the protocol of this house," he began, firmly but politely. As he spoke, he smeared his face with jenipapo, a fruit used for Indigenous bodypainting, until it was covered in black. "Indigenous blood has been spilt over every hectare of Brazil's 8m square kilometres," he told the constituent assembly. "You are witnesses of this."
Krenak's gesture helped enshrine Indigenous land and identity rights in the 1988 constitution. "There, the young Ailton understood the meaning of parliament," he reminisces. "The place to speak, the power of the word. Only those with a mandate speak on a pulpit."
In 2024, Krenak was back on a pulpit, again propelled by the power words - this time as a writer. He became the first Indigenous Brazilian to hold a seat in the Brazilian Academy of Letters, established in the late 19th century - and, until recently, composed mostly of white men.
Now aged 72, Krenak is a prominent writer, philosopher, environmentalist and Indigenous leader - an indispensable voice in Brazil and beyond, whose books have been published in more than 13 languages. In his work and lectures, he delivers piercing messages about the dead end we are in and the burden we have become for the Earth, seeking to put the Anthropocene epoch into words everyone can grasp.
"We are treading heavily on the Earth, like the steps of a dinosaur. I insist on calling on people to tread softly on the Earth," he says. "If I can imagine a utopia, it is for humans to recover the experience of a simple life."
Krenak opens the doors to an airy flat in Santa Teresa, a neighbourhood perched on the hilltops of Rio de Janeiro. He travelled here from Minas Gerais state - where he lives in the Krenak Indigenous reserve - to deliver a lecture at a literary festival.
As he stepped on stage in the evening's event, he was applauded effusively by an auditorium packed with people. Standing barefoot in a beige linen tunic, holding a pipe to his chest, he bowed while the moderator summarised his impressive biography.
"The flourishing of the world depends on this friction between us. If we can't come face to face, we have no impact on life - we just consume it," he says. "Modernity is very active in making us consumers but leaves little time and space to coexist."
Krenak mixes grave forecasts of the future with illuminating ideas and humour. He is known for his fierce critiques of capitalism but his friendly demeanour and a gentle way with words are perhaps the secret to his success in inspiring audiences; whatever the cause, the Indigenous intellectual is undeniably a bit of a superstar.
"You were told that I would talk about dreaming, creating, reflecting. You've fallen into a trap!" he says suddenly during his lecture. Audience laughter dissipates with laughter the tension that has been building as he unfolds his grim views about the world's growing intolerance and social exclusion.
"I love it when people have a good laugh," he says as he sits in a hammock for what becomes a long, meandering interview. He makes a point of demonstrating the right way to sleep on it: with your head and toes in a diagonal line: "Or else you will ruin your back!"
Ailton Alves Lacerda Krenak was born in 1953 in the original territory of the Krenak Indigenous people in Minas Gerais. Like Ailton, all his eight siblings have Portuguese names; until recently, children in Brazil could not be registered with Indigenous names.
In his 2020 book Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, one of his most famous, Krenak reflects on the impact that "humans are causing on this living organism that is the Earth", arguing against "the fury of consuming the Earth". A trilogy completed by Life Is Not Useful and Ancestral Future made him Brazil's first bestselling Indigenous writer.
Krenak himself has seen the end of the world more than once. As a child, when he lost his ancestral land, and as an adult, when the collapse of a mining dam owned by the multinationals Vale and BHP Billiton engulfed villages and spilt toxic sludge along 400 miles (600km) of the Doce river.
The river is sacred to the Krenaks, who regard it as their grandfather, Watu. Ten years after the Mariana dam disaster, as it came to be known, Ailton says the river is still in a coma: "To declare it dead would be giving up."
As he speaks on the hammock, Ailton often closes his eyes and sometimes points his bare foot like a ballerina, as if focusing head to toe on the path of his words.
He describes idyllic childhood memories of a Krenak village by the Doce, "with the fantastic freedom of jumping off cliffs, leaping from tree branches into the water". His world was "water, forest, wide-open spaces of fenceless freedom".
"It's a bodily experience of being in a world with no risks. Then suddenly you are warned by adults that you must run away. And then comes the memory of losing everything."
In the late 1960s, Brazil's military regime split up the Krenak territory and distributed land titles to farmers, violently expelling the Indigenous residents.
Krenak's family was thrown out of their village three times, until they finally fled. "I felt enraged. I don't think it's very different to what a Palestinian boy must feel. You look around and think: 'Who should I kill first?'" he once told GQ Brasil magazine. If there had been a guerrilla war, Krenak says, he would have been part of it.
His family fled to Paraná state, camping along highways. "I remember the feeling of being on the run, of not knowing if we'd find a safe place to sleep, of always being chased out from one place to the next," he says.
"That is likely the most common memory among people in diaspora. That's why I tell people: 'We are not equal. Not in one sense. We don't have a shared memory of history in Brazil. Each one has a fragment.'"
Krenak eventually lived in the state of Paraná and in São Paulo, where he connected with exiled Indigenous people like himself. He started an Indigenous newspaper at São Paulo's Pontifical Catholic University. It soon became an audio bulletin sent out to Indigenous villages on cassette tapes, and later a radio show.
He gradually became a protagonist in the budding Indigenous movement, and in 1980 co-founded the Union of Indigenous Nations (Uni). In 1987, the Indigenous movement reached Brasília.
In a watershed for Indigenous peoples, the 1988 "citizens' constitution" included a chapter recognising their rights to land and identity.
"The result was this impressive text," Krenak says, pointing at his T-shirt printed with the constitution's article 231. He reads it out: "Indigenous peoples are recognised as having their own social organisation, customs and original rights to the lands they traditionally occupy."
"I said those words, and they are printed in the Brazilian constitution. They've tried to tear it up, burn it down, throw it out - but they are still there."
Indigenous groups have seen huge setbacks ever since, with congress constantly moving to curtail land rights and elites obstructing this constitutional pledge.
"These guys are managing to keep Indigenous land from being recognised for 40 years," Krenak says of congress. "I can only refer to them as bandits."
As an intellectual, Krenak navigates western philosophy and literary references while speaking from the unique vantage of Indigenous traditions, cosmology and struggles.
Referring to the findings of the 2022 census at his Brazilian Academy of Letters inauguration ceremony, he says: "I am only one, but I can invoke 305 [Indigenous] peoples." Wearing the gold-embroidered academy uniform but with a Kaxinawá bandana around his forehead,Krenak says: "I am Guarani; I am Xavante; I am Kayapó; I am Yanomami; I am Terena."
He reminds his fellow academy members that literature is the heir of oral storytelling, connecting us to immemorial times when "people just told stories". Krenak's talent as a writer is a tribute to the spoken word - most of his books stem from lectures and interviews.
Krenak urges people to rethink a way of life based on the "consumption of everything" and on disconnection from nature, which is seen merely as a resource for the sake of development. He avoids using this word "because of the weight that it carries".
"Development is not an innocent word," he says. "It fires a shot at someone."
Krenak believes humans can choose to change radically. He puts it simply: capitalism is destroying the Earth's ecosystems; humans need these ecosystems to exist. "So humans should react swiftly against capitalism," he concludes.
By "swiftly" he does not mean the transition away from fossil fuels. "This talk of transition is a cynical negotiation," Krenak says, echoing his criticism of the Cop30 talks, held in the Brazilian Amazon last year.
"It's just a way to keep things as they are," he says. "If we have the courage to change, then why don't we?"