How Indigenous and Quilombola Peoples Are Reshaping the Future of Transition Minerals in Brazil
By Edson Krenak (Krenak, CS Staff)
A mining company is usually accustomed to big scale, big numbers, big money, and big allies. The impacts of a mining activity in a community are complex and can last decades, even centuries, after its closure, with or without the community's consent. The power of such human-made activity is massive, and once it begins, the landscape and life in the territory change. Mining seems like an unstoppable power, but it cracks, it fails, and it can be defeated; it can bring shame, and waste time, energy, and money; in spite of a few cases in the world, it ends before its own due time.
In the case of a lithium extractor in the Jequitinhonha Valley, Brazil, the miner’s concern is no longer from lawyers, legal experts, geotechnical or engineering staff, not even a fierce and steady resistance of Indigenous and Quilombola communities, but national and international investors - one of the powerful actors that can change the mining industry, mining behavior, and activities.
National and international investors are pausing, reassessing, and retreating from investing in one mining of the most needed lithium by the industry. The retreat and reassessment do not emerge in a vacuum. It follows the persistent strength of the Aranã Caboclo, Pataxó, and Pankararú Indigenous Peoples and Quilombola communities that, together with allies, have worked to expose the gap between corporate sustainability narratives and the realities lived in the territory.
Investors and the entire supply chain must understand that in mining, the decisive question is not only whether a project is profitable and technically viable, but also whether it is wrapped in the right Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) framework, green, or sustainable language. A deeper question emerges from the territory, the land of the precious minerals: what kind of relationship does this investment create with the people and communities who know the land, the color of its soil, the plants that grow and are harvested there, who protect the water that as a blood runs through the villages, forests, houses and families in the hot days of highly climate impacted region?
Indigenous and Quilombola communities have shown that they are not passive recipients of outside decisions, but rather rightsholders and active stewards of the territory of their ancestors, their history, memory, and life.
The Peoples of the Jequitinonha Valley have acted together with Indigenous relatives from other countries, researchers, legal advocates, journalists, social movements, faith groups, and other allies, becoming a collective and creative force capable of exposing the corporate empty discourse of development and prosperity by refusing to have their territories transformed into sacrifice zones. This is one of the clearest lessons from the Jequitinonha Valley and other mining regions today. But when investors listen to communities, many things change! If not investors, the courts of justice.
A few months ago, the High Court found BHP responsible for the 2015 collapse of the Fundão tailings dam in Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil, concluding that BHP is liable for the disaster according to the law firm representing the communities (Pogust Goodhead Law).This is a landmark jurisdictional decision enabling over 600,000 affected people, including my people and our sacred river, the Watu. The same moral and ethical approach is being used to consider Sigma Lithium's actions. The Brazilian-Canadian company is facing scrutiny from communities, lawyers, legal experts, public prosecutors, and regulators, as well as growing withdrawals or criticism from national and international investors (source 1 source 2 source 3: contradictions with the investor and ESG policies). What is happening is more than reputation turbulence, like some analysts are saying. It reflects the strength of communities and allies working together to name harm, document contradictions, and challenge the attempt to market extraction as sustainability. They do it because they protect the territories that bring life, food, water, happiness, and climate balance for many.
Between community gatherings, territory exchanges, political advocacy efforts, and national and international articulations, Indigenous and Quilombola communities from the Jequitinhonha Valley have been strengthening a collective agenda to defend the Jequitinhonha River, the river that gives the territory its very name, and considered sacred for Aranã Caboclo, Pataxó and Pankararú peoples. This process recently gained new momentum with the launch of a public petition calling for the river’s legal recognition as a subject of rights at the . Within just a few days, the campaign spread across social media, amplified by Cultural Survival, international and local organizations such as Instituto Janelas do Jequitinhonha, and major independent media platforms such as Mídia NINJA. The mobilization reached the Legislative Assembly of Minas Gerais and was embraced by some state representatives, eventually becoming Legislative Proposal No. 5609/2026 at the Legislative Assembly of Minas Gerais. The bill is part of a movement that has already achieved the recognition of the legal rights of other rivers in the country, like the Rio Laje (Komi Memen in Indigenous language) in the Amazon, the first river in Brazil to be legally recognized as a subject of rights.
The legislative proposal now enters a decisive voting phase. The recognition is just one part of the community's efforts to protect the Jequitinhonha River and their territories in the context of transition minerals extraction. This is also an example of how Indigenous Peoples have been reinventing their ways of struggle through their own cosmologies. Recognizing the river as a living being, a relative, the oldest ancestor in the territory is key to the cultural and environmental safety of these communities.
For years, these communities have raised and discussed several issues: disrespect for FPIC, not appropriate engagement, the threats on water safety, the social fragmentation, unresolved governance concerns, and the widening distance between green discourse and policies under the just transition framework, and the local realities. Because of this, Cultural Survival launched during COP30 in Belém the advocacy brief, "The Price of Green," revealing the deep discrepancy between the so-called green projects (green lithium, sustainable railways, etc.) and the realities of the affected Indigenous, Quilombola, and Traditional Communities in Brazil. This growing reality reveals that the environmental crisis is also a narrative crisis, where the language of sustainability often conceals systematic human rights abuses and violations transforming entire territories into sacrifice zones. As the brief defines:
“Sacrifice zones are not merely impacted areas but actively constituted through a violent logic that designates certain bodies, territories, and their cosmologies as expendable. This process systematically destroys the vital, relational bonds between communities and their ancestral lands, which are not merely resource-rich areas but the very source of cultural identities, spiritual memory, and meaningful existences. The destruction of these geographies undermines climate policies, weakens the ability of communities and territories to adapt, and causes the collapse of biodiversity.”
What many investors are now facing is something communities have long understood: territory, not balance sheets, first. The most responsible investors are learning to hear and to listen to the voices of the territory. The territory wisdom and the collective governance offer investors and governments at least three crucial lessons:
- Only Communities can provide reliable, early warning. They often detect harmful corporate culture and governance failures long before these problems appear in audits, risk memos, or sustainability reports. Respecting the voices of the communities means building a relationship based on trust, transparency, and respect. FPIC protocols are just the beginning and are not meant to be obstacles to investment; they offer clear, reliable pathways for long-term, solid gains.
- Learning contextual intelligence. Indigenous and Quilomboa communities assess risk holistically. They do not isolate tailings from water, rocks from the air, labor from land and soil, economics from memory, and biodiversity. Their knowledge is relational, it is shaped by affect. Yes, they are affectious. There is love, joy, and friendship when holistic intelligence is applied. The Quilombola community used to sing: “I love my village because it is where I find joy and friends, I love my territory because it is where my village sings, dances and lives…” (See top photo, a scene of the Quilombo Mutuca dancing and celebrating). The opposite is also true: mining companies very often carry a negative and damaging global reputation because they fail to build meaningful relationships with these places. What they offer, mainly jobs, is not enough for it does not create a belonging, nor does it bring lasting benefits to the territory.
- Keep the accountability thresholds in front of you. Who can afford to ignore accountability? The courts, reputation analysts, and even your own pillows at night (conscience) are filled with stories of social and legal consequences. Communities know when a project has crossed the line from tolerable risk into ethical and social unacceptability. We know it from the very beginning. From Mariana, Brumadinho and Montu POlly, to cite some, how many times have Indigenous Peoples and other communities protested against bad relationships and governance before the collapses? Across other extractive frontiers, history has shown that the warning often came before the collapse. They came from those living, sleeping, protesting, and working closest to the danger. What is missing is not local knowledge, but corporate and institutional willingness to listen.
How much mining is enough? We know a capitalist, consumerist society keeps demanding more and more but at its own risk and harms the planet. Mother Earth cannot take much more. If mining is to continue at all, especially those already present in the territory, it must be fundamentally rethought: investment only makes sense when it fully recognizes and respects our rights, our territories, and our right to decide. Indigenous, Quilombola, and traditional communities are already the enduring, everlasting stewards, caregivers, of the territories and ancestral lands have given so much! Now it is time to take care of it
What Sigma knows now is not only its own vulnerability, despite the rush for transition minerals and favorable market conditions, but also the growing power of communities working together. They know that people are working in investment firms who want to sleep at night and tell beautiful stories to their kids and grandchildren.
