Upuahu iwi i pe ─ dreaming the ground with your feet on the ground

Abstract

This writing narrates an experience in an ancestral ritual of the Guajajara people, the Wira’o haw, in the urban village Maraka’nà, in Rio de Janeiro, which resists genocide, epistemicide, ecocide, and racism structured since the colonial invasion. The Wira’o haw celebrates a girl’s first menstruation, kuzà tein, and the passage into adulthood. Moment when the zari, the older women, transmit teachings and ancestral care for the body-territory to them. Sharing this experience in an academic journal, especially, at the historic moment we are living in, of the creation of the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, coordinated by a Guajajara woman, is share a ritual of reparation, reforestation and recovery of our buried histories.