Photo/ Foto: Julio Pantoja

Lecturer: Megaron Txucarramãe
Presenters: Aílton Krenak & Prof. Terence Turner

Biographies

Megaron Txucarramãe is one of the most important native leaders in Brazil, with outstanding performance on behalf of his people, M_kragnotire, and of other Brazilian native people. Working at Funai, he acted in Contact Fronts of the Ikpeng and Panará People. In 1984 he took part in the setting of the land boundaries of the Native Land Kapôt - Jarina and, in 1992/1993, of the Native Land M_kragnotire. He was a FUNAI supervisor of the Parque Indígena do Xingu (Xingu Indians Park) from 1984 to 1994 and was the director of Funai - Colíder/MT from 1995 to 2011. He is also a founder member of the Associação Ipren-re de Defesa do Povo M_bêngôkre (Ipren-re Association for the M_bêngôkre People) since 1993.

Ailton Krenak is a native leader recognized in and outside Brazil. As a founder of the Núcleo de Cultura Indígena (Native Culture Centre), he intensively took part into the whole process of elaboration of the Brazilian Constitutional Text (1988). He created and directed the Centro de Pesquisa Indígena and Núcleo de Direitos Indígenas (Native Research Centre and Centre of Native Rights). He has been the leader of the Embaixada dos Povos da Floresta, a cultural center in São Paulo that gathered native people from the Amazon Forest and that spreads the culture and the knowledge of the traditional people from Brazil. For his fight in defense of the native people he was honored with the Direitos Humanos Lettelier-Moffit and Homem e Sociedade Prizes from Fundação Onassis. Nowadays, he works as Assistant for Native Issues for the Government of Minas Gerais State.

Terence Turner, Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, has worked with the Kayapo of Central Brazil since 1962. His numerous writings on them cover social organization, myth, ritual, history, politics, inter-ethnic contact and aspects of cultural, social, political and ideological change. He has also published numerous papers on general theoretical topics, including the application of aspects of Marxian theory to anthropology, the theoretical basis of anthropological approaches to human rights, multiculturalism, and activism in support of indigenous causes, critiques of world Bank policies and projects, and the recent development of ndigenous movements for cultural and social autonomy. He has made a number of ethnographic films about the Kayapo with the British Broadcasting Company and Granada Television. In 1990 he founded the Kayapo Video Project, in which the Kayapo have been shooting and editing videos about their own culture and relations with the Brazilians. Turner has acted as Assistant editor and producer for most of these videos.