Indigenous women’s leadership in the Amazon: how lessons learned from covid-19 can strengthen our response to the climate crisis

Indigenous women of the Rio Negro and their response to covid-19

The covid-19 pandemic in Brazil unfolded amid difficult political conditions. The government’s response to the pandemic was poor and often promoted anti-public health practices.345 Existing inequalities and vulnerabilities in Brazil were exacerbated by the pandemic, with dire predictions for Indigenous populations.6789 In this hostile environment, women from the Rio Negro basin in the Amazon organised a powerful counterstrategy of care to respond to the pandemic.

Between 2020 and 2021, the Women’s Department of the Federation of Indigenous Organisations of the Rio Negro (DMIRN/FOIRN) launched the campaign called Rio Negro, nós cuidamos (“Rio Negro, we care”). Faced with limited engagement from male leaders, federal neglect, and the shortcomings of public health protocols to protect against covid-19, women took the lead in regional governance, grounding their actions in the concept of “care.”1011

This campaign had an important role in pandemic control in the region. By mid-2020, contrary to national projections and general population trends in Brazil, mortality in the Rio Negro region declined and remained relatively low until the end of 2021.1213 By the middle of 2020, many communities considered the pandemic “under control,” as they felt that they had an understanding of the virus and its effects as well as some resources to manage the care and “cure” of patients. They also had experience of how to decrease mortality rates.10

The “Rio Negro, we care” campaign reached more than 70 000 people, mostly from Indigenous communities from 23 ethnic groups. It covered a territory larger than Portugal (over 100 000 km²) in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. The campaign was led by women and forged alliances with Indigenous organisations and state institutions. This strengthened political and financial management of the pandemic response in the city and in Indigenous communities.

The campaign engaged with politically weakened health institutions to reach all communities by using a multimodal communication strategy and several languages.14 This ensured a widespread understanding of the situation and greater adherence to “physical isolation” measures to reduce the spread of the virus. The campaign members produced tens of thousands of masks, secured thousands of food baskets, and overcame major logistical challenges to distribute them across the vast territory. The campaign worked closely with international, third-sector partnerships as well as allies from the scientific field, while maintaining a focus on practices of care and healing that were grounded in the local culture and territory, and making use of the profound knowledge of the Amazon forest.

A fundamental element of the campaign’s success lay in the political concept of “territory.” The Women’s Department is part of the Federation of Indigenous Organisations of the Rio Negro: one of the country’s oldest, strongest, and most respected Indigenous movements, dedicated to rights and territorial defence, with extensive credibility and rooted presence across the Rio Negro territory. The protection of the Amazon rainforest and the forms of life it sustains is central to this movement, and it is precisely this biosocial materiality—of bodies and territories—that helps explain the campaign’s effectiveness.

The protected territory sustains everyday life and healthcare. The effectiveness of Indigenous healing is directly tied to these protected spaces. Communities living in biodiverse forest environments have stronger resources for care than those displaced into urban areas or territories under agrarian, military, or mining pressure. Preparedness, therefore, is not only about laboratories, vaccines, or surveillance; but also sustaining the conditions of biosocial life itself.

In the Rio Negro, nine Indigenous territories remain protected. The inhabitants live in respectful co-existence with the forest, and, in turn, the Amazon rainforest itself provided protection during the pandemic. There was space for people to move and isolate in small groups; they had access to water, natural foods, and an abundant “living pharmacy” of plant and animal substances to support bodily strengthening and care.

Protection of sociobiodiversity and knowledge

Pandemics are not only the spread of a virus worldwide. They are social and political events that impact and interact in different ways with different bodies and territories. It is essential to contextualise catastrophe within place: to ask where it comes from, to which worlds it arrives, and with which bodies, forces, and relations it becomes entangled. Processes of “embodiment”—the materialisation of history, culture, and inequalities on the body—reveal how specific communities absorb, interpret, and resist disease.1516

From the perspective of Amazonian Indigenous communities, colonisation and development are already catastrophic processes, with epidemic and climate effects.17 Indigenous communities were able to draw on this experience and use the Amazon’s biosocial abundance and Indigenous women’s embodied knowledge. These become essential to meaningful preparedness during the covid-19 pandemic. The communities considered covid-19 to be yet another doença de branco (“white people’s disease”)—a crisis imported through colonial and capitalist expansion of frontiers. Their approach to dealing with it combined careful observation of the disease with biomedical knowledge and their own cultural systems of knowledge. They treated the virus not only as a biological agent, but also as historical (colonial) and metaphysical presence requiring prevention, healing, and ritual protection.

This holistic and sociocultural orientation underpinned the women’s campaign. They promoted a strategy of sharing experiences, narratives, and knowledge to inform how to deal with the critical context.

The success of the campaign offers vital lessons for responding to future crises, such as the climate emergency. Its impact stemmed from grounding the pandemic and its response in culture—in regional networks, histories, and knowledge systems—while also engaging scientific evidence and political realities. This made protection meaningful for communities, expanding practices of care beyond both traditional repertoires and narrow biomedical guidelines.

The climate crisis is both a reality and a threat. Despite decades of abundant evidence regarding the importance of the Amazon rainforest for the present and future possibilities of life on the planet, and for epidemic control,18 pressure on the forest and its devastation persist.1920 Legal recognition of Indigenous peoples remains precarious, and their knowledge of care and healing continues to be undervalued and marginalised within biomedical health systems.

To prepare for future crises, global health must look beyond technocratic frameworks and recognise the protective capacities embedded in Indigenous lands and knowledge. Without safeguarding these biosocial resources and the indigenous conditions of life, we risk perpetuating the social segregation and the loss not only of ecosystems but also crucial possibilities for surviving the emergencies to come.