A little girl wearing a virtual reality (VR) headset giggles and grasps at the air in front of her. “A blue macaw!” she calls out in delight.
The girl is in the Brazilian capital, but the headset transports her to a fictitious Indigenous village in the Atlantic rainforest, where capybaras and jaguars dart across the landscape. The five-minute simulation is modeled on the Guarani Kaiowá territory in Mato Grosso do Sul, near the border with Paraguay.
This is a “VR museum,” part of a wider project using technology to preserve an ancestral culture at risk of being lost.
Since 2019, members of the Guarani Kaiowá have been working with researchers from University College London’s Multimedia Anthropology Lab (MAL) and a local arts nongovernmental organization, Idac, to document their practices through a variety of innovative mediums, including the VR experience and an immersive audio archive.
For decades, researchers would visit Indigenous villages and gather audiovisual records that that locals never saw again. Now, the Indigenous people make the recordings themselves. Even the elders have lost their initial mistrust of cellphones, says Luan Iturve, a young Indigenous audiovisual producer and actor involved in the project. Many now enthusiastically use them to record rituals and everyday life. It’s part of a broader movement in Indigenous communities in Brazil to reclaim their narratives from outsiders, by using technology to tell their own stories.
“We can no longer escape from these technologies, so it’s better we take ownership of them and use them” to our benefit, says Mr. Iturve.
Who is technology for?
The Guarani Kaiowá are one of the largest Indigenous ethnic groups in Brazil, but also among the most threatened. They were violently displaced from their land in the 20th century by private companies and farmers to make way for commercial agriculture, an experience that the Brazilian Association of Anthropology has denounced as a genocide. Today, the Guarani Kaiowá regularly face violent and even deadly attacks as they try to reclaim this territory.
“Our territory barely exists anymore,” says Mr. Iturve. “Everywhere you look, it’s covered by soya plantations, ranching, agro-industrial farming.”
With the Guarani Kaiowá disconnected from their sacred land, modern technology – including simple recordings of sounds, or images snapped on a cellphone – has given them a way not only of preserving the traditions they understand as a form of “ancestral technology,” like their chants and maracas, but also of sharing their story with the world.
“The elders say that when the sacred chants end, it’s the end of the world,” says Doriano Morales Arçe, a Guarani DJ who prefers to go by his artist name, Scott Hill. He and Mr. Iturve both work as Indigenous coordinators for the MAL project.
He adds that the Guarani Kaiowá’s sacred chants connect them to their land and to practices rooted in respect for nature.
“Digital technologies and even artificial intelligence can be important tools” for Indigenous people today, says João Pacheco de Oliveira, professor of anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and curator of the National Museum’s ethnographic collection. He is responsible for rebuilding the museum’s Indigenous archive after most of it was lost in a devastating fire in 2018.
Dr. Pacheco de Oliveira acknowledges that technologies such as the internet carry risks, and may not be embraced universally within an Indigenous community. But he sees them as overwhelmingly positive developments – as long as “They are associated with the protection of Indigenous rights and knowledge,” he says, not a “colonialist perspective of taking and using.”
Roseli Concianza Jorge, a Kaiowá elder who inherited the knowledge of a rezadera, or spiritual leader, from her parents and grandmother says, “I have to record so people know.” Wearing a feather headdress that has been passed down generations, Dona Roseli, as she is known, recounts stories about flora and fauna. “How does planting work? What is health, well-being? How is the land; how are the animals? I record everything.”
Ancient traditions and new technology
Embracing innovative technologies is by no means unique to the Guarani Kaiowá. Across Brazil, a new generation of young Indigenous communicators is using social media, like TikTok, to take control of its own narrative. At the recent Free Land Camp Indigenous gathering in Brasília, where MAL showcased the latest version of the VR museum, immersive 360-degree films about a female chief in the Amazon and a ritual dance from northeastern Brazil called Toré were also on display.
But what makes the project with the Guarani Kaiowá different is the “radically collaborative” way in which the non-Indigenous team of researchers and modelers works with the Indigenous community, particularly elders like Dona Roseli, says MAL’s founder Raffaella Fryer-Moreira.
A pilot version of the VR museum was built in 2021 through a process of semiweekly online meetings between the London-based team and a multigenerational Indigenous group, who shot videos and took photographs that were used to create the VR experience. “We’d ask them not what they want in the museum, but what elements of their cultural heritage are they worried about losing,” says Dr. Fryer-Moreira, who started the project while researching her Ph.D. in social anthropology.
Every element was designed and placed according to the elders’ wishes. The result is a much greener and biodiverse version of Guarani Kaiowá land than the reality they face after decades of deforestation.
MAL is now due to start a project for AI-assisted biodiversity monitoring in the Guarani Kaiowá territory, which the organization hopes to expand to other Indigenous territories in Brazil.
“I don’t see a conversation taking place about the role of Indigenous knowledge, ancestral wisdom in technological innovation,” says Dr. Fryer-Moreira.
Guarani Kaiowá of all generations are changing that.
