A boy is born, the salvation of a people
Baby Akuntsu, the first of the ethnic group in 30 years
By Eliane Alves Cruz*, at ICL
“White people sleep a lot, but they can only dream about themselves”
Davi Kopenawa, in “The Fall of Heaven”.
This could be a fable or a Hollywood film if we were not in the brutal reality of the echoes of Brazilian colonization.
The egocentric Western dream has reduced the Akuntsú indigenous people of Rondônia to three people, virtually decimated by land conflicts.
This was the sad reality until the 8th, when a healthy baby arrived to answer the words of another native, Ailton Krenak: “The future is not for sale.” In December 2025, the first Akuntsú was born in 30 years.
Babawru Akuntsú’s son, aged about 42, with an indigenous person from the Kanoé people arrived because, despite belonging to different peoples, the two indigenous groups are the only ones to maintain daily contact with each other.
The Akuntsú are one of the smallest indigenous peoples of Brazil because they suffered successive massacres and expulsions during the agricultural advance of the region.
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The traces found by Funai indicate that, in the 1980s, a village of around thirty inhabitants was destroyed.
In 1995, when the first official contact was made, there were only seven indigenous people left.
By 2009, the group had grown to five people, but with the deaths of Kunibu and Popak, only three women remained: Pugapia, Aiga and Babawru.
The official contacts with the country’s representatives took place after decades of denial of the indigenous presence by farmers and clashes with invaders.
Despite being localized and monitored by authorities, the Akuntsú maintained the exclusive use of their own language and preserved their traditional cultural practices, such as the production of ceramics, body ornaments, musical instruments, and their own forms of social organization.
This exciting birth brought hope of renewal to the survivors currently living in the Land of the Omerê River, located between the municipalities of Chupinguaia (RO) and Corumbiara (RO).
According to the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), the area is made up of high-altitude forests and was part of a private farm closed by Funai in the late 1980s.
In the routine work of extracting the lowest rated information from the hegemonic media, I found baby Akuntsú. Calm at the top of the country, in the northern region where we also have a city called Bethlehem, he is our Christmas story, our contemporary fable of hope and life, our Child-God who received neither gold, nor incense, nor myrrh, but a chance to perpetuate his ancestors.
This offers us the opportunity to rethink the direction of the Earth and thus avoid “the fall of the sky”. There, in Rondônia, at the top of the tree nation called Brazil, a little star appears, an “idea to postpone the end of the world”.
Peace on Earth to men and women of good will.
Merry Christmas.
*Eliana Alves Cruz She is a native of Rio, writer, screenwriter and journalist. She was the winner of the 2022 Jabuti Prize in the Short Stories category, for the book “A Vestida”. She is the author of the award-winning novels Água de Barrela, O crime do cais do Valongo; I say nothing about you that I do not see in you; and Solitaire. He also has two children’s books and participates in around twenty anthologies. He was a columnist for The Intercept Brasil, UOL and press chief of the Brazilian Swimming Confederation.
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