CONFRONTING DEVASTATION: THE GUARDIAN CINEMA OF THE GUAJAJARA PEOPLE Andr´ e Brasil The birds broke a bowl full of chants and gave it to him. Thus did he meet the chants. Then those birds flew away, leaving all wisdom with him. —Tachico Guajajara, The History of Chants A brutal sequence of images opens Zawxiperkwer Ka’a – Guardio˜es da floresta (Guardians of the Forest, 2019), a doc- umentary by Jocy Guajajara and Milson Guajajara. 1 After showing the sign marking the border of Indigenous lands, a zoom out exposes a long line of pieces of meat hanging on the fence that surrounds the territory. The camera is unstable. A long shot follows the red line of exposed, sus- pended meats, a kind of ‘‘installation’’ that, due to its di- mensions, may not fit well in contemporary art exhibitions. As soon revealed, the oxen killed and butchered were a part of the illegal livestock found in the Indigenous Land of Caru, in Maranha ˜ o, and apprehended by a group called the Guardians of the Forest during their oversight patrol. Filmed on the border between the demarcated land and its surroundings, these sequences are addressed to a presumed audience of white people: the image of what is ceaselessly produced and reproduced by ‘‘them.’’ In wide shots of the land, this time near the pasture, we see a large group of young Guajajara, Awa ´-Guaja ´, and Ka’apor—Tupi-Guarani peoples—assembled to resist the constant and increasing invasion of their lands. These are the Guardians of the Forest, an Indigenous autonomous organization that was established in 2011 to take on the risky task of inspecting and monitoring demarcated lands to protect them from predatory activities by loggers and land grabbers (grileiros) in the absence of state enforce- ment. The Indigenous lands in the region suffer from intense deforestation and the construction of small roads used to steal timber—a situation dramatically aggravated by a government that today, in an explicit and deliberate way, attacks the constitutional rights of Indigenous peo- ples, encouraging land grabs. In November 2019, Guard- ian Paulo Paulino Guajajara was murdered in an ambush—a crime that has still not been investigated. 2 Through this camera in the hands of Jocy and Milson Guajajara, the film travels inside the conflicts, document- ing the actions of the Guardians of the Forest, especially the moments when they meet with groups engaged in illegal activity. Filmed in a direct cinema style, Guardians of the Forest places the viewer inside a risky scene on the threshold of a violent outbreak. Ruben Caixeta de Queiroz has described the film as an observational documentary, thus distinguishing it from other works by the well-known Vı´deo nas Aldeias (Video in the Villages) directors, which generally use voice-over to ‘‘weave the threads’’ of Indig- enous protagonists fighting against the colonization and expropriation of their lands. In a way, Caixeta de Queiroz has written, ‘‘the camera acts as a weapon, or a surveillance camera that is not continually connected,’’ varying between filming from a distance or up close, but always from the point of view of Indigenous people. 3 The Guardians traverse the territory to dismantle ille- gal fences and bridges, to interrupt the work of loggers and cattle ranchers, seizing huge logs and cattle that have been irregularly dispersed in the protected areas. As wielded by Indigenous people, the camera demonstrates knowledge of the territory and a sense of assuming its own guardian task by joining the group’s work, sometimes anticipating it or slightly out of step with it. The camera follows the action, matching its pace, sensitive to moments of apprehension and risk, of hesitation, of advance and retreat; it shares the speedboat (voadeira) for travels on the river, pays attention to the footsteps of oxen along the waterlogged trail, listens to the noise of a chain saw far away, hurries with the Guardians to catch illegal activity. The film is situated in the passage between the pressure of the off-screen space of hidden illegal enterprises that insist on entering the Indigenous lands and their exposure on-screen, provoked by the camera, in alliance with the 26 WINTER 2020 Film Quarterly,Vol. 74, No. 2, pps 26–31, ISSN: 0015-1386, electronic ISSN: 1533-8630.  2020 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https:// online.ucpress.edu/journals/pages/reprintspermissions. DOI:10.1525/FQ.2020.74.2.26