The river is territory: Quilombolas in defense of the waters of eastern Amazonia

In 2023, images of diminished Amazonian river channels, small ribbons of bluish-brown surrounded by massive sand banks, captivated Brazilian and international audiences. Eco-social activists, concerned government officials, and the international environmental movement brought attention to these apocalyptic landscapes: The seemingly infinite water resources of the expansive Amazon Basin reduced to a trickle. This paper calls for a local territorialization of rivers, specifically in Brazil's eastern Pará state where the pressures of development arrived with the opening of the Belém-Brasília Highway (1960), Trans-Amazonian Highway (1972), and Tucuruí Dam (1984). We write from a region accustomed to devastation under the mantra of economic growth and development. We offer three principal interventions within the framework of the river as territory. First, we emphasize the importance of the small tributaries, referred to locally as igarapés , which nourish these rivers. Next, in order to arrive at the affective power of rivers in Quilombola societies, we must consider the historical role of rivers as landscapes of flight, fear, and expert knowledge–factors in the formation of hydro-survivance which connects the layers of the past to the present moment in the Quilombola politics. Finally, rivers create the possibility of movement, and in this case, eco-social movements which network dispersed Quilombola communities with each other, but often go further, resulting in coalitions between Quilombolas, Indigenous groups, traditional populations (such as ribeirinhos ), and environmentalists.