Cassava, the root of resistance

Guardians of the wild cassava, the Indigenous peoples of Rio Negro show how socio-environmental justice and food security are inseparable.

“Cassava stalk is also a life. It is part of our lives. It cannot burn in the fire because the cassava stalk also cries,” says Rosa Marques Lima, 63. Speaking in the original language of the Tuyuka people, she relies on her daughter’s translation into Portuguese as she explains the origin of cassava. Cassava stalk is the stem cutting made from the cassava plant itself. Cut to the length of a palm and planted diagonally nto the soil, it grows upward, sprouting new stems, and downward, producing the cassava root.

“It has always been our partner, our friend. If we don’t take care of it, it won’t get used to us. It will find a way to disappear. You have to talk to it. Then the cassava stalk starts getting used to the person. It will always remain.”

We are in São Gabriel da Cachoeira, a municipality in Amazonas located on the northern bank of Rio Negro. The Tuyuka are one of the 24 Indigenous peoples who inhabit this region. Dona Rosa’s family lives in the urban area.

On the following Sunday morning in May, her brother Cipriano Marques Lima offers me an additional explanation: the cassava stalks are living beings that form part of the members of the body. Burning them would be like burning ourselves—and it may, in fact, trigger physical pain. Moreover, the cassava stalks have families. Eliminating them means leaving the children without a father or mother. A cruelty, which reinforces how the cassava stalks are an intense object of exchange among peoples and communities, yielding children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Among the majority of Indigenous peoples – the geraizeiro, riverside, quilombola cultures and other traditional peoples – cassava and corn are the foundations of food and culture. In some cases, the former predominates. In others, the latter. And there are still cases in which the reign is shared.

The difference is that corn has been dominated in the form of transgenics, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides. It had the misfortune of possessing a nutritional composition particularly valued by white Western culture. Perhaps it had the bad luck of adapting to the climate of the United States, where a process of genetic erosion and loss of diversity began, turning the former emperor of the Americas into a subordinate at the service of intensive animal farming and the ultra-processed food industry. 

But cassava is a whole new ball game. It never let itself to be tamed. There is no doubt who the queen is. The fields, the food, and the culture are structured around it. In the country of soybeans, corn, and cattle, this insurgent queen had to take refuge in the waterfalls of Rio Negro. Over thousands of years, this region has been the guardian of wild cassava. Nowadays, it is the main space of resistance for a root that tells us not only the past but also promises us the future. Global annual production is estimated at 330 million tons—Brazil produced 18 million tons in 2023.

Rio Negro offers one of the latest demonstrations of how socio-environmental justice and food security are inseparable. It is a kind of live, life-sized exhibition of what a truly prosperous country would look like—and how achieving a prosperous country depends on having a prosperous population, not corporations that prosper at the expense of people. This is also a region that shows how protection of the territory goes hand in hand with the promotion of food and nutritional security: almost 70% of Rio Negro area lies within Indigenous lands and conservation units.

The people of Rio Negro are one of the last antitheses to agribusiness. A place where one does not need to imagine, but simply see and grasp. A people who feed their own and others without resorting to fertilizers, pesticides, or tractors. And without cattle. without deforestation. To those who say this is a microcosm that it would never work on a larger scale, the size of the three municipalities of Rio Negro denies it. Together, they make up an area large enough to be the ninth biggest Brazilian state, ahead of Rio Grande do Sul.

No Dichotomies

Early that Sunday morning, Dona Rosa was preparing curadá to be served at the fair. It is a large, soft beiju, cut into four pieces right when it’s served and it works really well alongside broths that characterize the cultures of this region.

A little more than a decade ago, tired of not having a good market space at the local fair, this Tuyuka group decided to create their own gathering, which takes place every Sunday. Originally, this people comes from the Upper Rio Negro—in the case of Dona Rosa, the family lived in the Colombian region of the Uaupés River. It is a shed with a zinc roof—an inheritance from the construction work carried out last year by the city government of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, but from which the Tuyuka hope to free themselves at some point to restore the traditional thatched covering.

The relatives maintain fields in the surrounding area that supply the fair and provide produce for public purchases, such as school meals. I visited the field of one of Dona Rosa’s sisters, which, being so close to the city, is a much more limited field than those I came across throughout the Rio Negro region.

As we left, we walked up to Boa Esperança hill, the highest point in the city. From above, we can see a single thatched roof. It is not an Indigenous family’s house, but rather the roof of the headquarters of the Socioenvironmental Institute (ISA), an organization that has worked in this region for decades. Most roofs are made of asbestos and zinc. Most streets are made of mud with a thin layer of cement, in addition to completely nonstandardized sidewalks. In this sense, São Gabriel da Cachoeira is an Amazonian city like any other, with many planning issues and the glaring contradiction of the imposition of an architectural and urban model that is alien to the local reality.

Even so, it is easy to be charmed by the Amazonian city. The difficulty is to explain the reason why. Perhaps it is the green abundance of the forest that surrounds and weaves between the houses. Perhaps it is the beautiful diversity of Indigenous peoples. Perhaps it is the feeling of being in a rare edge of the world, a truly unique place amidst a century of cultural pasteurization of humanity—here, our fermenting and dangerous, yet fascinating, species seems less hemmed in and restrained.

Anti-pasteurization seems a fair way to define “the cultural broth” of São Gabriel. Jesus arrived, and certainly had a brutal impact on the way practically all these peoples interpret the world, but (still) has not managed to impose the dichotomy with the devil. Because these peoples are not dichotomous.

— “We call them invisible beings” — Bete Morais, 40, begins to speak even before the recorder is on.

We are talking about the importance of that which is felt but not seen. We have only a few minutes before a lecture for children at a school located on the outskirts of São Gabriel. She has come to speak about traditional ways of life as a writer and member of the Tukano people.

— “The entities that protect the forest or just live there are everywhere: in the forest, in the soil, in the animals, in the insects. So, a lot of things that happen to insects, for example, are manifestations of these invisible beings. These beings work in balance. It is not that they are necessarily good or bad. It depends a lot on how we relate to energies, to them, and to nature itself, because they also have their places. This knowledge of connecting with the invisible world comes from listening to yourself, because it comes from within you. My grandfather used to say that it seems complex, but this conversation is much simpler. It comes down to you being in contact with nature. Today, we have this idea of seeking perfect and complete spirituality, but that does not exist.”

I like to think that cassava is to blame for this non-dichotomous view. What underpins all of these cultures is a root that is naturally poisonous and deadly, but when it is properly prepared and respected, it becomes generous and full of flavor. A root that goes through fermentation processes in which life forms shunned by Western culture create a collaborative and invisible transformation – one that benefits them as much as they benefit humans. It is a whole lot of collective rebellion in a single plant.

São Gabriel is one of the most Indigenous cities in Brazil—93% of people identify as Indigenous, spread across 24 different peoples. Out on the streets, you only have to take a few steps to hear languages other than Portuguese. The municipality officially recognizes three of them: Nheengatu (the so-called general language), Tukano, and Baniwa, but there are at least a dozen others. On Sunday mornings, the fish stalls also offer huge pieces of caimans, as well as pacas and agoutis.

The peoples of the region share a common origin. The beginning of life took place at the milk lake, or milk river, where the city of Rio de Janeiro is located nowadays. There, the Grandfather of the Universe initiated all the peoples of Rio Negro. He gave them a gift, with the intention of converting them into humans and embarked all of them upon a snake disguised as a vessel: the Transformational Canoe-Snake. Following the sun, they arrived at Rio Negro, where each one got off in a specific place. The white man also came ashore,  shotgun in hand, and with a clear mission: to wage war to seize everyone else’s wealth.

Just like cassava, the peoples of this region are resilient. Their languages, their food, and especially their way of interpreting the world have withstood four centuries of colonialism. They endured the arrival of Europeans and massacres that followed, the rubber boom era and the aviamento period (exploitation by bosses), religious pressure, infrastructure projects, and the arrival of the State.

No wonder: these peoples were entrusted with a grand mission. They are the guardians of the “original cassava stalks,” the ones meant to be passed down from generation to generation. “The first cassava stalk emerged alongside the god of food, foreseeing the need and the future of humankind. This cassava stalk exists in Bela Adormecida (Sleeping Beauty), it must be very large,” says Rosa, from the Tuyuka people. Bela Adormecida is a mountain range located right across from São Gabriel. As a rule, for the Indigenous peoples of Rio Negro, the mountain ranges of the region are sacred spaces – places where forms of life first emerged. “From there, people took the cassava stalks and distributed them. It was created through this god of food.” 

Cultivated Diversity

The history of the relationship between cassava and human beings does not begin in this region. The most accepted hypothesis is that somewhere between where now Bolivia and Rondônia are, the first cycle of cassava use for human food took place—one possibility is that it ocurred around nine thousand years ago. People may have noticed that this bitter and poisonous root could be selected to produce less and less poison and become sweeter and sweeter. Until cassava was tamed. It did not take long for other animals to “hear the news”.

— “It is in this region of Madeira River that there are many different ways  the land’s surface has been altered,” — says Charles Clement, emeritus researcher at the National Institute for Amazonian Research (Inpa). — “They created channels, elevated pathways, earthworks for villages and agriculture, making it a very interesting region. This was an important center of plant domestication. There is no doubt corn and sweet cassava were the most important crops.”

Like a good Amazonian, Charles Clement offers me a comfortable chair outside the house, on the porch. It has already rained this afternoon in Manaus, but it is still hot. Born in the United States and wandering through Europe after completing his degree in Biology, he arrived in Brazil in the 1970s as an extra in a scientific expedition, at his father’s invitation. He got off at the very first stop and never continued the journey: he stayed at Inpa, where he would retire 40 years later.

“Am I going back to the United States? It’s filled with crazy people there.” He likes jokes. He is a thin man with blue eyes as big as his white beard, and on the we had our conversation, he was wearing frayed denim shorts and a red T-shirt.

Clement is a reference in the study of plant domestication in the Amazon. An article he published in 1999 has a sharp title: “1492 and the Loss of Genetic Resources of Amazonian Crops.” In summary, the document systematizes the available records and concludes that there was extraordinary diversity in the plants used for domestic purposes in the Amazon prior to the white invasion. There were at least 138 varieties cultivated, managed, or promoted in the Amazon, accounting for 50% of the total for the Americas. Of these, 52 were domesticated. The hypothesis he puts forward is that a neglect for Amazonian diversity stems from what happened post-colonization: the extermination of Indigenous peoples fostered the idea that the region had never been a major cradle of agricultural cultures.

Along the Madeira River, Eduardo Góes Neves, a professor at USP’s Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, has been one of the researchers working to unearth this history. His studies challenge the idea that a natural barrier prevented the rise of ‘advanced’ civilizations in the Amazon, a notion tied to the belief that the region’s soils are inherently poor. For him, what prevailed across this vast area was diversified resource use, not exhaustive exploitation.

First the European colonizers, and later those from the United States—always with Brazilian elites chiming in as backing vocals—spread the idea that no great civilization had ever existed in the Amazon. The forest was cast as a place of scarcity, where some essential element was always missing to build anything of significance. They looked upward and saw no buildings, no pyramids, nothing they recognized as a sign of greatness.

‘However, they failed to “check with the Russians”,’ writes Góes Neves in the book Sob os tempos do equinócio. ‘The “Russians,” in this case, are the ancient peoples of the Amazon, who made flaked-stone artifacts and later stopped producing them, invented ceramics and later stopped making them, created fertile soils such as terra preta but did not rely entirely on them, domesticated plants but in many cases did not want to be farmers, glimpsed the possibility of the State but fled from it whenever they could. In the central Amazon, archaeology reveals a long history of alternating, very distinct ways of life, but not necessarily moving toward the State, even in periods of greater demographic density.’ Neves argues that the forest should be understood as a space of biocultural construction—quite different from the idea of natural heritage. 

The problem was not the Amazon but its interpreters, who did not know how to read while looking down: it was beneath the soil that these peoples had planted wealth. The soil of this vast region is, for the most part, poor in nutrients—imagine land washed each year by torrential rains and floods. At least six thousand years ago, knowledgeable peoples learned that, to grow food, they first needed to grow the soil: the so-called ‘Indigenous black earth’ is fertile because it emerged from generations accumulating organic matter. In short, the peoples of the Amazon did not build pyramids because they were too busy growing forests—though even that is only partly true, since grand structures have recently been found in eastern Bolivia.

Some thousands of years ago, corn traveled from Mexico to South America, while macaxeira made the reverse journey. In other words, there was an exchange of things ripe for fermenting. Charles Clement believes that the ceremonial use of cassava is what drove the shift from backyard gardens to larger fields.

‘In the Amazon there were hundreds of languages. And each language represented a people, with its own cosmology, with everything. And some of these groups began to cultivate more than others. All of them, from the earliest times, managed a standing forest, increasing the abundance of açaí, for example, or Brazil nuts. So why work more, cut down the forest, and plant a cassava field? To have more beer. You can brew beer from any species rich in starch.’

Off to the fields

This is where the Rio Negro comes into the picture. Thousands of years ago, knowledgeable women noticed that the sweet variety of the root was an easy target for animals. In the time of backyard gardens—when planting was small and right behind the houses—this was manageable, because animals didn’t reach it. But in larger fields, one, two, three, even five kilometers from the dwelling, the macaxeira was quickly eaten.

We can say these were women because it is better to think so, but also for an anthropological reason: among several peoples, there is a clear feminine centrality in the fields of the Rio Negro. Myths about the creation of the cassava stalk attribute to them the role of tending the fields and securing the food supply. We do not know whether this region was the main source of the spread of wild cassava, but it is here that it reaches its apex.

These women then began selecting varieties that were increasingly poisonous—and bitter. And they guarded a secret: by letting the root ferment or by cooking the leaves for days, the poison and the bitterness would disappear. In their place emerged a plant rich in flavor and varied uses. Over time, many peoples elsewhere unlearned how to handle it: they, too, had been tamed and no longer knew what to do with so much wildness.

But the women of the Rio Negro did not. They never denied cassava shelter or sovereignty. The disdain they show toward macaxeira—a kind of supporting character in the cassava fields—is itself a repeated gesture of loyalty and care. They are also the ones who master the diversity of cassava stalks: choosing the best according to taste, yield, and purpose. They name them after whoever donated them, or after a place, or after some trait.

‘So a village of 10,000 people had to have a lot of variability. Because one thing we know is that the more individuals of a species there are, the greater the chance a pest or disease will like that population,’ Clement continues. In other words, genetic monotony—like that found in modern agriculture—is a major risk. ‘So how did Indigenous peoples handle this? They managed through variability. When you go to a field in the Upper Rio Negro, it looks like a cassava monoculture. But it’s not. Any one person has twenty or thirty varieties. What is that? It’s selection. It’s the basis of domestication. And it’s accompanied by propagation. Domestication relies on two things, nothing more: selection, which is unconscious, and propagation, which is conscious.’

This diversity was far greater than in other places, but we do not know its true scale. I asked Clement whether, twenty-six years after the article’s publication, we are any closer to understanding that scale. He didn’t take even a second before shaking his head no.

‘Let’s suppose covid arrives and wipes out everyone in that community. Without people, the field becomes a secondary regrowth forest. And soon there is no more cassava. What did you lose? Some varieties also exist in neighboring communities, because there is a network of constant exchanges in the Upper Rio Negro—or anywhere in the Amazon, or the world. But some things in that community were unique. Because every year, when a new field is opened, the fire stimulates the germination of cassava seeds that come from different combinations of the twenty or thirty varieties in the previous field.’

A new field so as not to lose

From the outside, everything looks like an impenetrable forest—until an opening appears, visible only to trained eyes. A small clearing among the trees. Just enough space to slip a canoe through with the motor off, peering between trunks during the flood season.

Only a few minutes from the community of Cartucho, in the Médio Rio Negro II Indigenous Land, in the municipality of Santa Isabel, lies the field of Aida Oliveira dos Santos, 56. The field sits on an island in the river, surrounded by forest, like nearly all fields in this region.

‘There are cassava stalks that we like a lot, right? So we have to move. Every year we must plant a new field so we don’t lose them. That’s why every year we send our husbands to make a field for us.

In the division of roles, the men mark off and clear the area where the field will be opened. Acres or hectares are unnecessary measurements; what defines the size is the person’s disposition and how many days of swinging an axe the men can endure. Near the summer season (which begins in June–July), they cut down the trees and let them dry for several weeks. At the height of the dry season, they burn the forest. Finally, they bless it to cool the soil. Then the women take over.

Planting the cassava stalks is the first and central step, done among the stumps without removing much of anything. It may take weeks, depending on the size of the field and how many hands are helping. Planting always begins from the outside in, in a spiral. The logic is simple: the harvest follows the same order. If the stalks were planted from the center outward, harvesting would require knocking down still-growing plants to reach the mature ones.

In virgin forest, they generally wait up to two years to harvest. In later harvests, about six months, because many families now favor stalks that develop more quickly. Some varieties last one year and then ‘turn watery, ’ beginning to rot. Others last up to two years and become a kind of savings account for the family: when flour or money is needed, it’s time to harvest.  

‘We replant the cassava stalk. If you poke the stalk into the soil and it no longer sprouts, we see that it is no longer liking the soil,’ Aida says. In general, this happens after three, four or five years, depending on the fertility of the soil, the size of the field and the care given. After that, the field is abandoned so it can return to secondary growth. In just a few months, primary vegetation appears, and within a few years it becomes a young forest again. It can then be cut to make room for cassava planting, or, after some more years, it may be fully regenerated.

This is why each family maintains two, three or even four fields at once: to ensure constant renewal and production in sufficient quantity, which is not the same as productivity.

The Beings of the Forest Remained

We can only understand how so many peoples and cultures flourished in the same geographic space when we turn off the motor. And this is not just any geographic space: it is a continent. Politically, São Gabriel is a border town, but the real borders are many hours or many days away. Rowing, it would take weeks and months to travel from one point to another, a journey taken only in extreme necessity or for a highly advantageous exchange.

It is also essential to understand that this flourishing rested on exchange and alterity. The Tuyuka, for example, belong to the Tukano language group. By tradition, they could marry only members of other Tukano peoples considered appropriate for this, excluding those seen as separated siblings.

With the motor running, anyone traveling up the Rio Negro meets choppy water, a sign that São Gabriel da Cachoeira is near. This is when the river channel becomes rockier and narrower.

In the city’s name, a Catholic saint imposed himself, but in the surname he had to accept the waterfalls formed by two Indigenous men. Curucui and Buburi, disputing the love of a woman, entered into conflict, fell, and remained trapped on opposite banks, one on each side, eternally punished.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, São Gabriel was a tiny settlement. But changing times made this place central as an access point to the world imposed by whites. People came from the communities for schools, religious missions, medical care and social services.

“A more hopeful soul might say that what appears in São Gabriel and in the communities is a process of cultural fusion. I prefer to understand it as a colonial violence from which emerge processes of resistance that show themselves in language, in food, in the fields, in the way of seeing the world. Almighty God, Jesus Christ and the saints arrived, but the beings of the forest did not leave. Today they are part of a complex system that someone might call beliefs, but that I again prefer to describe as a worldview.”

Just a Dream

After several hours of conversation, I asked Charles Clement if there was anything else he wanted to say. “You do not want to know about my lecture on the end of the Amazon?” he asked. It was the point where we had begun, speaking about the chaotic phase of global capitalism and the crushing of alternative ways of life, as in the case of Indigenous peoples, with the rapid loss of traditional knowledge that once offered another reading of the world.

“So, the lecture, formally, is called ‘The Unsustainability of the Amazon’, which is one of the dilemmas of the twenty first century. And there are no answers. There are only questions. The lecture is full of definitions and data from here, data from there, that show the extent of the mess we have created. And since the size of this mess is so large, the dream of sustainability is just that, a dream.”

Charles had warned that, in the Rio Negro, I would see problems brought by agricultural technicians who try to impose a model that is disconnected from traditional ways of life. A few days later, it was impossible not to remember him when I saw a small farmer who had begun producing bananas with chemical fertilizers recommended by these technicians.

“So, I like to say that this idea of social inclusion, which no one is against, is designed to transform every Brazilian into a Paulista. And that is it. This enormous variability that exists in Brazil, which is one of the good things about Brazil, could be used for another kind of development. But we will have to invent a way to end the capitalist cycle and live within what nature can offer and withstand receiving.”

Our conversation had begun with his surprise at what I was seeking. The idea was to portray the ways of life of Indigenous peoples, particularly those of the Rio Negro, as a form of resistance in the face of climate change and a generalized crisis. He expressed skepticism and asked, “What does cassava have to do with that?”

After thinking so much, I believe that yes, cassava does have to do with it. It is not like corn, rice, soybeans and wheat, which went through deep genetic erosion over the past century and today are basically seeds controlled by corporations. These seeds no longer present diversity: they are the same genetic material for any biome, which presupposes the use of fertilizers to deal with soils unsuited to that crop and poisons to control “foreign” plants and unwanted insects. In a growing scenario of climate collapse, these seeds are weak and barely capable of adaptation.

If there is any way for Brazil to truly feed the world, that way is cassava, not soybeans.

* The trip along the Rio Negro was carried out in a vessel provided by ISA. The ISA communication team accompanied the journey. The costs of fuel, personnel and food were paid by Joio.