For decades, Brazil’s Kayapo tribe has battled deforestation of their home. Now women are at the frontlines of the fight to save the rainforest. Concealed among dense Amazonian rainforest and grassy savannas are the simple palm-thatched dwellings of the Kayapo, one of Brazil’s best-known indigenous groups. Their scattered villages along the banks of the Xingu River are so remote that until the 1950s, the Kayapo people had virtually no contact with or knowledge of the outside world. Over the past three decades, Kayapo communities have been increasingly exposed to the outside world, bringing major shifts in the tribe’s social structure. One of the more recent and unexpected changes has been the emergence of three women chiefs, who are now in charge of villages spread across a vast swath of Amazonian rainforest.
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