Indigenous Data Activism: The Xakriabá Epidemiological and Political Struggle Against the Brazilian Government Policies in Response to COVID-19

For Brazil’s Indigenous peoples, the threat of COVID-19 not only evoked the genocide caused by the spread of diseases brought by Europeans during the period of colonial conquest, but was immediately interpreted as entangled with the political threats to which they were subjected, especially during the years of the 2019-2022 right wing government. Collaborative research conducted in the Xakriabá Indigenous Lands in the state of Minas Gerais has revealed the extent to which the underreporting of epidemiological contagion data by federal government agencies is interpreted by Indigenous peoples as yet another part of a strategy aimed at ridding the national territory of their presence. In response to this threat, Brazil’s Indigenous movement has gone beyond acts of denunciation, independently organizing collection and dissemination of epidemiological data on infected Indigenous people through social networks. Ethnographic research has allowed us to understand how actions and strategies employed specifically by the Xakriabá can contribute to the debate on “data activism” (the emerging field concerned with the political use of data by social movements). For the Xakriabá, such actions have in fact acquired specific meaning and connotations, ranging from political resistance to the use of data in internal decision-making, as well as emerging as an important collective learning tool within the community. Faced with yet another threat to their lives and territories, the Xakriabá reacted by collecting and disseminating data about themselves as a community of practitioners (or a community of learning in practice). In doing so, they mobilized decolonial epistemological “disobedience” strategies within a liberatory perspective, challenging a dominant model of knowledge management that was not only totally exclusionary but also complicit in maintaining necropolitical forms of governance.