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History of the Xingu Valley and the Place of the Kuikuro People in the Global Village

image of Afukaka Kuikuro and Michael Heckenberger
Friday, April 06, 2018
2:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Michael Heckenberger and Afukaka Kuikuro

(Part of the Global Brazil Conference: Amazon Frontiers) Afukaka Kuikuro is Paramount Chief of the Kuikuro Nation in the Alto Xingu Indigenous Reserve in Mato Grosso state, central Brazil. He has partnered with Michael Heckenberger and other academics to foster groundbreaking collaborative research that has transformed the world's understanding of Amazonian indigenous peoples and their long-term relationship to the environment and to the rest of the Xingu region and world.

Michael J. Heckenberger is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Florida. He has spent many years conducting fieldwork and living with the Kuikuro people in Brazil's Xingu Valley. Writers and filmmakers of the popular book and movie The Lost City of Z could not have completed their work without consulting with Heckenberger and the Kuikuro people. Heckenberger is one of the founders of the Central Amazon Project, which challenged the widely held belief that the Amazon was a pristine habitat, largely uninhabitable, and unchanged by indigenous people of the past.

Contact: Ken Maffitt