“How are you going to protect something that you don’t know?” the 26-year-old indigenous activist Txai Suruí asked during a Q&A session at Web Summit Rio on Tuesday morning, urging attendees to visit the Amazon and learn about the traditional ways of indigenous communities. “The most powerful technology is ancestral knowledge,” she added.
Ms. Suruí spoke alongside Ricardo Lima, the Web Summit’s head of startups and investors, after participating in the summit’s opening ceremony on Monday night, where she shared the main stage with famous Brazilian TV host Luciano Huck.
A member of the Suruí Paiter indigenous community, hailing from the Sete de Setembro protected land in the northern Brazilian state of Rondônia, Txai Suruí is one of the leading voices in defense of the country’s indigenous communities. In 2021, she made history when she became the first indigenous person to speak at the opening ceremony of a climate conference, issuing the opening address at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland.
At one of the world’s largest tech events, Ms. Suruí stressed that the people living in Brazil’s forests are also involved with technology and complained of the lack of space offered to indigenous communities in these spheres.
Ms. Suruí gave the example of her father, a leader in the Sete de Setembro indigenous land. “Back in 2005, he went to California and knocked on Google’s door, and told them, ‘you have the technology but you know nothing about the forest and its people.'”
“We are working with technology in the forest, but no one wants to listen to us. You want to save the Amazon? Well, come and talk to us!” she said.
“I’m looking around at all these people here, and if I hadn’t brought my boyfriend I’d be the only indigenous person here,” she noted. Nodding in agreement, Mr. Lima promised that next year’s edition of the conference would include more indigenous speakers.
Web Summit Rio hit full capacity on Tuesday, with a total of 21,367 attendees from 91 countries. This is the first edition of the globally renowned tech summit to be held outside of Europe, having been hosted in Dublin and Lisbon since its inception. The Brazilian Report is in attendance at the event, hosting a series of panels throughout the week.
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