Conversation with Txai Suruí and Eliane Brum

Postponing the End of the World

The activist and youth leader Txai Suruí speaks with the journalist and writer Eliane Brum about the resistance of Indigenous peoples in their struggle against extractivism, deforestation, and enormous fires.

An activist of the Suruí people, who live in one of Brazil’s most devastated Amazonian states, Txai Suruí became the most internationally influential young Brazilian activist when she gave an unforgettable speech at the COP26 summit in which she upheld Indigenous ideas of “postponing the end of the world”. Since then, her voice has been heard in spaces of Western power, calling for solidarity with the bodies that literally act as a bastion against the destruction of the rainforest and prevent the climate crisis from escalating.

Txai Suruí speaks with Eliane Brum about the struggle of young people who are trying to combat the climate crisis in Brazil, and about the resistance of Indigenous communities against extractivism, deforestation, enormous fires, and about bodies that make it possible to postpone the end of the world.