With rights under threat, Brazil's indigenous run for office

The number of indigenous Brazilians running for office has surged this year at a time when many feel their cultures and lands are more threatened than they have been in decades.

At least 120 indigenous people are running in Sunday's elections for offices at state and federal levels. While that's a tiny fraction of the more than 25,000 people running overall, it's a 60 per cent increase over the number of candidates in the last elections in 2014, the first year in which authorities collected information about candidates' ethnicities.

"We're tired of being invisible. We're tired of people speaking for us. We want a voice," said Airy Gaviao, an indigenous candidate for the local legislature in the capital of Brasilia.

Only one indigenous person has ever been elected to Brazil's Congress: Mario Juruna from the Xavante people, who served one term in the 1980s.

It's unclear if any of this year's candidates can end that drought, though widespread anger at Brazil's traditional ruling class could favor candidates perceived as outsiders.

Less than 1 per cent of Brazilians around 790,000 count themselves as indigenous, their numbers decimated by disease and oppression following the arrival of Europeans and African slaves whose descendants now make up the majority of the country's current population.

Many of the more than 300 distinct indigenous peoples live at the margins of society. Some reside on isolated land reserves much the way their ancestors did, while others dwell in impoverished urban pockets.

As a whole, they are poorer and less literate than the general population and face continuing prejudice.

But indigenous people have played a growing role in Brazil's larger culture since the country's return to democracy in the 1980s.

The increased political participation seen now may also be one of the dividends of policies such as quotas and scholarships that improved indigenous people's access to universities in the mid-2000s, said Luis Roberto de Paula, a social anthropologist who has studied the issue.

It also reflects fears that their cultures and lands are under serious threat. Many indigenous lands are fertile and hold native forests or rich mines that have prompted farmers, ranchers, loggers and miners to try to open them to development sometimes by force.

"We can't protect our communities from being invaded. So, what we see is that the state doesn't represent us at any level," said David Karai Popygua, a 30-year-old teacher and a leader in the Indigenous Land of Jaragua, a group of traditional settlements on the outskirts of Sao Paulo.

"And that is why we need to participate in the elections."