"If the earth is mother, it's time to listen to her": in Pará, quilombola women sow climate justice with ancestral knowledge.

In the Amazon, CEDENPA strengthens Black communities through knowledge, listening, and resistance, where memory, body, and territory walk hand in hand.

In the Abacatal quilombo, the land is not a commodity: it is mother, life, memory. There, on the outskirts of the city of Belém-PA, Black women keep alive a history of more than 300 years of resistance. They face floods, evictions, large-scale projects, and the neglect of the State. But they have never been alone. Since 1980, they have walked alongside CEDENPA (Center for Studies and Defense of Black People of Pará), an organization founded by Black women that, as Nilma Bentes defines it, built itself "half capoeira": rising, retreating, always starting again standing.

The strength of CEDENPA is not in ready-made formulas. It is in listening, in the knowledge that springs from life and returns to it. In the primers, meetings, and training sessions held with those who live in the territory and by those who care for it. It is in the elders who teach, in the young women who continue learning. And it is, above all, in the quilombola women, who have faced environmental racism long before it had a name:

“The words may be new, but the violation is old,” summarizes Roberta Sodré, a member of the CEDENPA youth collective.

Abacatal is a living example of this struggle. Even surrounded by violence and attempts at erasure, the quilombo continues to resist with song, with farming, with memory. Women like Vanuza Cardoso denounce the violations and reaffirm their belonging:

“We are heirs to this land.”

For them, territory is sacred. It is land that holds knowledge and nourishes the body and spirit.