WATERS AND MOVEMENTS: waters and movements: indigenous women, the environment and political organization in the context of the Mendonça Indigenous Territory
Waters; indigenous women; Mendonça Territory; Rio Grande do Norte; indigenous peoples of the Northeast
The thesis deals with indigenous women, the environment and political organization, in the context of the indigenous peoples in the State of Rio Grande do Norte (RN), which correspond to forms of perception, relationship, conflicts and demands for water, based on the ethnographic study in Mendonça Territory in the semi-arid landscape. From the narratives, knowledge, practices, backgrounds and experiences of indigenous women, throughout movements between water sources, places, communities, territories and organizational spaces, the study presents hydrosocial relationships from the perspective of daily movement and territorial engagement. This way, concepts and categories such as water, scarcity, land, territory, landscape, water landscape, water inequality and water injustice are instrumental in apprehending the relationships driven by the presence and absence of water. Throughout the text, the hydrosocial relations mediated by water-land, water-places, water-State and water-territory are highlighted, with water-women being transversal and complementary, because it presents territorialized engagements and forms of resistance of women that enable the maintenance of life in the Mendonça Indigenous Territory.