I am Glicéria de Jesus da Silva, also known as Glicéria Tupinambá or Célia Tupinambá. I live in the Indigenous territory of Tupinambá de Olivença in the south of Bahia, Brazil. I am a member of the Indigenous rights movement, I fight to defend my territory and my community, and if I know what I am today, it is because of my territory.

In 2010, because of the struggle for the defense of our lands, I was taken to prison. One day, while being held there, there was a rebellion and we stayed in the courtyard during the night. There was a child there, who was one year and two months old, and when the night came he looked up at the sky and saw the stars. He started to call the people around him to see it, and all of a sudden, when no one was paying attention, he began to dance to the stars. He would spin and jump trying to catch them. I also had my son in my arms, he was just a few months old. While I was there, watching that child discovering the sky for the first time, I realized how much had been taken away from us. They even colonized the sky. I started to ask myself: how is our sky? How is the sky of my people? How is the sky of Indigenous peoples? This question stayed with me. Later, I started to develop and work with the Tupinambá mantle. The mantle also speaks and in a dream it said to me that the mantle was a gift from heaven to the earth, that it held this connection. And while I was making the mesh of the mantle, I realized that mesh is also the mesh of the sky, it is the network of the stars. And so, I observed and looked for that sky even more, every day.

Since I was a child, I had always heard that the encantados (ancestral entities) come through a branch of the stars. I had also heard that it was necessary to look at the sky to know if it was going to rain or for how long the rain would last. For everything, the elders told us to look to the sky. As a child, I didn’t understand it. I looked at the stars and I didn’t understand that the dimming of their brightness symbolized that it was going to rain. When I managed to understand that the stars had this connection to our territory and our knowledge, I decided to return to that knowledge. Because it is important not only in taking back our name, but to look at the function that that knowledge has in the world. This notion was not lost with the older ones.

Travellers and priests through time have recorded the Tupinambá sky. They wrote about the constellation Tuibaé or The Old Man with His Staff. For the Tupinambás, he symbolized the creation of humanity. It was him who carved the first human out of trees. The trees donated the material and he carved us out with his staff. Then, he handed over the mission to continue the creation of humanity to the pajé [shaman], and left to live amongst the stars. He is also an important guide for time demarcation. Besides Tuibaé, there are other constellations such as Tapir’s Path, the rhea, the deer, and several other animal representations. Indeed, the earth is represented in the sky.

The constellation known in Brazil as Três Marias, in the Tupinambá language, would be Joykexo. These three stars represent fertility as well as the path of souls and death. They take care of life from its beginning to its end. The elders always spoke of these three stars and they looked at them, prayed to them, and asked them for information. When a season begins to change, they will say whether it’s going to rain or going to be sunny. We must look to the stars to see what the climate will be. This is fundamental to us because we do not depend on any technology other than these teachings passed down from the elderly. The Tapir’s Path constellation is what guided people through their journeys and helped them to go from one place to another. In that time, they did not have maps, it was through and with the sky that people walked. The stars were a map, a guide, a path.

Every day I try to get closer to these stars, to know them better, to understand them better, to understand their function. Because it’s not just a part, but it’s a whole. The constellations that appear in our sky also represent our encantados. They are the ones that bring me closer to the mantle, closer to the stars. And I would like for other people to hear this, to be able to understand that there is another sky. I bring these stars in the form of a natural fibre, coconut fibre. As Tuibaé, the old man with his staff, did when using the materials donated by the trees, I asked permission to represent, with care and respect, the Tupinambá sky, the encantados, and our stars. This work is an invitation to look at the sky in another way, from another angle, with another gaze. Like that child who looked at the sky for the first time, who danced to the stars, who tried to hold them in his hand. So I invite each one, each person, to see this sky, and to look for their own.

Glicéria Tupinambá
Serra do Padeiro, 23 January 2023

Translation by Túlio Rosa