Ancestral Waters

Brazil, 2012

I followed this young girl into the Xingú River late one afternoon as all the children from the Kayapó village of A’ukre descended into the cooling waters for an evening swim.  The way the light filtered through the forest and bounced off the cobalt surface of the river illuminated the delicate patterns on her face. The expression she wore was bright and innocent, perhaps unaware of the terrible fate awaiting the river that has sustained her community for generations; the construction of the sinister dam being built upstream that threatened her very existence, was almost too much to bear.