How Brazil’s Indigenous rights hinge on one tribe’s legal battle

Pushed into a degraded corner of their ancestral lands, the Xokleng people of southern Brazil anxiously await a Supreme Court ruling that could restore territory they lost decades ago. Sitting by a wood stove, Xokleng elders recall the days when plentiful fish and game fed their families, before the bulk of their fertile lands were sold by the state to tobacco farmers in the 1950s. Now the Xokleng pray that Brazilian courts will fulfil a dying shaman’s prophecy that they would one day win their lands back.