Five Centuries of Indigenous Resistance Impeded Deforestation in South America 

Indigenous resistance in South America has significantly slowed deforestation for centuries, impacting global environmental history.

A new study published in the Journal of Global History uncovers the role of Indigenous resistance in slowing tropical deforestation across South America from the 1500s to the present. Coordinated by Freg J. Stokes (Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology) and co-authored by Indigenous researchers Sandra Benites and Uraan Anderson Suruí, along with international scholars, the investigation highlights the importance of Indigenous actions in global environmental history.

Drawing on colonial archives and satellite imagery analysis, combined with Guaraní and Paiter Suruí oral histories, the study examines two critical biomes — the Atlantic Rainforest and the Amazon. It finds that centuries of Indigenous resistance — from armed defence and strategic retreat to economic sabotage and selective political alliances — obstructed European colonial expansion and commodity frontiers, preserving significant stretches of forest. This interpretation challenges a number of previous studies that have claimed that the post-invasion collapse of Indigenous populations drove subsequent forest regrowth.

“Over the long-term, Indigenous peoples have conserved South America’s forests not by dying, but by living,” says Stokes. “Their resistance is not only a regional struggle, but a material force with a planetary ecological impact.”

In the Atlantic Rainforest of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, Guaraní- and Macro-Jê-speaking peoples successfully defended large territories for centuries, creating ecological buffer zones that delayed deforestation. The decentralised social structure of these groups was key to their success. In the western Amazon, other decentralised Indigenous societies such as the Ashaninka, the Shuar and the Ava-Guaraní resisted early Spanish incursions, frustrating attempts to establish new mining frontiers. On the northeast edge of the Amazon, in the Guianas, Kalina and Arawak groups strategically played off different European factions against each other, preventing any one colonial force establishing dominance in the region. These actions, the authors argue, had lasting effects on the pace, direction, and geography of deforestation.

The research emphasises that Indigenous cosmologies, as seen in the Guaraní concept of the “body-territory,” underpin sustainable Indigenous relationships with forests today. The authors note that current Indigenous territories are now some of the last strongholds preventing runaway deforestation, storing vast amounts of aboveground carbon critical to stabilising the global climate.

“This history shows that Indigenous resistance against colonisation has been a powerful environmental force not just recently, but for half a millennium,” says co-author Uraan Anderson Suruí, a Paiter Suruí scholar. “Supporting Indigenous land rights is an essential part of combating the current global ecological crisis.”