In 2025, a small, indigenous nation that calls itself the “people of many colors” will go home for the first time in 80 years. Their return will drive a movement of indigenous peoples across the Amazon rainforest fighting for legal titles to their ancestral territories, and winning. These victories will have global significance.
The Siekopai lived for centuries along what is now the border between Ecuador and Peru in the western Amazon. In the 1500s, they were a powerful civilization with their own unique varieties of corn and an army capable of defeating the Portuguese conquerors and stopping their advance. Later, however, they were decimated by disease, enslaved by rubber