Have You Ever Seen a River Stop? Panel Discussion

Olinda Muniz Silva Wanderley (1989), from the Tupinambá and Pataxó Hãhãhãe peoples, is a journalist, filmmaker and activist. She writes and edits the Pau Brasil Notícias blog and is the coordinator of the Kaapora Project, created in 2016 with the scope of environmental education and reforestation in the Pataxó Hãhãhãe area. As a filmmaker, Olinda’s work for the project is dedicated to environmentally recover her people’s lands taking the indigenous cosmovision as a magnifying glass. Following the production of various documentaries, Kaapora – O chamado das matas (The forest calling) is her first fiction/ documentary movie and has been exhibited in ethnomedia circles as well as internationally and in Véxoa, the exhibition curated by Naine Terena. She is also the curator of various Indigenous Film Festivals in Brazil.

The Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB) has existed in Brazil since 1991. The movement denounces the construction of dams as energy models and their impact on community's lives, underlining the need for the State to create a national policy that would guarantee, in law, the rights of those affected by dams. The organization has exposed the specific impacts of dams in women's lives and promoted the need for women's participation in decision-making spaces, building conditions to accelerate processes of female protagonism within the movement. MAB featured and collaborated in the making of Carolina Caycedo's film O Rio and her long term project Be Dammed.

Glenn H. Shepard Jr. is an ethnobotanist, medical anthropologist, photographer and filmmaker who has worked with diverse indigenous peoples of Latin America, especially in Amazonia. He earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton University and completed his doctorate in Medical Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. He has published over a hundred research articles on topics including ethnobiology, traditional medicine, sensory anthropology, community resource management, visual anthropology and the territorial rights of isolated peoples. His writing has also appeared in The Common, The Millions, Broad Street, Popula and The New York Review of Books. His work in the Amazon has been featured in news stories in National Geographic (2016), The New Yorker (2016, 2019), and the Financial Times (2019). He has participated in the production of several films, including the Emmy-Award-winning documentary, Spirits of the Rainforest, as well as Zapatista Moon. He is a tenured staff researcher in the Human Sciences Division at the Goeldi Museum in Belém, Brazil, where he curated the ethnographic collections from 2009-2013 and co-chaired the Division from 2014-2016. Since 2010, he has collaborated in the training of indigenous Kayapó film makers, as portrayed in a new exhibit he helped curate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.