Project
A Retomada (The Revival)
The struggle of Indigenous people in Brazil to secure their fundamental rights
An English summary of this report is below. The original report, published in Portuguese on Rádio Novelo, follows
An Indigenous girl from the Suruí-Aikewara people was kidnapped by loggers from her village in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1960s, when she was 6 years old. She witnessed her 4-year-old brother being brutally killed in front of her. Soon after, she was taken to live with a family of Brazil nut collectors and forced to forget her language and her traditional customs.
The girl was given a non-Indigenous name: Goreth. She formed close bonds with that family, especially with the women, whom she came to see as her mother and grandmother. Over the years, she remained close to them until one day, as an adult in the 1980s, she told a priest about her kidnapping. She didn’t know where she came from, but the priest helped her discover her original village. Decades later, Goreth finally went back home.
Goreth became a guardian of the forest, a leader in the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), and a teacher. She began fighting for better educational conditions and, together with university professors from the region, managed to reopen the school in her village. On the day the school reopened, there was a huge celebration.
But the story doesn’t end there—not with the happy ending of someone who leaves and later returns to improve her community.
Goreth began to be discredited by her own people, the Suruí-Aikewara. Some members of the group said she had “lived too long among white people” to truly come back. She found herself in conflict: She didn’t want to deny her Indigenous past, nor her non-Indigenous one. Beyond the psychological scars, the kidnapping left her with a kind of birthmark—impossible to erase.
Right now, Goreth is moving back to her village, having to prove who she feels she is, without rejecting either her origins or her past. This story follows her journey and this moment in her life—a rare perspective on Indigenous people who were kidnapped as children and one day return home. A return that is not easy—neither for those who come back, nor for those who receive them.
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A volta de Goreth Suruí
Uma mulher refaz o caminho até o povo dela
Um alerta: esse episódio contém descrições de violências de vários tipos.
A tentativa de reconstruir uma identidade, 60 anos depois.
APRESENTAÇÃO ATO ÚNICO
A história do novo nome
Em meados dos anos 60, uma menina indígena foi raptada no meio da floresta amazônica, no Sul do Pará. Ela passou a viver com uma família de coletores de castanhas e, aos poucos, teve de deixar de lado a língua, os costumes, a origem. Mas ela sentia que, um dia, ela ia voltar. E isso de fato aconteceu: depois de décadas vivendo entre pessoas não-indígenas, ela finalmente conseguiu voltar pra sua aldeia. Só que não demorou a entender que não ia ser um retorno simples: nem pra ela, nem pra etnia que estava recebendo ela de volta.
Essa é a segunda história da série especial “A Retomada”, apoiada pelo Pulitzer Center, sobre direitos indígenas no Brasil. A primeira história da série foi publicada em setembro de 2025, no episódio “Ritos”, do Rádio Novelo Apresenta.
