At the Santuário dos Pajés in Brasília, shaman Márcia Guajajara presents herself as leader of the Land. The area has been demarcated, but the land title never arrives, and the territory remains disputed through maps, fences, and broken promises. Under pressure from developers and urban projects, the threat renews itself in invasions and intimidation. When arson attacks hit the territory and destroy the herbarium and nurseries, the aggression does not burn plants alone; it attempts to erase a living school, an archive of healing, and a possible future. Márcia starts again, makes new seedlings, rebuilds the herbarium, and insists in her daily life that preservation is not a slogan, it is routine.
The episode also follows Santixie Tapuia Guajajara, who speaks about growing up in the Santuário and facing bureaucracy just to exist with an Indigenous name. He recalls his father, the struggle for territorial rights, and his father’s death in the midst of that battle, linking this history to the continuity that is reborn with the reconstruction of the herbarium. In the legal field, Edelamare Barbosa Melo, Deputy Prosecutor General of Labor at the Federal Labor Prosecution Office and an Indigenous woman, translates what is essential: territory is life, and it is not negotiable.
In parallel, in Bahia, Renata Tupinambá and Majé Rívia Tupinambá describe another siege, now on the coast and coastal scrublands. Roads, tractors, condominiums, and hotels advance over areas where herbs and seeds were once gathered. What disappears from the ground disappears from the body, and the choice between staying at risk or retreating for safety appears in all its harshness. In the end, the episode holds on to a simple and unsettling idea: land is indeed to be preserved, but also to be worshipped.