The Falling Sky as Cosmopolitical Warfare: Eschatological scenes of an Ancestral Catastrophe in Brazil

Brazil’s increase in ecological catastrophes is directly associated with the permanence of ancestral colonization dispositifs in governing territories and populations—especially among the poorest, most peripheral, and racialized. From the perspective of the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, the Falling of the Brazilian Sky—our climate apocalypse—has its cosmopolitical origins in the colonial invasion of Amerindian territories by the “napë” [white men] and the extractive violence of the “people of the commodity.” Based on the ethnographic description of what would come to be considered one of the greatest environmental crime-disasters in the modern history of mining industries in the world, the collapse of the iron ore tailings mine in the city of Mariana (Minas Gerais, Brazil), I aim to create a critique dialogue between Process Philosophy, Philosophy of Multiplicity, Amerindian cosmologies, and Black Feminist Theory to explore the state of cosmopolitical conflict observed in Brazilian ecological catastrophes.