Music, Dance, and Testimony: The Living Voice of the Amazon!

In our climate change project, music and dance are not simply cultural expressions, they are vital forms of knowledge, memory, and resistance. Within Indigenous communities of the Amazon, songs and movements embody ancestral teachings about rivers, forests, animals, and the cosmos. They carry ecological wisdom passed down through generations, transforming lived experience into rhythm and performance. When music is sung and dance is performed, they are not entertainment but testimony: a way of narrating history, affirming identity, and claiming rights over threatened territories.

In all our methodologies and research meetings, music, dance, and body paint are central tools. They create spaces of mutual respect and cultural recognition, breaking down barriers between researchers and communities. Through these practices, collaboration becomes embodied, emotional, and symbolic, strengthening trust and ensuring that research is conducted on Indigenous terms.

The role of Indigenous testimonies in this research is equally powerful. Stories told by elders, leaders, and youth reveal the daily realities of water scarcity, food insecurity, and the accelerating impacts of climate change. Yet they also speak of resilience, solidarity, and alternative futures grounded in reciprocity with the land. By listening to these voices alongside the beats of drums, chants, dances, and the painting of bodies, we understand climate change not as an abstract crisis of numbers and charts, but as a lived experience inscribed in bodies, sounds, and landscapes.

Music, dance, body paint, and testimony together form a political act of presence. They challenge the silence of erasure, demand recognition in climate negotiations, and invite the world to imagine solutions based not only on science and technology, but also on ancestral wisdom and embodied knowledge. Through them, Indigenous peoples are not objects of study, but protagonists of global climate justice.