The rescue of Wahutedew’á and the epistemological reforestation: an analysis of time in A terra dos mil povos, by Kaká Werá Jecupé

It is estimated that in 1500, the year the Portuguese arrived in America, there was a population of 2,431,000 inhabitants, according to historian John Hemming (1978), who occupied the lands that we now know as Brazil. These peoples had their own culture whose cosmology was destroyed and erased over time by a violent process of colonization. Even though entire groups were decimated, much of their influence is still alive in Brazilian culture. This influence can be found in vocabulary, cuisine, and even religious practices. With the aim of rescuing ancestral narratives and knowledge of various native peoples, Kaká Werá Jecupé (2022) launched A terra dos mil povos, a work that mixes historiographical, mythical elements, and oral narratives specific to the thousand peoples that the title exalts. This paper aims to identify the conceptions of time of indigenous peoples presented in A terra dos mil povos and show how this concept was used to fill the epistemological void left by the colonization process that imposed its own visions of temporality as one of the tools for dominating native peoples. To this end, a dialogue will be promoted between decolonial theorists, indigenous thinkers and the work of Jecupé, as well as his critical fortune. Throughout the text, this recovery of knowledge will be called epistemological reforestation, a term coined during the writing process of this article.