Oráculo is a project of the life work of Naine Terena de Jesus. “It is built upon the logic of Indigenous thought,” she says. “The world of the non-Indigenous exists in separate, distinct boxes; for the Indigenous this division does not exist. Life is all intertwined: the creation of children, working, and daily life are connected. There is no way to separate one thing from another. I would say that binarism is typical of a philosophical thought, where something is this or that. However, Indigenous peoples place themselves in a “while this there is that.” There is a famous phrase that says, “I can be who you are without ceasing to be what I am.”

De Jesus is from the Terena peoples of Mato Grosso do Sul, the state in Brazil that acts most violently against Indigenous peoples: in 2016 alone, over one hundred Terena have died. Naine Terena de Jesus is an artist and a militant defender of Indigenous knowledge and culture in the face of the violent colonial situation of Brazil. For her master thesis, instead of researching Western art, de Jesus returned to her reservation, Limão Verde, and wrote on the most symbolic Terena cultural manifestation there, the Emu Dance, which she takes as a point of departure for a study on the everyday, memory, and the resistance by the Terena people of the genocide policies of the Brazilian government. This work has now become a theater play and is shown locally.

Naine Terena de Jesus holds a PhD in education and is one of the few Indigenous academics to do so in Brazil due to racist educational policies. While living in an urban marginalized periphery, de Jesus organized youth from different ethnic communities into a theater group where she wrote and directed plays for ten years. Today, Oráculo gives workshops on the Theater of the Oppressed approach developed by Augusto Boal, most recently in conjunction with MTS (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra), Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement. Oráculo participates in, and documents, demonstrations for Indigenous rights throughout Brazil while also giving talks on technology and Indigenous communities, on Indigenous women, Indigenous media, land struggles and on the oppression of the LGBTQ community in Brazil. Oráculo was a consultant for the Sao Paulo Biennale of 2016, is implementing creative economics such as bio- jewelry in various Indigenous communities, and is developing an app for learning the Terena language. Oráculo has also supported or co-organized events by Indigenous communities especially for women such as the Sarau (meeting) of Indigenous women in the city of Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso, while at the same time seeking sponsorship for Gavião Kyikatêjê Futebol Club, the only all Indigenous professional soccer team in Brazil.

Oráculo, in conjunction with the Ministry of Culture, produced a series of Visual Diaries which returned anthropological research to Indigenous communities in three regions in Brazil. Oráculo has engaged psychologists and brought them to the reservation to work together with local healers in developing a program for Indigenous youth at risk. Oráculo also participates in retomadas, the reclaiming of ancestral land by Terena people, a situation fraught with violence exerted by local authorities and non-Indigenous land owners.

It is unusual for an Indigenous person to be included in an event, academic or otherwise, organized by the non-Indigenous that focuses on what might be perceived to be a non-Indigenous topic, that is unrelated to specifically Indigenous issues. And yet, in 2017, Naine Terena de Jesus was invited to present at the First Symposium of Psychology and Social Commitment of the Silvia Lane Institute at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. There she explained how Brazilian society could have learned from the Terena deep medical insights and understanding, for instance about post-partum depression and traditional treatments for it. Instead, Terena society was almost destroyed and Brazilians discovered these cures only centuries later.

Oráculo is the life work project of Naine Terena de Jesus. A work that responds to the needs of her community with an expansive set of means and skills which she acquired from her community and the academy. It requires that she constantly develops new skills to actively respond to urgent situations. This life work not only engages militantly to fight for and guarantee land rights and cultural as well as physical survival, but through performative works and discussions also challenges the non-Indigenous community to dialogue with the Indigenous peoples of Brazil. As Naine Terena de Jesus says, “Our cosmology allows us to travel between heaven and earth, the enchantments and enchanted, and among enemies. The focus of my production is memory and resilience. For this I am not limited to one role: a visual artist or a filmmaker or a writer or a theater director. I am all that my existence will become: artist, scientist, professional. I am what I can capture and use, from the simplest to the most complex.”