Nũhũ yãg mũ yõg hãm: This Land Is Our Land!

Fruit of a collaboration between Maxakali and non-Indigenous filmmakers, Nũhũ yãg mũ yõg hãm—literally, “this land is our land”—creates an alternative system of audiovisual cartography to give shape‚ both physical and mythical, to the Tikmũ’ũn territory, which is now confined to three portions of land in the northeast of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Shot in inner Brazil, on a small reservation known for its fairly restricted access to water, Nũhũ yãg mũ yõg hãm travels on foot, following the Tikmũ’ũn as they share their physical, historical, and mythological understanding of space. The film devotes equal attention to the portions of land stolen by farmers; the memory of relatives murdered by white men, alluding to a living history of struggle; and the ancestral stories that expand the territory far beyond the present, accumulating different names across generations and blessing the prosaic with magic.