First Person: A life dedicated to indigenous rights in Brazil
Joenia Wapixana With a law degree from the Federal University of Roraima, Ms. Wapixana has been advocating on behalf of indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon since the 1990s.
In 2018, at the end of a long campaign, financed at the grassroots level by crowdfunding, she became the first indigenous woman elected to Brazil’s federal parliament.
In that same year, she was awarded the UN Human Rights Prize, a high profile award whose previous winners have included Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela.
After taking the “Raposa Serra do Sol” land dispute to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Wapixana became the first indigenous lawyer to argue and win a case before the Supreme Court of Brazil.
