São João das Missões lies in the far north of Minas Gerais, in the sertão - the dry interior scrubland that Brazilians associate with droughts, cattle drives, and the musical storytelling of repentistas. The municipality sits 21 kilometers southwest of Manga, a port town on the São Francisco River, the great inland waterway that drains nearly a seventh of Brazil. To the south, the land rises into Cavernas do Peruaçu National Park, a limestone karst country of caves and rock art. Januária is the nearest regional center. The elevation in São João das Missões is 501 meters; the climate is tropical and the rainfall is unreliable, which is part of why only 2,000 of the municipality's 16,154 hectares of farmland were actually in crops when the last agricultural census reached here.

The Xacriabá have a long and documented history of fighting to keep their land. In the eighteenth century, the Portuguese crown granted them a reserve - one of the few indigenous land grants in colonial Brazil. In the twentieth century, cattle ranchers and loggers encroached anyway. In 1987, Xacriabá leader Rosalino Gomes de Oliveira was assassinated by gunmen hired in a land dispute; the federal government, embarrassed, formally demarcated the reserve in 1987 and expanded it in 2003. Today the Xacriabá Indigenous Territory covers more than 50,000 hectares spread across São João das Missões and neighboring municipalities. Twenty-one aldeias - villages - scatter through the sertão, each with its own school teaching in Portuguese and in the revitalized Xacriabá language. Artemisa Xakriabá, born in the reserve, became an internationally known climate and indigenous rights activist, speaking at the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019 when she was nineteen. She is from here.

Statistics flatten the texture of a place. Still, a few from São João das Missões land hard: 861 rural producers on 16,154 hectares, with cropland on only 2,000 of them. Fourteen thousand head of cattle in 2006. Eighty-nine automobiles in 2007 - roughly one car for every 121 residents. Three public health clinics and zero hospitals. No banks in the urban area. The Municipal Human Development Index of 0.595 put São João das Missões 840th out of 853 municipalities in Minas Gerais in 2000, and 4,760th out of 5,138 in Brazil. That ranking does not describe a failure; it describes what it costs to live in the sertão when you are indigenous and the national economy was built on your dispossession. What the numbers leave out is also real: the Xacriabá are still here, still speaking their language, still running their own schools, still writing their own names onto the map.