When they closed their eyes, the Bakairi people of the Santana Indigenous Territory in Brazil heard a sound similar to rain in the forest. It was reminiscent of a summer storm, the kind that arrives suddenly and drenches the vast Cerrado savanna. But instead of water, it was fire. The flames spread across the 73,000-hectare Indigenous territory in the municipality of Nobres, Mato Grosso state, burning trees, animals, medicinal plants, and everything else in their way. “A machine caught fire in the farm near the territory. The owners couldn’t control it, so it spread to our area,” says Edna Rodrigues Bakairi, a 39-year-old educator. As the fire advanced, the community waited for the authorities — municipal, state or federal — to authorize fire brigades to start containing the flames. “During that wait, the fire arrived and destroyed everything here,” Edna says. The incident, in 2018, left deep scars and forced the Bakairi to seek their own response. A community brigade was born from those ashes, and over the next six years it has prevented large-scale fires on the land. The difference from other Indigenous-led fire brigades? The prominence of women: of the 45 volunteers trained by a retired firefighter, 25 are women. Tragedy amid a national crisis It was Paulo Selva, a retired colonel from the Mato Grosso state fire department, who came up with a project to strengthen socioenvironmental resilience in the Bakairi community. He says he didn’t believe the official system could handle all the demands. “The fire…This article was originally published on Mongabay