Indigenous Women on the Frontlines of Climate Activism: The Battle for Environmental Justice in the Amazon

Malcolm McNee is associate professor and chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Smith College, where he teaches Portuguese and a range of interdisciplinary humanities topics in Afro-Luso-Brazilian studies. He is author of The Environmental Imaginary in Brazilian Poetry and Art (2014), which examines a range of artistic responses to environmental change and vulnerability in contemporary Brazil, from efforts to connect art with activism to conceptually oriented interrogations of ideas of nature, place-making, and ecology. He is currently working on an anthology of Brazilian environmental writing in translation and coediting a volume on ecology and contemporary Indigenous thought in Brazil.

Elena Langdon has been a professional translator and interpreter since 2001. She holds a master’s degree in translation studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is certified as a Portuguese-to-English translator by the American Translators Association. Elena grew up in southern Brazil and feels a deep connection to Native peoples everywhere, perhaps in part because as a child, her anthropologist parents told her cosmology tales of the Siona and Barasana people as bedtime stories.