The way forward must be collective: A tribute to Marielle Ramires

The way forward must be collective.
There is no other choice but to gather people and build movements. 

— Marielle Ramires  

I remember vividly meeting with Marielle – Mari - for the first time. Her collective, Mídia NINJA, was supporting Brazilian Indigenous Peoples to get visibility for their campaigns. I was struck by how trusting Indigenous leaders seemed to be of her. Mari, right from the start, inspired me by her positivity, her constant smile, her calm energy, her confidence in a brighter future.  

It was right during the dreadful Bolsonaro years.  

“Let’s collaborate”, she told me one evening, “we want to know more about what’s happening in Europe”.  

Back then, the European Union was strongly positioning itself as a world leader in the fight against climate change and had come up with the European Green Deal strategy. Many NGOs, including Fern, seized this opportunity to turn their solutions into policies.  

Mari thought that informing Brazilian audiences about those developments could help them see beyond Bolsonaro’s bleak administration. It could act as an inspiration.  

So many times, I’ve seen her instilling hope. She did so by creating connexions. In a way, she was a visionary, always finding paths for resilience and ways to grow stronger. “There is hope, even in the most desolate landscapes,” she wrote. 

And so we started working together. “Let’s try and see what will happen,” she said at the beginning. Mari was about creating the conditions for beautiful things to materialise. We don’t know exactly where we’re going, but we’re going there together, hoping to be happily surprised.  

This was quite a departure from my “Western” way of doing things: everything needs to be planned out, monitored, actionable, reportable. Mari helped me understand why the path is more important than the end-result.  

“You know, we’ll come stronger out of the Bolsonaro era”, she once told me, only a few months away from the end of Bolsonaro’s term. Faced with the kind of adversity they hadn’t seen in decades, Brazilian civil society organisations, activists, movements, stuck together, facing the storm collectively. Mari, and other “Ninjas”, helped create connections between different struggles, including internationally. In a way, I only got the chance to meet her thanks to this core vision. 

In mid-May 2025, a gathering for peoples and forests will take place, bringing together, for the first time, forest activists from all over the world. This is a direct result of “seeing what will happen”. Mari first told me about her idea for a gathering in 2021 so when a similar idea emerged within Fern, I immediately knew that the “Ninjas” could help bring it to life. In a few weeks, it will be a reality.

It devastates me to know that Mari will not be there to see it, but also incredibly proud to know that this is her direct legacy.  

I don’t know what will come out of this event, but I know for sure that new connections will help “build paths of healing”, as she eloquently wrote in one of her last writings. 

Hasta Siempre Mari. You’ll continue to live in us for the decades to come.

 

In a time of crisis, we have to be able to imagine new ways of relating to each other, new ways of being together, new ways of struggling together.

— Angela Davis

_{This piece was written by Pierre-Jean Sol Brasier.}