RIO DE JANEIRO – Last Sunday, seven representatives from Brazil’s Tupinambá de Olivença people welcomed home an ancient feather cloak that they regard not only as a sacred artifact, but as an ancestor.
“You’re lying down, but you’ll stand up,” said Jamopoty Tupinambá, a chief among the Indigenous people, addressing the cloak as a person in its own right, as reported by the Guardian.“We came to visit you.”
The seven Tupinambá representatives prayed and spoke to the cloak for 20 minutes, while outside some 200 other members of the tribe gathered.
“We spoke to him, and he responded,” Jamopoty said afterwards. “I don’t even have words. It’s the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”
The sacred Tupinambá de Olivença feather cloak [Niels Erik Jehrbo | Nationalmuseet]
The cloak will go on display to the public when Brazil’s National Museum reopens in April 2026. Until then, he will be accessible only to researchers and to representatives from the Indigenous communities who claim it. (Author’s note: out of respect for the Tupinambá, we refer to the cloak as “he” in this article.)
The cloak, which is a little under six feet long and made of 4,000 scarlet ibis feathers, has spent the past three centuries in European hands. He was first recorded in the collection of Frederick III, who reigned as king of Denmark and Norway between 1648 and 1670. How he came to Denmark originally is unknown, though he may have been taken from the Tupinambá by the Portuguese during their colonial occupation of modern Brazil, or by the Dutch, who occupied the state of Pernambuco, home of the Tupinambá, in the first half of the 17th century.
Since that time, he has resided in Denmark, most recently in Copenhagen’s National Museum. His return to Brazil and to the Indigneous communities there has been the result of a quarter century of demands for repatriation. The National Museum of Denmark had loaned the cloak for an exhibition in São Paulo, which was visited by Jamopoty’s mother and predecessor, Amotara, who called for him to be returned to the Tupinambá.
Amotara’s call for repatriation was not an isolated incident – it was part of a struggle for Indigenous recognition in Brazil. In 2000, the year of the São Paulo exhibition, the Tupinambá were not even officially recognized as an Indigneous tribe by the Brazilian government. Though they did obtain recognition the following year, even to this day the Tupinambá face resistance from forces in the government as they attempt to have their ancestral lands recognized, as reported by the BBC.
Jamopoty says that the cloak’s return heralds the need for her people to have their homeland mapped and acknowledged by the Brazilian government. “He said we must have our lands demarcated,” she claims.
The land demarcation issue is one of the major struggles in Brazilian politics. The Brazilian president, Luiz Lula da Silva, generally referred to as Lula, attended an unveiling ceremony for the cloak on Thursday at Brazil’s national museum. While there, he reaffirmed his commitment to the ability of Indigenous communities to make claims on their ancestral lands.
“I am in favor of the rights of the Indigenous peoples to their territory and culture, as established by the Constitution,” said President Lula. “Therefore, I am against the absurd idea of the limit on land claims.”
As The Wild Hunt reported in July, there is an ongoing struggle between Lula and the Brazilian legislature over an attempt to codify a time limit on Indigenous land claims, essentially stating that Indigenous groups must have been occupying the land after 1988, when the current Brazilian constitution was adopted.
As most Indigenous groups had been forced from their ancestral lands by European colonizers centuries before then, this would essentially nullify the ability of Indigenous groups to make land claims at all.
Agribusiness and other extractive industries have supported the legislature’s attempt to restrict Indigenous land claims, hoping to use Indigenous lands for profit.
The issue is currently before the Brazilian supreme court, which ruled in 2021 that the time limit was unconstitutional; it remains to be seen whether they will reaffirm this ruling now.
Just as the cloak is made of innumerable interwoven feathers, so too are the struggles of Indigenous people overlapping and intertwined. As they work to receive full domestic recognition from the Brazilian government, so too are they working to have their sacred objects returned to them after centuries of European pillaging.
“I felt sadness and joy,” Yakuy Tupinambá told the AFP News Agency, after traveling nearly 750 miles by bus to see the cloak. “A mixture between being born and dying.”
Europeans “put [the cloak] in a museum, as if it were a zoo, for art scholars to observe,” Yakuy continued. “Only our people communicate and engage with such a symbol.”
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