We’e’ena Tikuna grew up hearing her grandfather’s stories of slavery.

When he was young, the substance of choice to extract from his people’s piece of the rainforest was latex. The men who invaded the land called it “white gold.”

Like many Indigenous people living in the Brazilian Amazon from the late 1800s up until the first half of the 20th century, O’i Tikuna was forced to help them tap Pará rubber trees, letting the sticky, milky liquid run into small metal buckets and then to be exported and sold. A commodity in high demand ever since the Industrial Revolution, its popularity resurged during WWII.