July 2025 Blog post: Honouring Cacique Raoni: a recognition that resonates with PREFER

On 2 June 2025, the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ) awarded an honorary doctorate to Cacique Raoni Metuktire, the Kayapó leader whose decades-long struggle for the Amazon rainforest and the rights of Indigenous peoples needs little introduction.

The ceremony took place at Versailles City Hall. Raoni, unable to travel, was represented by his grandson, Cacique Tau Metuktire.

This event was not part of PREFER. Still, it connects quite directly with some of the questions and ambitions that drive our research.

The story began when Gert-Peter Bruch, founder of the French NGO Planète Amazone, approached me with the idea of having Raoni recognised by the university. At his request, I proposed Raoni’s name for an honorary doctorate. The university, its board, and its president, took up the proposal, and what followed was a collaboration between Planète Amazone, UVSQ, CEARC and the PREFER project team that eventually made the ceremony possible.

For me, the connection with PREFER is not simply that Raoni has spent much of his life confronting threats to the Amazon and to the Kayapó people. It goes somewhat deeper.

PREFER is concerned with threats to the continuity of worlds: not just the loss of places, resources or livelihoods, but also the possible disappearance of ways of living, knowing, relating and making sense of existence. Raoni’s struggle speaks to precisely these concerns. It is about defending a forest, certainly, but also about defending the possibility for a people to continue living in a world that remains their own.

One moment of the ceremony particularly struck me. Cacique Tau spoke about the importance of preserving the narratives of Kayapó elders, of ensuring that their stories and knowledge are not lost with them. This was another, perhaps even more direct, connection with PREFER. Collecting narratives is central to our work, not because stories are merely sources of information, but because they carry understandings of what matters, what is threatened and what deserves to continue.

Of course, preserving narratives is not quite the same as preserving the worlds in which they make sense. Nor is recording them a guarantee that the knowledge they carry will remain alive. This is one of the difficulties we encounter in our own research, and one worth keeping in mind.

There is also something worth reflecting upon in a university awarding an honorary doctorate to an Indigenous leader. Academic institutions have their own ways of deciding what counts as knowledge, who is entitled to produce it and whose voice deserves recognition. Honouring Raoni does not resolve these questions. But it does, at least for a moment, open a space in which they can be asked differently.

Finally, when discussing possible future collaborations, Cacique Tau expressed the need to work on preserving the narratives carried by Kayapo elders. I was then invited by Cacique Tau to conduct fieldwork in this new and promising field site. This will be an important opportunity to further develop our relationship with Planète Amazone and its founder, Gert Peter Bruch.