‘A legend for our people’: Inside an Indigenous activist’s death in Brazil

Uruçuca, Brazil – Mukunã Pataxó remembers his aunt began to sing moments before the gunfire rang out.

Maria de Fátima Muniz, 52, was a spiritual leader among the Pataxó Hã-Hã-Hãe, an Indigenous group in northeastern Brazil. A short, serious woman with dark, shoulder-length hair, she was known to lead her people in prayer and song, her voice deep and steady.

But on January 21, that voice could not quell the violence about to erupt in the rolling green hills outside Potiraguá, a…