The life of the Xingu river in emerging data assemblages

How does one keep a river alive? For the Juruna-Yudjá, an indigenous group in the Brazilian state of Pará, the issue is at the heart of their concern with data. Not that data ever mattered too much in their dealings with other beings in the landscape known as "Volta Grande do Xingu". However, this changed in 2015, when Norte Energia, the company who runs the Belo Monte Dam, obtained a license to operate that allowed it to divert up to 80% of the water from the Xingu river into its run-of-the-river hydroelectric system. The amount of water that the company released downstream was referenced on the so called "Consensus Hydrograph", which predicted water levels way below the average annual flow.

The non consensual and highly disputed hydrograph led to what the Juruna called the "theft of the Xingu water". In order to fight it they decided to start producing data that countered those presented by the company in its technical reports for environmental agencies and investors. The Volta Grande do Xingu Observatory was thus formed, a network of indigenous and non-indigenous researchers dedicated to the independent monitoring of the impacts of Belo Monte in the life of the river. The collaboration reaffirmed the need for indigenous and traditional communities to become co-producers of data in impact assessments of infrastructure projects.

If in the first stages of the independent monitoring the aim was to counter the consensus hydrograph, in the following years the Juruna were keen to develop an alternative "Piracema hydrograph" that would provide enough water to enable the fish to swim upstream for spawning. This next step depended on getting even more experts on board in the war for water, a dispute around data that would ultimately determine the survival or death of the Xingu river. Researchers associated with different universities and areas of knowledge, such as biology, ichthyology, geology, archeology, anthropology, and hydrosedimentology, collaborated in the analysis of the technical data provided by Norte Energia on orbital remote sensing, two-dimensional hydrodynamic mathematical modeling and biotic studies. In August 2022, they presented their report at the request of the Federal Prosecutor at the Ministério Público Federal (MPF), along with the suggestion that a Provisional Hydrograph be applied while additional studies were carried out so as to guarantee that in the meantime the ecosystems of Volta Grande do Xingu were not lost. They also suggested that a panel of experts be formed to assess the effect of interannual climate variability and climate change on the flow of the Xingu River, as well as to plan the continuous monitoring of the impact of flow reduction in the region. Data has now definitely become an intrinsic part of the assemblage that sustains the life of the river.

Even though the Juruna-Yudjá hardly frame the data politics they have been forcibly immersed into as an issue of “data justice”, their struggle speaks to the increasing importance of data practices in social movements' strategic actions. Concepts such as data justice and data activism are defined in such broad terms that they bring together experiences whose approach to data is conceived in very different terms. In contexts where the process of datafication pervades more intensely people's lives, a lot of the discussion around data justice seem to revolve around surveillance, individual rights, racism and algorithms, and other issues that are at the core of disputes on data technology per se. In the case of the Juruna, data is seen as a means to achieve other more pressing ends, such as the survival of the Xingu river. Highlighting the differences between these forms of activism might help delineate more clearly the particularities of emerging data assemblages, and reaffirm the role of data collaborations in contexts of environmental and indigenous struggles.