Um rio sem fim / A River without End: Book talk with author Verenilde Pereira

Thu, Oct 9, 2025, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm

144 Louis Simpson Building

A River Without End tells the story of Maria Assunção and Rosa Maria, Indigenous girls educated in a religious mission and taken to work in the homes of wealthy families in Manaus. From there, both are forced by these circumstances to forge their own paths toward freedom. Written by Verenilde S. Pereira, the novel recounts this experience precisely from the unprecedented perspective of the unthinkable. The Indigenous gaze, embodied in these two figures, that animates the spirit of the book is driven by a deep yearning for freedom, redemption, and redress, which remains relevant in the face of the challenges still confronting Indigenous peoples today.

Considered a pioneer of Afro-Indigenous fiction, Verenilde Pereira’s book was first published in 1998, remained hidden for 25 years, until it was discovered by the Brazil LAB researcher Rodrigo Simon de Moraes. now the novel returns in a new edition from Alfaguara. The novel grew out of the author’s master’s thesis in communication, making it a decolonial “research-fiction” in which the researcher’s subjectivity and the people’s collective experience merge into a living narrative.

Verenilde Pereira was born in 1956 in Amazonas, the daughter of a Black mother and a father from the Sateré Mawé people. She earned a degree in Journalism from the University of Amazonas and worked as a reporter specializing in Indigenous struggles for the leading newspapers in Manaus and Belém. Among other assignments, she covered the incursion of mining operations into Yanomami territory in Roraima and into the Alto Rio Negro region in Amazonas. As an activist, she participated in various Indigenous resistance movements and was part of Porantim, the first newspaper dedicated to Indigenous issues. She also taught at the Katipari rubber plantation on the Purus River in Amazonas, giving classes to riverine communities, Indigenous peoples, caboclos, and rubber tappers. Pereira holds a PhD in Communication and defended her dissertation, Violence and Journalistic Singularity: “The Massacre of the Calleri Expedition”, at the University of Brasília (UnB) in 2013. She has published essays, articles, and poetry, and is the author of the short story collection Not the Way It Happened (Thesaurus, 2002).

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Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies

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