Xingu Indigenous Territory

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A large demarcated indigenous territory in northern Mato Grosso, created in 1961 as the first reserve of its kind in Brazil and home to more than a dozen peoples of different language families. It is the most legible piece of evidence in the basin for what demarcation does, because the agricultural frontier reached it and stopped. On satellite imagery the territory appears as a block of continuous forest with a hard edge, surrounded by soy and pasture that runs up to the boundary and no further - an outline visible from orbit that is a legal line rather than a physical one. Its headwater position matters too: the streams that form the Xingu river rise in the cleared land to the south, so the territory's water quality is decided outside it. Protecting a forest does not protect a watershed.