This post is part of our special coverage Forest Focus: Amazon. Photo by flickr user Lorena Medeiros, published under anAttribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic Creative Commons License The idea commonly supported in the collective Brazilian imagination, that the indigenous Brazilian is no longer considered indigenous as soon as he or she adopts the customs and technologies inherited from the West, is countered by a reality in which indigenous villages are using information tools and technology with ever more frequency precisely for more efficiently defending their indigenous lifestyle and culture. In Taqui Pra Ti [pt] blog, an article by Professor José Bessa Freire, coordinator of the Indigenous Studies Program (University of Rio de Janeiro) [pt] and research with the Graduate Program in Social Memoy (UNIRIO) [pt] discusses the indigenous appropriation of citizen media available online and the use of multimedia content to promote socialization, claim rights and affirm indigenous identity in cyberspace: No Brasil, índios de diferentes línguas e etnias foram estimulados a usar a Internet por organizações governamentais e não governamentais. Embora a situação ainda seja bastante precária, inúmeras das 2.698 escolas indígenas existentes nas aldeias, frequentadas por mais de duzentos mil alunos, foram dotadas de computadores. Ali onde isso não foi possível, os computadores dos postos de saúde da Funasa foram disponibilizados dentro dos Pontos de Cultura no Programa Governo Eletrônico – Serviço de Atendimento ao Cidadão. With increased computer access, the first indigenous internet sites began to appear in 2001. According to Eliete Pereira, from the Atopos Research Center at the Arts and Communications Faculty of the University of São Paulo [pt], indigenous presence on the internet is still rather erratic [pt]. In a map she prepared of indigenous internet participation [pt], Eliete found three types of sites: personal sites, sites corresponding to particular ethnicities and sites corresponding to indigenous organizations. Holders of personal sites innovatively used the internet to show individual indigenous production. In this category, for example, we find the sites of writers Daniel Munduruku [pt] and Eliane Potiguara [pt], in which the authors present their books and interact with their readers. We also find the blogs of notable indigenous leaders like Ailton Krenak [pt]. The sites pertaining to specific ethnic groups have been designed to bring greater domestic and international visibility to particular indigenous ethnicity through the dissemination of arts, indigenous craft art, design patters, narratives and languages of different ethnic groups. This is the case of the Baniwa [pt], the Ashaninka [pt] and so many others who, after participating in the discussion on indigenous access to information technology and the internet in 2005 in Rio de Janeiro, and following the inauguration of the People of the Forest Internet Portal [pt], began to use these digital tools as part of interculturally-based educational projects supported by the Ministry of Education (MEC) [pt] and NGOs like The Socio-Environmental Institute [pt]. Finally, the sites created by different indigenous organizations are presented online by institutions that represent different ethnic groups, that cover local, regional or national collectives, and that are associated with the fight for land rights, bilingual education and the health of the indigenous population. These sites are tools for claiming rights and pursuing political action. Examples include The Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB) [pt], the Online Indigenous Brazilians [pt] and the Federation of Indigenous Organizaiton of the Back River Region (Rio Negro) (FOIRN) [pt]. The Suruí, information technology and the Amazon Rainforest A very successful case of political action focussing on the use of digital technologies is the initiative pursued by Almir Narayamoga Suruí [en], chief of the Gamebey tribe of Suruí Indigenous Brazilians who live in the indigenous village of Sete de Setembro in the state of Rondônia, Brazil. The forest has always played an important role in the lives of the Suruí, both from a cultural point of view and from an economic one, which is why Almir's tribe is engaged in reforesting and in combating deforestation of the ancestral lands through the use of tools like Google Earth and GPS. In his first consultation in 2007, Almir endeavored to find his village in Google Earth's satellite image. That was when he immediately noted how much of his people's territory was being threatened by the rampant deforestation of the outlying forest.