This article examines recent legislative efforts to criminalise ecocide in Brazil, situating them within the broader context of Indigenous peoples’ rights and worldviews. Adopting a decolonial approach, it critically explores prevailing frameworks for defining and addressing ecocide, highlighting how they often reflect assumptions of extractivism and exploitation rooted in colonial ways of being and knowing. Drawing on the philosophical framework of Amerindian perspectivism, the article argues that genuine environmental protection requires moving beyond a singular, technocratic perspective towards one that recognises rivers, forests, and animals as subjects embedded in relational ontologies. To ensure that the criminalisation of ecocide does not enable the destruction that it seeks to prevent, it is argued that the definition of ecocide should, at least, be grounded in an epistemic shift that recognises Indigenous peoples’ right to land and values their ways of being and knowing.