Yanomami

The Yanomami are a society of hunter-gatherers and slash-and-burn farmers who occupy an area of tropical forest comprising approximately 192,000 square kilometers located on both sides of the Serra Parima range, which divides the waters of the upper Orinoco (south of Venezuela) and the tributaries of the right bank of the Rio Branco and of the left bank of the Rio Negro (in northern Brazil). They constitute a vast and isolated cultural and linguistic group, subdivided into several languages and related dialects. Their total population is estimated to be slightly more than 33,000 people, which makes them one of the largest Amerindian groups in the Amazon to have mostly held on to their traditional way of life.

The Yanomami territory in Brazil, legally recognized in 1992 as the Terra Indígena Yanomami, extends over 96,650 square kilometers — an area slightly larger than some European countries, such as Portugal, Hungary, and Ireland. Their population of approximately 16,000 people is distributed among some 230 local groups. These communities are usually formed by what anthropologists call an endogamous set of cognatic kin. They are composed of several families linked through cross-cousin marriages, repeated from one generation to the next, who reside together in one or more ring- or cone-shaped communal houses.

The first sporadic contact the Yanomami of Brazil had with white people — collectors of forest products, foreign explorers, military personnel, and SPI agents — was in the early decades of the twentieth century. Then, from the 1940s through the 1960s, several Catholic and Protestant missions, as well as SPI outposts, were opened on the periphery of Yanomami territory. They provided the first regular points of contact and sources of trade for manufactured goods for the Indians, but such contact also led to deadly epidemics among them. In the early 1970s, these initial incursions by white people suddenly intensified, first with the opening of the northern section of the Trans-Amazonian highway (the Perimetral Norte) on the southern end of Yanomami territory, and then, after a ten-year respite, with an unprecedented gold rush into its heart. Highway construction was abandoned in 1976, and the invasion by gold prospectors had been reined in somewhat by the mid-1990s. Gold prospecting has been recently revived, however, by a surge in gold prices on international markets, and the Terra Indígena Yanomami is also threatened by new interests reaching into the western part of Roraima state, including mining companies, agricultural colonization, and cattle ranching.


Latest threats

Thousands of gold-miners are now working illegally on Yanomami land, transmitting deadly diseases like malaria and measles and polluting the rivers, fish and forest with mercury. Some Yanomami living in communities near mining hotspots have dangerously high levels of mercury in their bodies.

Cattle ranchers are invading and deforesting the eastern fringe of their land.

Yanomami health is suffering and critical medical care is not reaching them, especially in Venezuela.

The Brazilian congress is currently debating a bill which, if approved, will permit large-scale mining in Indigenous territories. This will be extremely harmful to the Yanomami and other remote tribes in Brazil.

The Yanomami have not been properly consulted about their views and have little access to independent information about the impacts of mining.

Davi Kopenawa, a leading Yanomami spokesman and President of Hutukara Yanomami Association, warns of the dangers.

‘The Yanomami people do not want the national congress to approve the law or the president to sign it. We do not want to accept this law.’

‘Our land has to be respected. Our land is our heritage, a heritage which protects us.’

‘Mining will only destroy nature. It will only destroy the streams and the rivers and kill the fish and kill the environment – and kill us. And bring in diseases which never existed in our land.’


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