The threatened forest people who are learning the language of survival (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

The threatened forest people who are learning the language of survival

By Louise Rimmer in Rio de Janeiro
06 December 2003
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=470595

When Davi Yanomami jets in and out of international conferences, he
wears his traditional feathers rather than a suit, although few hotels
can offer him his preferred hammock. Yet this is a minor discomfort.
For, through his engagement with the modern world, the charismatic
spokesman for the Yanomami, South America's most numerous
forest-dwelling tribal people, has helped secure their rights over
ancestral land and preserve a lifestyle that has nature at its core.

Davi represents an estimated 27,000 Yanomami, the continent's last
substantial group of isolated indigenous people. Their home is the
northern Amazon, deep in the hills that lie between Brazil and
Venezuela. After their land is secured from the interests of
gold-prospectors and cattle-ranchers, the Yanomami are able to thrive
as their ancestors did for thousands of years.

Life for the Yanomami is communal; tribal groups of up to 400 can share
the same house, although there are hearths for individual families
around a central area cleared for rituals and dancing. The communities
live by hunting and gathering, cultivating crops and growing medicines
in large gardens. Hunting is reciprocal, with meat being shared with
family and friends. "There is always enough food in the forest," Davi
says.

The Yanomami are also deeply spiritual people, who summon shamanic
spirits using an hallucinogenic snuff called yakoana. These spirits are
said to preside in the mountains, wind, thunder and darkness and help
cure forest diseases, control the weather and generally keep an eye on
the world, which can be a perilous place for the Yanomami.

During the 1970s and 1980s, they suffered hugely from Brazilian
gold-miners invading their land. Villages were destroyed, the people
were shot at, and swept by diseases to which the Yanomami had no
immunity. Twenty per cent of the population were wiped out in seven
years. Finally, after a 20-year international campaign led by Survival
International, one of the three charities in this year's Independent
Christmas Appeal, the miners were expelled and the land was demarcated
as the Yanomami Park by the Brazilian government in 1992.

But the Yanomami do not have ownership rights over their land.
Cattle-ranchers and miners continue to threaten them, and the Indians
(to use the term they prefer) wish to own the land, rather than simply
feel they are renting it from the government. "By law it is forbidden
to invade Yanomami land, but nobody is making sure that the law is
being implemented," Davi says.

"The miners are still coming in, and bringing disease with them. The
farmers are chopping down the trees and destroying the forest. The land
gives us life, and if we keep the land, we give life back to it,
because no one can destroy it when it remains in our hands."

The vulnerability of the Yanomami was brutally exposed in 1993, when 16
of them were killed by gold-miners in what became known as the Haximu
massacre. And there are threats of a more insidious kind. The increased
militarisation of the area has brought barracks full of soldiers who
bring sexually transmitted diseases with them, infecting Indian women
who sell sex for food and coffee.

But not all experience with the non-indigenous "white man", or the
nape, as Yanomami call them, is negative. In recent years, the Yanomami
have accepted funding from international organisations, including
Survival, to set up their own school, with the aim of writing down
their language and history for the first time.

"It is important for us to become educated, to be able to write about
our culture to pass onto future generations," Davi says. He learnt
Portuguese to translate the advice of white doctors after an epidemic
of malaria in his community. "I also want white people to be able to
read our language, just as it is important for us to speak theirs."

The Yanomami are also learning to read a microscope slide to study the
impact of malaria. "The meeting of white and Yanomami healing gives us
the strength to get rid of disease," he says. "Our shamanic spirits can
cure only the diseases they know, the diseases of the forest. The white
doctor cures tuberculosis, malaria, pneumonia and worms." These
diseases were brought in by the white man.

The Yanomami are reluctant to encourage further integration, preferring
to fight for the right to be different. "We don't know about commerce,"
Davi says. "We use our forest without paying. The whites come and take
our earth to make things to put in shops, where they wait for the price
to go up so they can gain more at our expense. We indigenous people use
the earth to plant and then we divide food up between our relatives and
our friends."

Misconceptions about Indians and non-indigenous abound. It is hard to
tell if Davi is joking when he speaks solemnly on the worst type of
white man, the yoasi, "men with white skin, who are bald with glasses
and go around in cars and swim in swimming pools. What I really mean is
men who look to the forest, and all they see is money".

Davi's stereotypes are much less damaging than those of a leading
American anthropologist, Napoleon Chagnon, who once pronounced the
Yanomami as "sly, aggressive and intimidating" people who lived in a
state of "chronic warfare". The anthropologist's views, which have been
denounced as racist and sensationalist, are still current in some
universities. But Davi is dismissive. "We get violent only when the
white man messes with us," he says. "It is the rest of the world which
is violent. You see it in the big cities, in Iraq, in the United
States. We don't have bombs or guns. When we have conflict, we just
fight among ourselves. That's normal."

But the Yanomami's real battle, he knows, is a different one. It is
against the corrosive homogenisation of Western culture.

"We will keep on fighting," he says. "We Indian people from different
tribes are getting together and getting stronger. We have learnt a lot;
we are learning to speak Portuguese so that we can complain and demand.
Don't you worry, we will keep on fighting. Fighting for our rights."
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