Illegal gold mining threatens the environment and human health in the Amazon, said shaman and Yanomami Indigenous leader Davi Kopenawa in a talk at Princeton Jan. 31. And there are consequences for all of us, too, as mining in the Amazon rainforest diminishes one of the planet’s largest natural carbon sinks and a bastion of biocultural diversity.
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Kopenawa, who has been advocating for his people’s rights since the 1970s, is the author of “The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman” (2013, Belknap Press) and the president of the Hutukara Yanomami Association.
The Yanomami (“human-beings” in their language) are a group of 35,000 people who live across 250 villages deep inside the Amazon Forest in northern Brazil and parts of southern Venezuela. In 1992, after years of struggle against commercial encroachment, they won a major victory when the Brazilian government preserved more than 37,000 square miles for the Yanomami to continue their way of life and stewardship of the forest’s integrity.
Then, on a campaign stump in 2018, former president Jair Bolsonaro promised to open the Amazon for commercial exploitation. According to Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research, his four-year term saw 17,800 square miles of forest razed, an area approximately the size of Taiwan.
“I’m in mourning,” Kopenawa said at the beginning of his keynote address. “My people are dying.” Brazil’s new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who took office in January, has promised to remedy the “absolutely urgent” situation, Kopenawa said.
Kopenawa later described the ways in which the struggle of the Yanomami have implications for humanity. “The whole world knows the importance of the Amazonian rainforest,” he said. “We are living here, on this Earth. It’s the only Earth we have for everybody.”
Kopenawa and fellow Yanomami were in the area for the Feb. 3 debut of “The Yanomami Struggle,” an exhibition at The Shed cultural center in New York City, organized together with the Instituto Moreira Salles and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. The show, which runs until April 16, explores the decades-long collaboration between photographer Claudia Andujar and the Yanomami people. The Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) Brazil LAB and the Department of Anthropology are organizing student trips to see the exhibition.