We dare not sleep
When 120 Yanomami and Yek’wana shamans, warriors, women and youth come together to resist 20,000 wildcat miners and President Bolsonaro’s plans of destruction, it is best to stay awake.
By Bruno Weis
Photos: Victor Moriyama
Video: Cassandra Mello
No one sleeps in the Watorikɨ community. At least, not during the first Forum of Yanomami and Ye’kwana Leaders, held in the circular ancestral hut, or xapono, situated at the foot of watorikɨ, Yanomami for “wind mountain.” During that week, at the end of November, the village in the middle of the Amazon forest was the stage for an unprecedented and historic meeting, which brought together 120 leaders from 26 regions of a territory spanning 9 million hectares, the Yanomami Indigenous Land, located between the states of Roraima and Amazonas.
The arrival of relatives from afar is marked by body painting, adornments, chanting and dancing. The reception ceremony lasts an entire afternoon. Old friends reunite with hugs and smiles all around. Some visitors arrive after days of walking through the forest. They camp in the forest, in the areas surrounding the xapono and, before they enter the village, they cover their heads in white, with the feathers of the king vulture. They paint their bodies in red and black, each with their own designs. They walk along the footpaths amid the chanting and shouting and are welcomed into the festive circular hut by rhythmic dancing, with the youngest women at the fore.
The first meeting of Yanomami and Ye’kwana leaders occurs at a time when over 20,000 artisanal miners are on Yanomami Indigenous Land, in the largest invasion since the demarcation of the area in 1992. Leaders, shamans, warriors, women and youth decided to meet to strengthen their alliance and resist the ambitions of President Bolsonaro, who has been announcing plans to open up artisanal and commercial mining on indigenous lands. Bolsonaro cites the Yanomami Indigenous Land repeatedly and by name. Sleep is impossible.
The hosts of the Watorikɨ and their guests spend four days in an intense, continuous exchange. Assembled for days, they listen and speak of their memories and recollections of times past, before coming into contact with the non-indigenous, when there was no common enemy and wars and alliances were made between the different indigenous groups, with cycles of mourning, vengeance and peace. They talk about the reality of life today in the communities, the polluted rivers and scarcity of fish due to mining, the lack of game and contamination of fish. They address cases of cancer caused by contamination from the mercury used in the extraction of gold, the young people seduced by miners, the women raped.
Many leaders also describe the decline in health services, the return of malaria to their communities. They note that, in 2019 alone, at least six deaths along the Uraricoera River can be attributed to the disease. The leaders denounce shortages of medicine, equipment and technical staff at the health clinics on indigenous land.
The conversation also turns to income generation projects, such as the Yanomami Mushroom Project, Yaripo Ecotourism Project, the recently launched Yanomami Chocolate Project, all strategic investments made by the communities to divert their young people from mining. For Yanomami parents, grandparents and relatives, young people are at the center of their concerns. It is the first generation of this people to become literate in Portuguese. A generation that now embarks on adult life and sees themselves, unlike their predecessors, at a crossroads between traditional culture and the freedom of the forest and “the world of the city,” where money talks and “everyone is a slave” to it. Which path will they take? “No one steals here, we nurture and preserve. We honor our words. We live, sleep, breathe and produce, without veering from this path,” says Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami shaman and elder, one of the hosts of the gathering.
Their doubts and dreams about the present and future of their communities and the forest permeate the discourse, gazes and pauses inside the xapono. How to face the great threat that destroys their communities from the inside and the urihi, or land-forest? How to resist the invasion of thousands of miners that are today destroying the forest, contaminating the rivers, spreading diseases and perpetrating all sorts of crime, sowing discord between kin?
We must remain alert and present, amid the spirits of the forest and the chants of the shamans, into the night. “Our house is circular, like life itself, like everything in the forest,” explains Kopenawa, pointing to the design of the ancestral hut, a large collective house, built of wood and a thatch roof with fourteen small doors that lead to the open center. “It is not like life in the city, where everything is square.”
Davi explains that at night, when participants settle into their hammocks, near the fire, and the children sleep, they begin the ceremonial dialogues, a special art, where host and visitor sing a duet of their ties of friendship and good neighborliness, their “wars,” conflicts past or future, “to leave everything clean for the days to come.” For all of these reasons, there was no need for sleep.
Watch the video here (captions available):
