"We need your help": a Yanomami shaman's call in Barcelona

BarcelonaThe Indigenous and Anomami people have a word for global warming: motokari"It's already happening in many places in the jungle," says Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, who visited Barcelona this week at the invitation of the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture (CCCB). motokari "It has come down to dry up the land," he warns, and asks us "to fight together, Indigenous and non-Indigenous," to protect the Amazon from destruction: "If the land dies, we will die too, and the forest is already beginning to die."

Kopenawa is the political and spiritual leader of the Ianomami, the largest semi-isolated Indigenous people in South America, with some 40,000 people living in the Amazon rainforest on the border between Brazil and Venezuela. Kopenawa, 67, has been fighting for the rights of Indigenous peoples and for the protection of the Amazon for four decades. He has taken this fight to every forum in the world, including the United Nations, and has been awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, the alternative Nobel Prize.

Killed by pollution and disease

This week, he visited Barcelona for the first time, where he received an honorary distinction from the University of Barcelona. In addition to the call to halt the destruction of the Amazon caused by our global consumer economy, he also brought another urgent request. In a press conference at the CCCB, he explained that the Yanomami people are severely affected by the pollution and illnesses inflicted by the illegal gold miners who invaded them during the Jair Bolsonaro era. In January 2023, when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had just come to power, Devastating images were made public and went around the world: severely malnourished children and anomami. The portal Sumauma, which investigates and reports from within the Amazon rainforest, said that more than 500 children and Anomami had died in four years of Bolsonaro's rule. Indigenous peoples had even brought Bolsonaro at the International Criminal Court on charges of "genocide".

Now, says Kopenawa, there is no more malnutrition, but malaria and flu are taking their toll on his people, especially the children. Lula has managed to expel most of the illegal gold miners from their lands, but "organized crime is still lurking. Many miners have left, but they've left us with diseases and contaminated water," he says. "Our children are dying," he warned, calling on Barcelona and Europe to act as "yanomamis."

"Europeans buy the gold that's mined"

Illegal gold miners first arrived in Yanomami indigenous territory during the 1980s, after a road was built in 1972 through the forest area where this isolated people lived. Through a long and bitter struggle, the Yanomami succeeded in having their territory marked and protected in 1992. This territory covers 9.6 million hectares of forest in northwestern Brazil, near the border with Venezuela, equivalent to three times the area of Catalonia, and today forms the Yanomami demarcation.

But with Bolsonaro, illegal gold miners returned. "More than 70,000 miners flooded our lands from 2020 to 2022, and they were selling with weapons," explains Kopenawa. For the Yanomami, he says, "gold is just a rock, it's not wealth, because our wealth is the land that gives us food." But he is clear that "those who buy the gold from the lands and the Yanomami are the Europeans."

European demand, from gold to soybeans to meat, contributes to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, the largest tropical forest in the world, which produces 20% of the Earth's oxygen. captures huge amounts of CO₂ and plays a key role in water cyclesThe Amazon is key to the fight against the climate crisis, and Indigenous peoples like the Ianomami are defending it, often at the risk of their own lives. According to Global Witness, more than 36% of environmental activists killed worldwide are Indigenous. "We seek international solidarity against invaders, against illegal mining, against deforestation," insists Kopenawa.

"The spirits of the forest are angry."

As a shaman, Kopenawa connects with the chapiri, beings that he does not like to translate as spirits because he says that "it is a word of the church", but that would be that, the spirits of the jungle that adopt the image of animals and send their messages through shamans, in rituals with a psychotropic pulse Yakoana, which is extracted from the bark of the virola tree.

"The chapiri "They are angry," said Kopenawa in Barcelona. Angry because the Amazon rainforest is being destroyed, because "the rainforest is burning" in fires that deforest it "to extract wood, soy, gold." chapiri, he says, they baptized the non-indigenous people, who in Yanomami are napë, as "the merchandise people," a people who invade the jungle "with their big machines" to take its riches.

It is estimated that 70% of deforestation is caused by the global "carnivorous diet," through cattle and soybeans for animal feed, according to data from UB professor Martí Orta, but the extraction of gold, timber, and fossil fuels also weighs in. A destruction that is getting closer and closer to the so-called point of no return. Currently, 20% of the Amazon rainforest has already been destroyed, but if 30% is reached, we would pass the tipping point from which scientists warn that the Amazon would stop capturing carbon and start emitting it and would stop acting as a climate regulator, probably advancing towards desertification. "It is important that we are united with indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. We have to fight together with the original peoples and with the chapiri"because they need your help," the shaman invites.