Brazil’s highest court has upheld a ban on missionaries entering reserves that are home to isolated and recently contacted Indigenous people during the pandemic.
The decision comes in response to a lawsuit filed by Indigenous organizations against a law passed in July 2020 that allowed missionaries to remain inside these reserves despite the pandemic, in violation of Brazil’s official policy in place since 1987.
According to Indigenous organizations, it’s crucial to reaffirm the non-contact policy under the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro that has pushed to “integrate” Indigenous people into society, and has been cozy with the evangelical movement.
Besides the risk of disease spread, the presence of missionaries in these reserves undermines traditional cultures and social cohesion, and compels these nomadic communities to settle down, making the land more vulnerable to invasions by illegal ranchers and loggers, activists say.
Brazil’s highest court has upheld a ban on missionary activity inside reserves that are home to isolated or recently contacted Indigenous people, in a bid to protect the communities against COVID-19.
Although the country’s official indigenist policy toward these groups since 1987 has been to not engage in any contact, regardless of whether there’s a pandemic, a federal law passed in July 2020 allows religious missionaries to remain inside these reserves. This triggered a lawsuit by Indigenous and political organizations, which the Supreme Federal Court (STF) has now ruled in favor of.
The 2020 law attempted to “legitimize something that is already forbidden,” said Carolina Ribeiro Santana, a lawyer for the Observatory for the Human Rights of Isolated and Recently Contacted Indigenous Peoples (OPI), one of the co-authors of the lawsuit. “As we are under an anti-Indigenous government, it is important to have a decision which reassures the Indigenous policy.”
OPI authored the lawsuit along with the Articulation of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Apib) — the country’s largest Indigenous organization — and the Workers Party (PT). Justice Luís Roberto Barroso issued the court’s ruling on Sept. 24.
Uncontacted Indigenous community in the Brazilian state of Acre. Although the country’s official indigenist policy toward these groups has been to not engage in any contact, regardless of whether there’s a pandemic, a federal law passed in July 2020 allows religious missionaries to remain inside these reserves. Image by Gleilson Miranda / Government of Acre via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
Last year, the court had already forbidden the entry of outsiders into these areas while hearing another case where Indigenous organizations urged the federal government to implement measures, including imposing sanitary barriers, to protect the Indigenous population from COVID-19. “In the current situation, where there is an ongoing pandemic, the peoples in isolation and recent contact are the most exposed to the risk of contagion and extinction,” Barroso said in that earlier ruling.
But threats against uncontacted Indigenous groups have escalated under the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, who has called for Indigenous people to be “integrated into society.” Bolsonaro’s hostility toward Indigenous people is no secret; last year, in his weekly live transmission on social media, he declared that, “more and more, the Indigenous is a human being just like us.”
At the same time, Bolsonaro is hugely popular with Brazil’s evangelicals, who are credited with helping him win the 2018 election. (His middle name translates to “Messiah.”) Once in office, he appointed evangelical leaders to key posts in his administration, including Ricardo Lopes Dias, who, until November 2020, headed the department responsible for protecting isolated and recently contacted communities at Funai, the Indigenous affairs agency. Dias was a pastor with the New Tribes Mission, an evangelical group notorious for reportedly spreading disease among the Zo’é people living in northern Pará state. More than a third of the Zo’é population subsequently died. Another top official, Damares Alves, the minister for women, family and human rights, is also reportedly linked to missionary groups, according to BBC News Brasil.
“These people choose isolation,” anthropologist Aparecida Vilaça, from the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, told Mongabay in a phone interview. “What the state has to do is to not let anyone get in.”
One of the reasons for this isolation, according to Indigenous organizations, is precisely the trauma of almost being exterminated by the diseases brought by non-Indigenous people, like influenza, measles and malaria; Indigenous people, especially isolated ones, don’t have immunity to many of these pathogens.
But the threat of disease isn’t the only one introduced by missionaries, even to non-isolated groups. According to lawyer Eliésio Marubo, from Vale do Javari reserve in northern Amazonas state, missionaries undermine the social cohesion of the community by favoring the leaders who support them.
“The culture of our people is also weakened because certain practices are forbidden [by the missionaries], like traditional medicine,” Eliésio Marubo said. “The relationship with the territory also changes. Before, we used to move around a lot, but the missionaries want us to stay in one place only.”
Vale do Javari is home to the largest number of isolated Indigenous people in the world: 10 out of the 28 confirmed groups of isolated people in Brazil. The reserve is also home to non-isolated Indigenous groups, like the Marubo.
“It is a cultural destruction,” anthropologist Aparecida Vilaça said of the missions’ presence in Indigenous reserves. Vilaça witnessed the effects of missionary groups on an Indigenous community in Rondônia, also in the Amazon region. “They do a very deep process of humiliation of the traditional practices, by saying their dances and beliefs are things of the devil,” she said.
According to Vilaça, these changes in the traditional way of life make the Indigenous people more vulnerable to several economic interests. “The missionaries lead to the settling of all the community in the same place, releasing land to farmers and loggers. We can’t forget that these lands are very coveted,” she said.
Vilaça said the desire to convert Indigenous groups started with the colonization of Brazil, by the Catholic Church, and is now led by evangelical groups, some of which have deep pockets.
Rejection of “consentement” thesis
As the lawyer for Univaja, the Union of Indigenous People of Vale do Javari, Eliésio Marubo went to court last year against Andrew Tonkin, a U.S. evangelical Baptist missionary who was planning to travel to the reserve amid the pandemic to contact isolated Indigenous groups.
“Missionaries have been harassing us for 60 years,” he said. “They have helicopters, airplanes and they fly from here to the United States.”
Besides granting Univaja’s request to ban Tonkin’s entry, a federal court also ordered the expulsion of missionaries still inside the territory. Despite the victory, the missionaries are still lurking, Eliésio Marubo said. “They remain on the borders of the reserve, trying to co-opt people,” he told Mongabay over the phone.
Uncontacted Indigenous group in the Brazilian state of Acre. Evangelical missionaries use several strategies to approach Indigenous communities, including giving gifts of axes and knives. They also co-opt some Indigenous leaders, provoking social conflicts, and tell the Indigenous people their dances and beliefs are evil. Image by Gleilson Miranda / Government of Acre via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
In a setback for the Indigenous groups, Justice Barroso denied their request to remove the missionaries already inside the reserves. Besides creating a risk of contagion, Barroso said — since evicting them could “require third parties to enter such areas” — it was not clear that isolated groups had not consented to their presence.
“How can you give consent for something that you have no idea what it is? To people who don’t even speak their language?” Vilaça said. She added that missionaries use several strategies to win over the isolated people. “They offer axes, knives, and other benefits to those who join them.”
In their argument to the STF, the Indigenous groups noted that the way isolated communities express their will is different from the rest of society. “Our society gives prevalence to speech, to writing, and these people are talking to us in a different way. When they run away or attack an approaching person, it is a way of saying no,” Santana said.
Barroso’s ruling is a precautionary measure, meaning the case will be subject to trial in the STF plenary. In a statement, the office of Brazil’s attorney general said it had been notified of the decision but will only manifest in the court. Funai didn’t reply to requests for comment.
The decline is one of the effects of the industrial modernization that is supposed to have brought increasing comfort, health, and advanced knowledge into our lives.
Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – While mainstream media celebrate the remarkable development in record time of vaccines spectacularly effective against the Covid virus, knowledge that might contribute to other medical breakthroughs is being steadily undermined. This decline is not the result of some dramatic lawsuit or corporate takeover. It is one of the effects of the industrial modernization that is supposed to have brought increasing comfort, health and advanced knowledge into our lives. Economic growth has produced not only a climate emergency but a less publicized decline in the many efficacious forms of traditional knowledge and the biodiversity they sustain and are sustained by. In an email exchange I had with ethnobotanist Kirsten Tripplett, Ph.D., she pointed out:
“the generally accepted understanding is that 12-25% of “Western” medicine is derived or based on plant molecules/chemical backbones…It depends who’s talking and what their agenda is. And that is JUST in Western medicine. There are other, much older and empirically-based medicinal systems out there that are incredibly effective, but most U.S. citizens are unaware or only dimly, of them. Not only is the loss of language directly linked to knowledge loss and potential medical/economic loss, but think of all of the practical and useful things that get lost, too.”
When Brazil President Bolsanaro encouraged more forestry development in the Amazon, global climate advocates worried about the lungs of the planet and the contribution to global warming. They might equally have been concerned with the indigenous knowledge going up in smoke.
“A study at the University of Zurich in Switzerland shows that a large proportion of existing medicinal plant knowledge is linked to threatened Indigenous languages. In a regional study on the Amazon, New Guinea and North America, researchers concluded that 75% of medicinal plant uses are known in only one language.” She reports that 91% of medicinal knowledge exists in a single language, so the loss of linguistic diversity diminished the former as well.
Nor are medicines all that is lost. She adds,
“Every time a language disappears, a speaking voice also disappears, a way to make sense of reality disappears, a way to interact with nature disappears, a way to describe and name animals and plants disappears,” says Jordi Bascompte, researcher in the Department of Evolutional Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich.”
As indigenous peoples rely on the spoken word for intergenerational knowledge transfer, the disappearance of these languages will take with them a universe of information. The possible losses include fundamental neurological facts about the human brain. Jairus Grove, author of Savage Ecology, cites work by neurologists showing that each language contains a different cognitive map of the human brain. Sometimes the differences are very significant and open up important research potential. Grove cites work by linguist David Harrison on the Uririna people of Peru showing that some, though very few, languages place the object of the sentence at the beginning. Were it not for the continued existence of this people, neuroscientists would not even suspect or know that the human brain could be wired in such a way to make O-V-S sentences possible.
Grove points out that most Indo European languages have an active subject, verb, passive object form, but there are minority cultures that do not express that format. In a world beset by the dangerous exploitation of the natural world these minority cultures may teach us more about how to survive and thrive in this world. In this context Tripplett points out that agency is not confined to the human world. The unwillingness to recognize and accept this fact could have increasingly dire consequences.
Dr. Kirsten Tripplett writes, “It’s a long leap conceptually to make, but if one accepts a premise that “language” isn’t just spoken, and that knowledge is transmitted through actions and lifeways, then loss of biological species and their exploitation to serve human interests, is a critical loss, too, for the same reasons as those cited above . . .”
Grove has similar worries: “Irreversible catastrophic changes are certain but extinction is unlikely. What we stand to lose as a species in this current apocalypse of homogenization is unimaginable, not because of the loss of life but because of the loss of difference. Who and what will be left on Earth to inspire and ally with us in our creative advance is uncertain. If the future is dominated by those who seek to establish the survival of the human species at all costs through technological mastery then whatever “we” manages to persist will likely live on or near a mean and lonely planet.” (Savage Ecology, p. 209)
Why this loss of cultural diversity? There is first the reductionist tendency to treat cultural diversity and biodiversity as separate issues rather than as continuously interacting. Zanon further quotes Jordi Bascompte: “We can’t ignore this network now and think only about the plants or only about the culture . . . We humans are very good at homogenizing culture and nature so that nature seems to be more or less the same everywhere.”
This homogenization process includes reduction of human labor to cogs in a corporate machine, to cookie cutter development to the planned obsolescence and corporate-dominated consumer culture. Most important is a neoliberal financial system fostering increasing wealth gaps within and among nations. In this context it is especially important to preserve alternative ways of being in the world and their origins and history. Despite efforts to homogenize many indigenous cultures some retain their vitality. But their survival will depend on bottom-up activism and rules, laws, and practices negotiated across race, ethnicity, religion, and class.
As Subhankar Banerjee argues, saving elephants in different states presents complex problems. More broadly biodiversity conservation is contextual. What works for one place and in a particular culture may not work for another place and in another culture. This is not, however, cultural relativism. Biodiversity advocates value most those cultures that seek space for difference and for a politics that celebrates that end.
Banerjee again: “What makes biodiversity conservation so beautiful is that it is a pluriverse—so many ideas, so many practices, so many forms of human-nonhuman kinship that exist around the world, which in a different context, a quarter-century ago, Indian historian Ramachandra Guha and Spanish ecological-economist Juan Martinez-Alier called Varieties of Environmentalism.”
To help indigenous peoples worldwide preserve, revitalize and promote their languages, UNESCO has launched its Decade of Action for Indigenous Languages from 2022 to 203. This is a principle worthy of much more attention than it receives. For that situation to change more than proclamations of rights will be necessary, including political movements celebrating and willing to fight for economic justice and biological and cultural diversity.
DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples worldwide. We acknowledge that they are victims of the largest genocide in human history, which is ongoing. Wherever indigenous cultures have not been completely destroyed or assimilated, they stand as relentless defenders of the landbases and natural communities which are there ancestral homes. They also provide living proof that not humans as a species are inherently destructive, but the societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption and accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy we call civilization.
Featured Image: The Belo Monte hydroelectric complex is the third-largest in the world in installed capacity, able to produce 11,200 megawatts. Copyright: PAC-Ministry of Planning, Brazil [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0].
The company responsible for Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam claimed in a letter to the New York Times that the company respects Indigenous peoples, the environment and international conventions.
The Arara Indigenous people contest the company’s claims and call attention to a series of broken promises.
The Belo Monte Dam is notorious for having violated international conventions and Brazilian laws regarding consultation of Indigenous peoples, and for its massive environmental and social impacts.
This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.
Even in this era of “alternative facts,” the letter to the New York Times from Norte Energy (the company responsible for Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam) will surely be remembered as a classic.
The letter opens by claiming that “From the beginning, the deployment of the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Power Plant in the Brazilian state of Pará has been guided by respect for the local Indigenous populations and by laws, ratified protocols and conventions.” News of Norte Energia’s letter reached the local Indigenous populations, and they are rightly enraged. A response from the Arara People (Figure 1) is translated below. For whatever reason, the New York Times declined to publish it.
Letter from the Arara People to the World
We the Arara Indigenous People of the Iriri River are tired of being deceived by Norte Energia. We want respect! Ever since the Belo Monte Dam arrived, our situation has only worsened. Our territory has become the business counter of the world. Our forest is suffering a lot. With each passing day we hear more noise from chainsaws eating our territory. Our river is growing sadder and weaker every day. This is not normal. We are being attacked from all sides. We have never been in such need. We are very concerned about the future of our children and grandchildren. How long will Norte Energia continue to deceive us? Why hasn’t the disintrusion [removal of invaders] of our Cachoeira Seca Indigenous Land been carried out until today? We ask everyone to help us build a great campaign for the defense of our territory.
The Arara People will never abandon our territories. Our warriors will not allow our forest to be destroyed. Together we will protect our Iriri River.
Timbektodem Arara – President of the Arara People’s Association – KOWIT
Mobu Odo Arara – Chief
Norte Energia’s claim of being “guided by… laws and ratified protocols and conventions” is an amazing rewrite of the history of building Belo Monte a dam that managed to be completed despite massive efforts both within Brazil and abroad, to have those conventions respected. Belo Monte violated Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO-169) and the Brazilian law (10.088 of Nov. 5, 2019, formerly 5.051 of April 19, 2004) that implements the convention. These require consultation of affected Indigenous people to obtain their free, prior and informed consent. Note that the operative word is “affected,” not “submerged.” The claim was that the Indigenous people did not need to be consulted because they were not under water.
Downstream of the first of the two dams that compose Belo Monte is a 100-km stretch of the Xingu River from which 80% of the water flow has been diverted. Largely disappeared are the fish that sustained the populations of the two Indigenous lands along this stretch, plus a third located on a tributary. Both the ILO and the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States recognized violation of ILO-169 by not consulting Indigenous peoples impacted by Belo Monte. Over 20 cases against Belo Monte are still pending in Brazilian courts; only one case has been decided, and this was in favor of the Indigenous people. However, the case was appealed to the Supreme Court where it languished while the dam was built and has still not been judged.
Bribes paid by construction companies for the contracts to build Belo Monte were a star feature in Brazil’s “Lava Jato” (“Car Wash”) corruption scandal, with confessions from both the side that paid and the side that received. This scandal helped explain why Belo Monte was built despite the Xingu River’s long low-flow period when no or very few turbines at the main powerhouse can operate (2020 was a dramatic example). Climate change will make this worse still.
The Norte Energia letter asserts: “The plant has a valid operating license and generates energy for millions of Brazilians, grounded in the principles of environmental responsibility and social justice in deference to the culture of the local Indigenous populations.”
Mention of the “valid operating license,” reminds one of the Federal Public Ministry in Belém describing Belo Monte as “totally illegal.” The dam forced its way past multiple legal challenges by means of “security suspensions,” a relict of Brazil’s military dictatorship that allows projects to go forward despite any number of illegalities if they are needed to avoid “damage to the public economy” (originally law 4348 of June 26, 1964, now law 12,016 of August 7, 2009).
With respect to Norte Energia’s boast that Belo Monte “generates energy for millions of Brazilians,” the dam does indeed produce electricity, although industry gets the biggest share: only 29% of Brazil’s electricity is for domestic consumption. Much more electricity would be available if the billions of dollars in subsidies that the country’s taxpayers gave Belo Monte had been used for other options, such as energy conservation, halting export of electricity in the form of aluminum and other electro-intensive products, and tapping the country’s enormous wind and solar potential.
Norte Energia’s letter concludes that Belo Monte is “grounded in the principles of environmental responsibility and social justice.” This is certainly a most memorable “alternative fact.” The implications for environmental justice of Belo Monte and other Amazonian dams are dramatic (see here in English and Portuguese).
“The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind,” Rachel Carson wrote.“That, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done.”
Silent Spring, which inspired the modern environmental movement, was more than a critique of pesticides, it was a cri de couer against industrialized society’s destruction of the natural world.
Yet five decades of environmental activism haven’t stopped the destruction, or even slowed it. In those same decades, global animal populations have dropped by 70 percent. Right now, we are losing about one football field of forest every single second. Looking forward provides no solace: the oceans are projected to be empty of fish by 2048.
A salient reason for this failure is that so much environmentalism no longer focuses on saving wild beings and wild places, but instead on how to power their destruction. The beings and biomes who were once our concern have disappeared from the conversation. In their place we are now told to advocate for projects like the Green New Deal. While endangered ecosystems get a mention, the heart of the plan is “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” in the service of industrial manufacturing.
This new movement is called bright green environmentalism.
Its advocates believe technology and design can render industrial civilization sustainable, and that “green technologies” are good for the planet. Some bright greens are well-known and beloved figures like Al Gore, Naomi Klein, and Bill McKibben as well as organizations like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and Audubon. These committed activists have brought the emergency of climate change into consciousness, a huge win as glaciers melt and tundra burns. But bright greens are solving for the wrong variable. Their solutions to global warming take our way of life as a given, and the planet’s health as the dependent variable. That’s backwards: the planet’s health must be more important than our way of life because without a healthy planet you don’t have any way of life whatsoever.
The bright green narrative has to ignore the creatures and communities being consumed. Take the Scottish wildcat, numbering a grim 35, all at risk from a proposed wind installation. Or the birds dying by the thousands at solar facilities in California, where concentrated sunlight melts every creature flying over.
Or the entire biome of the southern wetland forest, being logged four times faster than South American rainforests. Dozens of huge pulp mills export 100 percent of this “biomass” to Europe to feed the demand for biofuels, which bright greens promote as sustainable and carbon-neutral. The forest has a biological diversity unmatched in North America, lush with life existing nowhere else and barely hanging on. This includes the Southeastern American Kestrel. They need longleaf pine savannahs, and longleaf pine have been reduced to 3% of their range. The kestrels depend for their homes on red-cockaded woodpeckers, who exist as a whisper at 1% of historic numbers. Last in this elegiac sample is the gopher tortoise. Four hundred mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and insects cannot survive without the protective cover of the burrows dug by tortoises, tortoises now critically endangered. All these creatures are our kin: our fragile, wondrous, desperate kin, and environmentalists would have them reduced to pellets, shipped to Europe, and burned, while calling their slaughter “green.”
Facts about renewable energy are worse than inconvenient.
First, industrial civilization requires industrial levels of energy. Second is that fossil fuel — especially oil — is functionally irreplaceable. Scaling renewable energy technologies like solar, wind, hydro, and biomass, would constitute ecocide. Twelve percent of the continental United States would have to be covered in windfarms to meet electricity demand alone. To provide for the U.S.A.’s total energy consumption, fully 72% of the continent would have to be devoted to wind farms. Meanwhile, solar and wind development threaten to destroy as much land as projected urban sprawl, oil and gas, coal, and mining combined by 2050.
Finally, solar, wind, and battery technologies are, in their own right, assaults against the living world. From beginning to end, they require industrial-scale devastation: open-pit mining, deforestation, soil toxification that’s permanent on a geologic timescale, extirpation of vulnerable species, and use of fossil fuels. In reality, “green” technologies are some of the most destructive industrial processes ever invented. They won’t save the earth. They’ll only hasten its demise.
There are solutions, once we confront the actual problem.
Simply put, we have to stop destroying the planet and let the world come back. A recent study in Nature found we could cut the carbon added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution in half by reverting 30% of the world’s farmland to its natural state. This would also preserve 70% of endangered animals and plants. This is the lowest of low hanging fruit when it comes to combating climate change and healing our planet. Everywhere there are examples of how the wounded are healed, the missing appear, and the exiled return. Forests repair, grasses take root, and soil sequesters carbon. It’s not too late.
The green new deal has reforestation as one of its goals, but it’s not the main goal, as it should be. If environmentalism is going to help save the planet — and if it’s going to respond to global warming commensurate with the threat — it needs to return to its roots, and remember the love that founders like Rachel Carson had for the land. We need to pledge our loyalty to this planet, our only home.
There’s no time for despair.
Wildcats and kestrels need us now. We have to take back our movement and defend our beloved. How can we do less? And with all of life on our side, how can we lose?
Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert are the authors of the forthcoming book, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It. The book will be available March 16th, but you can pre-order to your local bookstore or library via IndieBound now.
The survival of several uncontacted tribes is now at risk after fires were set inside their territories. Activists have described this year’s Amazon fires, and President Bolsonaro’s war on indigenous peoples, as “the gravest threat to the survival of uncontacted tribes for a generation.”
Four tribal territories face an especially serious crisis:
– The famed Papaya Forest on Bananal Island, the world’s largest fluvial island. It’s inhabited by uncontacted Ãwa people. Eighty per cent of the forest burned in fires last year – fires have been seen this year in one of the last areas of intact forest. More than 100,000 head of cattle now graze on the island.
– The Ituna Itatá (“Smell of Fire”) indigenous territory in Pará state, inhabited exclusively by uncontacted Indians. This reserve was the most heavily deforested indigenous territory in 2019, as land grabbers and cattle ranchers invaded. In the first four months of 2020, another 1,319 hectares of forest were destroyed, an increase of almost 60% compared to the same period last year.
– The Arariboia territory in the eastern Amazon state of Maranhão: uncontacted Awá inhabit this territory, which has already been extensively invaded. Amazon Guardians of the neighboring Guajajara tribe are warning daily that illegal loggers are destroying the forest at alarming rates. (The Ãwa people of Bananal Island and the Awá tribe of Maranhão state are distinct peoples).
– The Uru Eu Wau Wau territory. Uncontacted Indians inside this territory shot and killed famed Amazon expert Rieli Franciscato last month – campaigners fear the group is being forced out of the forest by the invasions.
Many of the fires are being started to clear the rainforest for logging and ranching, and millions of tons of soya, beef, timber and other products are imported into Europe and the US each year.
APIB (the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil) has launched a campaign to highlight the links between Bolsonaro, his agribusiness backers, and the genocidal violence being committed against indigenous peoples across the country. They are asking people and companies around the world to stop buying products that are fuelling the destruction of their territories.
Survival has launched a global action calling on supermarkets in Europe and the US to stop buying Brazilian agribusiness products until indigenous rights are upheld.
Ângela Kaxuyana, spokesperson from COIAB, the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon, said: “Land grabbing, deforestation and arson directly threaten the lives of our uncontacted relatives. The destruction of the territories that are their only sources of life, from where they obtain their food (fauna, flora and water), could end in their extermination.” “A grilagem de terra, o desmatamento e os incêndios criminosos ameaçam diretamente a vida dos nossos parentes em isolamento voluntário. A destruição dos territórios que são suas únicas fontes de vida, de onde garantem sua alimentação (fauna, flora e água), podem levá-los ao extermínio”.
Tainaky Tenetehar, one of the Guajajara Guardians who protect the Arariboia reserve for the Guajajara people and their uncontacted neighbors, said today: “We fight to protect this forest, and many of us have been killed doing so, but the invaders keep coming. They have damaged the forest so much in recent years that their fires are now much bigger, and more serious, than before, as the forest is so dry and vulnerable. The loggers must be evicted – only then can the uncontacted Awá survive and thrive.”
Survival’s Senior Researcher Sarah Shenker said: “In many parts of Brazil, uncontacted tribes’ territories are the last significant areas of rainforest left. Now they are being targeted by land grabbers, loggers and ranchers emboldened by Bolsonaro’s open support for them. Consumers in the US and Europe must understand that there’s a direct connection between the food on their supermarket shelves and this genocidal destruction – and act accordingly. Uncontacted tribes are the most vulnerable peoples on the planet, and at the same time nature’s best guardians, by far. We cannot let their land go up in flames.”
