#Yanomami

[victusinveritas]

In 1997, photographer Ricardo Stuckert took the top photo of Penha Goes, a 22-year-old girl from the Yanomami tribe, in the Brazilian Amazon.

In 2015 he took another photo of her at 40.

[swftsp]

hi, it's me again.

i'm here to talk and beg for you guys to do a favor or just read this post carefully.

a few hours ago i posted a thread on twitter explaining what's happening in brazil with the indigenous tribe "Yanomami".

for those who don't know, i am a brazilian person and this is an extremely sad and cruel thing to hear coming from my country and the people who were here first.

i'd like to ask you guys to at least skim over this thread i made, there's a lot of information including petitions and articles.

(sometimes the link doesn't work so you can just search @swftspX on twitter, the thread is pinned)

you don't have to follow me or like any other posts of mine. just PLEASE. read this.

if you don't want to, i'd like for you to at least see what's happening with the Yanomami people and i'll put some links.

this is them. they're currently suffering from starvation and the brazilian court has openly discussed the fact that the Yanomami people are suffering a genocide due to illegal mining explorations. there has been reports of sexual assault with little kids, miners offering food and gold in exchange of sex with minors and/or their mothers. people dying from diseases since there's barely clean water on their territory and overall it's been hell in there. this happened while Bolsonaro was in command and now they're STILL suffering.

PLEASE. don't let my people die.

articles:

petitions:

[probablyasocialecologist]

[richardanarchist]

Yanomami com beija-flor

Rosa Gauditano

[reasonsforhope]

"When President Lula da Silva took office this year in Brazil, many environmental and indigenous rights groups hoped he would fulfill campaign promises of better protection for the Amazon rainforest and the people who live there.

Nearly four months into his tenure and early signs are that Lula was telling the truth, as Brazilian police have evicted dozens of illegal gold miners from the Yanomami Reserve, an area the size of Portugal inhabited by around 35,000 [Indigenous people].

Illegally-mined gold accounts for around half of all the country’s exports, and a new Environment of the Amazon division of the federal police is seeking international assistance in building a first-rate structure for targeting the outside funding toward and sales from illegal gold mining.

Reuters says that so far, the new division has ousted nearly all miners from the area, including overseeing the destruction of 250 mining camps and 70 low-tech boats used for dredging. 48 planes and helicopters for smuggling the gold out of the reserve have been seized as well.

The police hope to use radioisotope technology and methods to be able to pinpoint the exact mineralogical makeup of illegally mined gold as a way of targeting it in the market even after it’s melted into ingots.

They also plan to remove miners from 6 other Amazon reserves this year, while setting up a permanent, floating police station on a river in the Yanomami Reserve.

At the moment, the Lula Administration is considering the best set of laws for tackling the problem. While 804 miners have been arrested in the raids, all were let go, and many others fled in the police advance.

Humberto Freire, from the new Amazon division, told Reuters he and his department hope to create a sophisticated electronic tax receipt for any transactions of precious metals to help pinpoint sales and distribution of suspected illegal bullion."

-via Good News Network, 3/23/23

-video via Reuters, 3/22/23

[alinamghart]

Drawing my take on the 'Fire Navi' from the upcoming Avatar 3. Was inspired by the Yanomami people from the Amazon, but I want to slip in some Papua New Guinee influences. In my view, the Fire ones are the 'boiling blood of Eywa'. They are her rage and warrior spirit, and they are dang proud of it. You won't find these ones to be a peaceful lot.

[just-an-enby-lemon]

I never on my life got this nervous with a post before. This is me advocating for a group I'm not a part of and I tried to do my research the best I could. So let's go.

THE YANOMAMI HUMANITARIAN CRISIS (AND GENOCIDE)

When the pandemic hited Brazil and it was revealed that former president and Trump personal dick sucker Jair Messias Bolsonaro refused the vacine numerous times and ignored Pfizer tentatives of contact, not only that but he spred dangerous misinformation about the virus. Because of his lack of responsability during the covid-19 crisis brazilian left wing started calling him a genocide. But we had no idea how right we were.

Bolsonaro was always a huge supported of mineration. He even tried to legalize it on indegenous people - an effort he didn't suceed. One of brazilian biggest gold reserves is in protective areas more specifically in the divise between Brazil and Venezuela were the yanomami indigenous tribe lives. Well you can imagine where the story goes.

Bolsonaro defunded organs that protected native people and put on comand of the yanomami areas high ranking militar people who had no experience, instruction or prepare whatsoever for it. They made a concil to discuss the righs of land and protection of the Amazon rainflorest and none of the members where native people. They autorized the miners to act close to the area.

Not only that but they refused to send help, closed health centers and ignored letters from people working for FUNAI (the organization that protects and acts on indegenous land) about extreme violence from the miners and corruption inside the institucion (for instance their helicenter for specialized helicopters was being used by the miners who bought the people fiscalizing the landings). 30% of the medicine sent to the tribe never got to them.

With the miners destroying the land they depended to leave, bringing deceases and cominting acts of violence soon famine came to the tribes and the miners started to trade food for either gold or more frequently sexual favors mostly from minors. Some that couldn't sexually assault them by despair did it by force and a 12 year old girl was abused and killed, her body throwed in the river, the authorities took a long time to hear the natives denounces and try at least rescue the body. They also used food as payment to work either on their farms or by doing the mining. Besides that they would trade alcohool and drugs to the natives to turn them addicted and dependent on them.

Bolsonaro and some of his personal are being investigated for purposifully causing this tragedy as means to facilitate mining wich constitutes in proper ethinical genocide. It's only an investigation but if nothing more his inaction and omission already constitutes a human rights violation. I don't know if anyone will actually respond for it. I hope they do but I don't trust this capitalistic society to do anything against powerfull people no matter what they do.

Now I did lie in the begining of this post. I'm sorry. I said we had no idea about it and that's a lie. Me and other white people had the priviledge of not knowing or caring enough. Indigenous activists have been talking about it the whole time. In november when doing a presentation about how psychology could help in the fight for land reform and indegenous spaces my research took me to an interview with an indigenous leader where he said that Bolsonaro's discourse by itself made so the miners and landowners relatated to agriculture would invade protected areas and beat or even kill the natives who oppose and when they talked about their rights they would say "not for long" or "it doesn't matter president Bolsonaro is on our side". That was just based on his racist rethoric against native people. His actions were even more talked about. This was an evitable tragedy and we have to keep it in mind so we can always listen and look for the signs of prejudice and violence to at least try to end them before it's too late.

I'm doing this post not for a lession on white inaction but mostly because there isn't much I can do to help as a broke college student. So I'm trying to maybe hype some donations from you guys.

Here is the link from an organization who is helping to buy food and medicine and help the humanitarian crisis. I did some background checks and also this one actually accepts money in different currencies. So yay. Please, please IF YOU CAN DONATE.

[tepkunset]

Brazil has airlifted 16 starving Yanomami tribal people to receive urgent treatment, after the government declared a medical emergency.

The indigenous people live in a reserve in Brazil's northern state of Roraima.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has accused his predecessor, far-right Jair Bolsonaro, of committing genocide against the rainforest tribe.

The government declared a medical emergency after hundreds of Yanomami children died from malnutrition.

The deaths are linked to water pollution caused by mining and logging in the densely forested area, where food insecurity is rife.

On Saturday President Lula visited Roraima, which borders Venezuela and Guyana, following reports of severe malnutrition among Yanomami children and said he was "shocked" by what he found.

"More than a humanitarian crisis, what I saw in Roraima was genocide: a premeditated crime against the Yanomami, committed by a government insensitive to suffering," he said later. "I came here to say we are going to treat our indigenous people as human beings."

The new Lula government says more than 500 indigenous children have died in the past few years from drinking water contaminated with mercury, which is directly linked to illegal gold mining.

[intomore]

Barbara Brändli, "Untitled," 1965,

Yanomami community of Mavaca, Upper Orinoco region, Amazonas State, Venezuela,

Digital print, 10 3/8 x 15 3/4 inches

[ozkar-krapo]

[rec. David TOOP]

"Lost Shadows: In Defence of the Soul (Yanomami Shamanism, Songs, Ritual, 1978)"

(LP. Sub Rosa. 2015 / rec. 1978) [BR-VE]

[victusinveritas]

Penha Goez, a Yanomami tribeswoman of the Amazon Rainforest, 1997 The second picture is a close-up portrait of Penha in 2015, reunited with photographer Richard Stuckert.

[tropic-havens]

Watoriki village, Yanomami Indigenous Land, Brazil

[partesextrapartes]

Amazing

[subnitida]

Desenho yanomami. O mutum (paruri) que simboliza a noite (titi).

[ausetkmt]

How the world’s favorite conservation model was built on colonial violence | Grist

On a 1919 trip to the United States, King Albert I of Belgium visited three of the country’s national parks: Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the newly established Grand Canyon. The parks represented a model developed by the U.S. of creating protected national parks, where visitors and scientists could come to admire spectacular, unchanging natural beauty and wildlife. Impressed by the parks, King Albert created his own just a few years later: Albert National Park in the Belgian Congo, established in 1925. 

Widely seen as the first national park in Africa, Albert National Park (now called Virunga National Park), was designed to be a place for scientific exploration and discovery, particularly around mountain gorillas. It also set the tone for decades of colonial protected parks in Africa. Although Belgian authorities claimed that the park was home to only a small group of Indigenous people — “300 or so, whom we like to preserve” — they violently expelled thousands of other Indigenous people from the area. The few hundred selected to remain in the park were seen as a valuable addition to the park’s wildlife rather than as actual people. 

And so modern conservation in Africa began by separating nature from the people who lived in it. Since then, as the model has spread across the globe, inhabited protected areas have routinely led to the eviction of Indigenous peoples. Today, these conservation projects are led not by colonial governments but by nonprofit executives, large corporations, academics, and world leaders.

For much of human history, most people lived in rural areas, surrounded by nature and farmland. That all changed with the Industrial Revolution. By the end of the 19th century, European forests were vanishing, cities were growing, and Europeans felt increasingly disconnected from the natural world.

“With industrialization, the link with the natural cycle of things got lost — and that also led to a certain type of romanticization of nature, and a longing for a particular type of nature,” said Bram Büscher, a sociologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. 

In Africa, Europeans could experience that pure, untouched nature, even if it meant expelling the people living on it. 

“The idea that land is best preserved when it’s protected away from humans is an imperialist ideology that has been imposed on Africans and other Indigenous people,” said Aby Sène-Harper, an environmental social scientist at Clemson University in South Carolina. 

For Europeans, creating protected parks in Africa allowed them to expand their dominion over the continent and quench their thirst for “undisturbed” nature, all without threatening their ongoing expansion of industrialization and capitalism in their own countries. With each new national park came more evictions of Indigenous people, paving the way for trophy hunting, resource extraction, and anything else they wanted to do.

In the mid-19th century, European colonization of Africa was limited, largely confined to coastal regions. But by 1925, when King Albert created his park, Europeans controlled roughly 90 percent of the continent. 

At the time, these parks were playgrounds for wealthy Europeans and part of a massive imperial campaign to control African land and resources. Today, there are thousands of protected national parks around the world covering millions of acres, ranging from small enclosures like Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis to sprawling landmarks like Death Valley in California and Kruger National Park in South Africa. And the world wants more. 

Scientists, politicians, and conservationists are championing the protected-areas model, developed in the U.S. and perfected in Africa. In late 2022, at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, nearly 200 countries signed an international pledge to protect 30 percent of the world’s land and waters by 2030, an effort known as 30×30 that would amount to the greatest expansion of protected areas in history.

So how did protected parks move from an imperial tool to an international solution for accelerating climate and biodiversity crises? 

In the early part of the 20th century, the expansion of colonial conservation areas was humming along. From South Africa to Kenya and India, colonial governments were creating protected national parks. These parks provided a host of benefits to their creators. There were economic benefits, including extraction of resources on park land and tourism income from increasingly popular safaris and hunting expeditions. But most of all, the rapidly developing network of parks was a form of control.

“If you can sweep a lot of peasants and Indigenous peoples away from the lands, then it’s easier to colonize the land,” Büscher said. 

This approach was enshrined by the 1933 International Conference for the Protection of the Fauna and Flora of Africa, which created one of the first international treaties, known as the London Convention, to protect wildlife. The convention was led by prominent trophy hunters, but it recommended that colonies restrict traditional African hunting practices.

“Conservation is an ideology. And this ideology is based on the idea that other human beings’ ways of life are wrong and are harming nature, that nature needs no human beings in order to be saved,” said Fiore Longo, a researcher and campaigner at Survival international, a nonprofit that advocates for Indigenous rights globally. 

The London Convention also suggested national parks as a primary solution to preserve nature in Africa — and as many African countries saw the creation of their first national parks in the first half of the 20th century, the removal of Indigenous peoples continued. The convention was also an early sign that conservation was becoming a global task, rather than a collection of individual projects and parks. 

This sense of collective responsibility only grew in the aftermath of World War II, when many international organizations and mechanisms, like the United Nations, were created, ushering in a new period of global cooperation. In 1948, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, the world’s first international organization devoted to nature conservation, was established. This would help pave the way for a new phase of international conservation trends.

By the middle of the 20th century, many countries in Africa were beginning to decolonize, becoming independent from the European powers that had controlled them for decades. Even as they lost their colonies, the imperial powers were not willing to let go of their protected parks. But at the same time, the IUCN was proving ineffective and underfunded. So in 1961, the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF, an international nonprofit, was founded by European conservationists to help fund global efforts to protect wildlife. 

Sène-Harper said that although the newly independent African countries nominally controlled their national parks, many of them were run or supported by Western nonprofits like WWF.

“They’re trying to find more crafty ways to be able to extract without seeming so colonial about it, but it’s still an imperialist form of invasion,” she said.

Although these nonprofits have done important work in raising awareness of the extinction crisis, and have had some successes, experts say that the model of colonial conservation has not changed and has only made the problem worse. 

Over the years, WWF and other nonprofits have helped fund violent campaigns against Indigenous peoples, from Nepal to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And amid it all, climate change continues to worsen and species continue to suffer. 

In 2019, in response to allegations about murders and other human rights abuses, WWF conducted an independent review that found “no evidence that WWF staff directed, participated in, or encouraged any abuses.” The organization also said in a statement that “We feel deep and unreserved sorrow for those who have suffered. We are determined to do more to make communities’ voices heard, to have their rights respected, and to consistently advocate for governments to uphold their human rights obligations.”

“I think most of [the big NGOs] have become part of the problem rather than the solution, unfortunately,” Büscher said. “The extinction crisis is very real and urgent. But, nonetheless, the history of these organizations and their policies are incredibly contradictory.”

To Indigenous people who had already suffered from decades of colonial conservation policies, little changed with decolonization.

“When we got independence, we kept on the same policies and regulations,” said Mathew Bukhi Mabele, a conservation social scientist at the University of Dodoma in central Tanzania. 

In 1992, representatives from around the world gathered in Rio De Janeiro for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. The Earth Summit, as it has come to be known, led to the creation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as well as the Convention on Biological Diversity, two international treaties that committed to tackling climate change, biodiversity, and sustainable development. 

Biodiversity is the umbrella term for all forms of life on Earth including plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi. 

Although the Earth Summit was a pivotal moment in the global fight to protect the environment, some have criticized the decision to split climate change and biodiversity into separate conferences. 

“It doesn’t make sense, actually, to separate out the two because when you get to the ground, these are going to be the same activities, the same approaches, the same programs, the same life plans for Indigenous people,” said Jennifer Tauli Corpuz, who is Kankana-ey Igorot from the Northern Philippines and one of the lead negotiators of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity. 

From left: The 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the Earth Summit, brought together political leaders, diplomats, scientists, representatives of the media, and non-governmental organizations from 179 countries. Indigenous environmentalist Raoni Metuktire, a chief of the Kayapo people in Brazil, talks with an Earth Summit attendee.

In the years following the Earth Summit, biodiversity efforts began to lag behind climate action, Corpuz said.

Protecting animals was trendy during the early days of WWF, when images of pandas and elephants were key fundraising tactics. But as the impacts of climate change intensified, including more devastating storms, higher sea levels, and rising temperatures, biodiversity was struggling to gain as much attention. 

“There were 100 times more resources being poured into climate change. It was more sexy, more charismatic, as an issue,” Corpuz said. “And now biodiversity wants a piece of the pie.” 

But to get that, proponents of biodiversity needed to develop initiatives similar to the big goals coming out of climate conferences. For many conservation groups and scientists, the obvious solution was to fall back on what they had always done: create protected areas.

This time, however, they needed a global plan, so scientists were trying to calculate how much of the world they needed to protect. In 2010, nations set a goal of conserving 17 percent of the world’s land by 2020. Some scientists have supported protecting half the earth. Meanwhile, Indigenous groups have proposed protecting 80 percent of the Amazon by 2025. 

How the world arrived at the 30×30 conservation model

Explore key moments in conservation’s global legacy, from the United States’ first national park in the 19th century to the expansion of colonial conservation areas in the early 20th century and the current push to protect 30 percent of the world’s land and oceans by 2030.

1872: Yellowstone becomes the first national park in the U.S.

1919: King Albert I of Belgium tours Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon

1925: Albert National Park is established in the Belgian Congo

1933: One of the first international treaties to protect wildlife, known as the London Convention, is created by European conservationists

1948: The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is established 

1961: The World Wildlife Fund, a non-governmental organization, is founded by European conservationist

1992: The Earth Summit in Brazil creates the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)

2010: CBD sets a goal of conserving 17% of the world’s land by 2020 

2022: At the UN Biodiversity Conference, nearly 200 countries set 30×30 as an international goal 

In 2019, Eric Dinerstein, formerly the chief scientist at WWF, and others wrote the Global Deal for Nature, a paper that proposed formally protecting 30 percent of the world by 2030 and 50 percent by 2050, calling it a “companion pact to the Paris Agreement.” Their 30×30 plan has since gained widespread international support. 

But other experts, including some Indigenous leaders, say the idea ignores generations of effective Indigenous land management. At the time, there was limited scientific attention paid to Indigenous stewardship. Because of that, Indigenous leaders say they were largely ignored in the early years of international biodiversity negotiations.

“At the moment, we did not have a lot of evidence,” said Viviana Figueroa, who is Omaguaca-Kolla from Argentina and a member of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity. 

Some experts see the push for global protected areas as a direct response to community-based conservation, which grew in popularity in the 1980s, and saw local communities and Indigenous peoples take control of conservation projects in their area, rather than the centralized approach that had dominated during colonial times. 

Some of the chief proponents of 30×30 bristle at the suggestion that they do not support Indigenous rights and say that Indigenous land management is at the heart of the initiative.

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson from WWF pointed to its website, which outlines the organization’s approach to area-based conservation and its position on 30×30: “WWF supports the inclusion of a ‘30×30’ target in CBD’s post-2020 global biodiversity framework (GBF) only if certain conditions are met. For example, such a target must ensure social equity, good governance, and an inclusive approach that secures the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities to their land, freshwater, and seas.”

“People have cherry-picked a few examples of where the rights of locals have been tread upon. But by and large, in the vast majority of situations, what’s going on is support of local communities, really, rather than anything to do with violation,” said Dinerstein, who now works at Resolve, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on environmental, social, and health issues. 

But Indigenous advocates say if that were true, they would not keep pushing a model that has already led to countless human rights violations.

“Despite having this knowledge and knowing that people who are not contributing to the destruction of the environment are going to pay for these protected areas, they decided to keep on pushing the target,” Survival International’s Longo said. 

The new 30×30 framework agreed to by nearly 200 countries at the UN Biodiversity Conference in December came after years of delay and fierce negotiation. The challenge is now implementing the agreement around the world, a massive task that will require buy-in from individual countries and their governments.

“What was adopted in Montreal is hugely ambitious. And it can only be achieved by a lot of hard work on the ground. And it’s a great document, but it is only a document,” said David Cooper, acting executive secretary of the UN’s Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. 

Part of that work is figuring out what land to protect. And although Indigenous negotiators and advocates did manage to get language that enshrines Indigenous rights into the final agreement, they are still concerned. Over a century of colonial conservation has shown that it only serves the powerful at the expense of Indigenous peoples. 

“European countries are not going to evict white people from their lands,” said Longo. “That is for sure. This is where you see all the racism around this. Because they know how these targets will be applied in Africa and Asia. That’s what’s going on, they are evicting the people.”

Dinerstein, however, would argue that European countries have less natural resources to preserve, but more financial resources to help other countries.

“There’s a lot that can be done in Europe,” he said. “So we shouldn’t overlook that as well. I’m just making the point that there’s the opportunity to be able to do much more in other countries that have much less resources.”

Cooper said that in addition to implementation, monitoring and ensuring that rights are upheld will be a crucial task over the next seven years. “There will need to be a lot of work on monitoring. There’s always a justified nervousness that any global process cannot really see what’s happening at the local level and can end up with supporting measures that are perhaps not beneficial at the local level,” he said. 

Although Indigenous leaders are going to keep fighting to ensure that the expansion of protected areas does not lead to continued violation of their rights, they are worried that the model itself is flawed. “It’s inevitable that the burden is going to fall again on developing countries,” Corpuz said.