Star Girl: Making the prize-winning Kayapó-language film "Nhakpoti"

Over years and across long distances, an international filmmaking team collaborated to bring to life the origin story of how agriculture came to Kayapó communities, Indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon.

Just ahead, a Kayapó warrior in flip-flops slashes through forest undergrowth with his machete. Behind him, filmmaker Pat-i navigates the narrow path with a boom microphone. The rest of us on the filmmaking crew follow close behind. Suddenly, Pat-i stops. He points the boom mic into the forest and says, “I remember seeing a wang-ynh this way.”

It was late June 2019. We were searching the forest near the village of A’Ukre in the Brazilian Amazon for a particular species of flexible tree. The wang-ynh tree figures prominently in the Kayapó story of “Star Girl,” or “Nhakpoti.” The story recounts how a Kayapó boy declared his love to a beautiful star, who then came down from the heavens to marry him. Not satisfied with the meager mushroom diet of her primordial Kayapó in-laws, Star Girl flies back into the sky, propelled by a wang-ynh catapult, and brings down agricultural crops for the village.

A still from the short film Nhakpoti shows Star Girl descending from the heavens. 
Photo: Paul Chilsen

For the film adaptation of the story, our production team envisioned a scene catapulting a novice Kayapó actress into the heavens—using nothing more than a sapling, some vines and climbing rope for guy wires, and a little fancy camera work.

The Kayapó (who call themselves Mêbêngôkre) have been pioneers in the growing global Indigenous media movement. In the early 1990s, anthropologist Terence Turner described one community’s innovative use of video to document and defend their culture. Inspired by Turner’s work, co-author Glenn Shepard Jr. began collaborating with anthropologist Richard Pace in 2010 to train more Kayapó filmmakers and better understand their perspectives. In 2017, co-author and filmmaker Paul Chilsen joined forces with anthropologists Shepard, Pace, and Laura Zanotti (who had been working independently on Indigenous media in A’Ukre since 2012). The team started providing additional equipment and training for a growing cadre of Kayapó filmmakers in several villages.

Up until recently, Kayapó-made films have mainly focused on recording traditional ceremonies and political rallies in real time. However, as a result of training workshops and contact with other Indigenous media-makers, Kayapó filmmakers have started to explore other film storytelling genres beyond documentaries. Co-author Pat-i expressed an interest in experimenting with the fictionalized narrative genre—the first of its kind in his community. And so, we began adapting the tale of Nhakpoti into a short film.

The team films a pivotal scene for Nhakpoti featuring actress Boni Kayapó.
Photo: G. Shepard

“Growing up, Nhakpoti is one of many stories I heard from our elders,” explained Pat-i. “We chose this story to be our first narrative film because it’s short. We thought it would be easy to make as our first film. In our minds, it would take just a few days.”

However, the process turned out to be more complicated and time-consuming than the Kayapó team anticipated.

The entire filmmaking process—storyboarding, casting, writing dialogue, shooting, and, finally, editing—was carried out in collaboration with elders and the filmmaking collective from Pat-i’s home village of A’Ukre in the Brazilian Amazon. As part of a two-week training course in A’Ukre in 2019, a multicultural crew, including Indigenous filmmakers and actors, U.S. college students, and U.S. and Brazilian researchers, worked together to produce the film. With COVID-19 delays, travel restrictions, multilingual translations, and working across the miles, the film was finally completed in early 2023.

The film alternates between a scene of a current village elder, Krwyt, telling the story to his grandson in the present day, and a reenactment of the legendary story of Nhakpoti by Kayapó actors. By blending the mythical past with the present, the film is faithful to deeply rooted Kayapó notions of time and history. Kayapó rituals and aesthetics emphasize how ancient forms and values are always reproduced in the present. Indeed, during Nhakpoti’s wedding feast at the end of the film, mythical events become virtually indistinguishable from a current-day Kayapó ceremony, reflecting what Shepard and Pace have described as a distinctive “Kayapó film aesthetic.”

The production revealed the complexities of transcultural filmmaking. For example, the initial male lead was shy in front of the camera, so a collective decision was made to replace him with a more assertive actor. However, the female lead suddenly refused to speak her lines to the new actor, bringing production to a halt. We learned that kinship taboos prohibited her from addressing this particular relative directly. To respect Kayapó customs, we had to find a new female lead.

In another learning experience, Kayapó filmmakers who had previously worked mostly in documentaries realized they needed to shift their audio recording techniques for this film. They suddenly had to worry about roosters and gasoline generators interrupting the harmonious mythical soundscape the film was attempting to create.

To facilitate the creation of more narrative films in the future, the village filmmaking collective is now considering building a remote shooting location far from anachronistic sights and sounds. Such a site could help the Indigenous filmmaking collective in A’Ukre achieve even more independence within the global media industry.

For Chilsen, Shepard, and the other collaborators from outside of A’Ukre, the goal has always been to affirm and prioritize Indigenous voices and to understand the unique Kayapó cultural perspective on filmmaking. Rather than transposing a Hollywood studio model on A’Ukre, the making of Nhakpoti shows how Kayapó filmmakers are creating their own filmmaking tradition: a sort of “A’Ukrewood in the making,” as Shepard and Pace put it.

“It was a learning process,” Pat-i reflected on the collaboration. “We understood that this is how ‘White people’ make films. Now, hopefully, we can make our own narrative films without their help.”

The film shoot in the village of A’Ukre in 2019 brought together Kayapó filmmakers and actors, U.S. college students, and U.S. and Brazilian researchers.
Photo: G. Shepard

Back in the forest that day, we were nearing the end of our shoot, and we all could feel how this intense, critical scene embodied the depth and significance of this cultural, creative exchange.

After locating the wang-ynh tree in the forest, we set about working out the complexities of “catapulting” Nhakpoti into the heavens.

The non-Indigenous members of the film crew relied on the ingenuity of Kayapó woodsmen-grips as they lashed together saplings and vines, using a tree fork to create an improvised jib for the Star Girl’s heavenly flight. Likewise, Kayapó filmmakers were fully engrossed in seeing how strategic camera angles could produce the magic of special effects. Working together, we all helped Star Girl soar.

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Nhakpoti debuted at the Montreal First Peoples Festival in August, taking home a prize for Best International Short Film. 

 

Nhakpoti was co-directed by Pat-i Kayapó and Paul Chilsen (view a trailer)

Text by Paul Chilsen, Glenn H. Shepard Jr. and Pat-i Kayapó

First published by Sapiens on Aug. 24, 2023 as "Bringing Nhakpoti, the Kayapó Story of Star Girl, to the Screen" 

Women Have Hair, Men Have Nicknames: Remembering Jay Dautcher

When I first created this blog ten years ago, I had trouble deciding on a name for it. So I called Jay Dautcher, my multi-talented polyglot musician-climber-anthropologist friend and fellow Berkeley anthropology Ph.D. who had been my go-to title crisis counselor for years. We had a long brainstorming session over Skype (back when that was a thing), and after he had grilled and goaded me for almost an hour about my vision for the site, and mercilessly shot down all of my corny, half-baked title suggestions, somehow the name of Dostoevsky came up and he suddenly blurted out "Notes from the Ethnoground." 

I said, "Jay, that's it! You're a genius."

And the rest, so they say, is history.

Jay Todd Dautcher was indeed a genius, and he left this world, tragically young and still in peak physical and mental condition, just over three years ago, victim of a uniquely severe allergic reaction caused by a rare immune system disease known as systemic mastocytosis that he himself, in typical Jay fashion, correctly diagnosed after months of inconclusive medical testing and his own obsessive online research. 

Jay on the beach near his home in Santa Cruz, 2018. Photo: Lyn Jefferey.

Jay was a child prodigy. He finished high school a year early and went on to take college-level math and science courses as well as foreign languages in Switzerland. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1985 with a degree in physics, and from there pursued a Master's in physics in China (and in Chinese!) at Peking University. Yet in the end, his passion for languages and cultural immersion outstripped his natural talent for math and science. He left the hard sciences for the social sciences, continuing his studies in China and getting a Master's Degree in Folklore at Beijing Normal University in 1991. 

Jay was a great lover of music and a talented musician in his own right. He played guitar and sang at bars around Beijing, where he met and befriended a number of prominent folk musicians, notably Uyghur artist Alimjan Tursun from Xinjiang in western China. Alimjan later achieved international recognition for his perfomance of traditional music in the Oscar-winning film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. 

Jay at Lake Karakul in Xinjiang ca. 1995. Photo: Eric Karchmer, courtesy of Lyn Jefferey.

Already fluent in Chinese after living and studying in China for five years, Jay began traveling in Xinjiang and learning Uyghur, the Turkic language spoken by this Muslim ethnic group that has long suffered under Han Chinese domination. In 1991, he entered the Ph.D. program in anthropology at U.C. Berkeley (a year after I did) where he studied under the legendary folklore scholar Alan Dundes. As part of his dissertation fieldwork, he entered Xinjiang University in Urumqi to study the Uyghur language formally. With his tireless drive and prodigal language skills, he become fluent in Uyghur as well. 

With our shared interest in languages, travel and acoustic music, it was inevitable that Jay and I would become friends. I will never forget sunny days sitting in the eucalyptus grove along Strawberry Creek on the Berkeley campus, Jay with his Martin D-28 and I with my banjo, picking away at bluegrass classics, bossa nova, swing tunes and the occasional Charlie Parker bebop standard. 

Pickin' and grinnin' (and Wild Turkey). Berkeley, 1995. Photo: Maria N.F. da Silva.

Jay's mind never stopped, and yet his body was never far behind. As he reinvented himself intellectually and professionally, time and time again over the years, he also maintained himself in prime physical condition through weight training and rock climbing. In his youth, he accompanied mountaineering legend Rob Robinson in discovering the "Tennessee Wall" near Chattanooga for climbers in the mid-1980s. Jay made a number of first ascents on routes that still bear his name, and of course his creative titles such as "Finger Lockin' Good" and "Jay Walker." 

After finishing his Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1999, Jay went on to a post-doctoral position at Harvard, where he began work on his pioneering book about the Uyghur people, Down a Narrow Road: Identity and Masculinity in a Uyghur Community in Xinjiang China (Harvard University Press: 2009). 

Being one of the few fluent American speakers of Uyghur in the U.S. in the early 2000s, Jay was called upon by public defense attorneys to translate for a number of Uyghur prisoners at Guantanamo Bay detention camp who had been captured during the U.S. war in Afghanistan. A total of 22 Uyghur were captured and detained despite being unarmed and not apparently involved in hostilities against the U.S. The last Uyghur captives were finally released only in 2013 after more than ten years of imprisonment. 

Jay's notes from his visit to Guantanamo.

Jay was a brilliant and acclaimed scholar, and he landed the most coveted position in the entire United States in the field of folklore at the University of Pennsylvania in 2001. Yet he walked away from this dream job a few years later and moved to Santa Cruz, California, to be with the love of his life, Lynn Jeffery, and her son Ethan, whom he raised as his own. 

The academic grind was ultimately too narrow for Jay's warp-speed mind and voracious curiosity. After leaving academia, he held numerous jobs and consulting positions in translation, industrial ethnography and data analysis, working for a telescope manufacturing company based in China, a medical facility in the Midwest, Ricoh electronics and the "TurboTax" parent company, Intuit. 

During the last three years of his life, Jay returned to his roots in the hard sciences, reinventing himself once again as a data scientist. He spent a year teaching himself machine learning and then immediately landed a job at one of Silicon valley's top internet security firms. Throughout these permutations and reinventions, Jay was also an avid amateur inventor, and spent years creating designs for a "fish suit" that would allow people to swim with greater mechanical efficiency. 

As a consummate folklorist, Jay amassed vast collections of jokes, sayings, scams, folk songs and urban legends in Uyghur as well as Chinese. I remember one particular Uyghur saying that was important to his research into masculine identity: "Women have hair, men have nicknames." The saying refers to male joking practices among the Uyghur, a major focus of one chapter in his book. Uyghur boys receive nicknames, usually in reference to some embarrassing childhood incident that haunts them for the rest of their lives. Just as hair for women represents an intimate part of their social identity that must be hidden from all but their closest relations, men's nicknames are also a reflection of both intimacy and danger. Or to put it in another way, that which is dearest to us can also be our greatest vulnerability. 

As someone who always maintained both his body and mind in top condition through rigorous exercise and constant intellectual challenges, it was a sad irony that he was ultimately felled by the excessive vigor of his immune system, rather than by any weakness of it. My youngest son, who shares the same birthday with Jay, also coincidentally suffered from a mysterious and exceedingly rare immune system disease as a child.

Jay with my eldest son in 2002.

Another favorite Uyghur saying of Jay's was, "If you have teeth, eat meat!", an exhortation to live and enjoy life to one's fullest capacity. There is no question that Jay lived up to that motto. Though he spent his grad-school days subsisting on a minimalist diet based on the principal of time efficiency, his life with Lyn and Ethan inspired him to become a creative, and of course studious and prolific chef. 

During his last few years, and inspired by his adopted son Ethan, Jay got turned on to mycology. Like everything else in his life, Jay did not take to this new hobby casually. He enrolled in mushroom workshops with the famous Santa Cruz-based mycologist, David Arora. He made frequent mushroom hunting expeditions in the woods near his house and throughout the Santa Cruz mountains, occasionally sending me scale photos of his latest finds. He studied, learned and obsessively documented the full suite of fungi in the region, and discovered dozens of secret, reliable spots to gather favorite species to cook for his family. 

The last jar of porcini: September, 2018.

Though we talked occasionally on Skype, I hadn't seen Jay in person since 2008. We both suffered life-threatening illness episodes in 2015-2016, and decided it was time to see each other again soon. The last time we spoke, around May of 2018, I had finalized my plans to attend the upcoming American Anthropological Association meetings in nearby San José that November. We eagerly plotted out a busy itinerary of music, hiking, rock climbing, bonfires on the beach, a Thanksgiving mushroom extravaganza, and otherwise enjoying the scenery, the coffee shops and one another's company.

Instead I found myself in Santa Cruz in mid-September, stunned and in shock alongside family, co-workers, and friends both old and new, attending an inspiring and poignant memorial service, a month after his death and just two months before his 55th birthday. That night, Lyn and a few friends and I made risotto al funghi out of the last remnants of a jar of dried porcini mushrooms he had gathered the previous Spring. 

There is nothing quite like the bittersweet experience of cooking, savoring and consuming the fragrant harvest of a beloved friend who has departed the world so recently, and so prematurely. Grok?

In memory of his contribution to this web log from its very inception, ten years ago, and to his inimitable genius and our years of friendship, sadly cut short, I dedicate this posting to Jay, on what would have been his 58th birthday. 

"Hallelujah, done my duty, put on my travelin' shoes"

Jay Todd Dautcher: November 19, 1963 - August 4, 2018.

                                                                -----

Jay's family created a website of memories and stories for those who wish to learn or share more about his remarkable life.

Jay's friend and fellow Xinjiang expert Gardner Bovington receives donations for the Jay Dautcher Memorial Fund supporting young scholars in the field of Uyghur studies at Indiana University.

A wildcat doesn’t change its spots: Gold mining on Indigenous lands in Bolsonaro’s Brazil

A shootout on May 10 between Yanomami Indigenous people and heavily armed illegal miners in Roraima state, Brazil, left three miners and two Yanomami children dead. Since then, invaders have returned by boatloads, firing on community members and even Federal Police agents. Emboldened by Jair Bolsonaro’s election to the Brazilian presidency in 2018, wildcat gold miners have invaded federally protected Indigenous lands with impunity, knowing that the president has their back. 

Illegal mining on Yanomami lands has altered the course of rivers: photo Instituto Socioambiental

Bolsonaro has always had a soft spot for gold miners. During his presidential campaign in 2018, Bolsonaro bragged about driving around with a kit of sieves in the trunk of his car so he could stop whenever he wanted to pan for gold. “Mining is addictive, it runs in the blood,” he stated, referring to his father, Percy Geraldo Bolsonaro, who joined over 100,000 wildcat miners in the notorious gold rush at Serra Pelada in the Amazonian state of Pará in the 1980s. 

Bolsonaro's father participated in the "Hellish" devastation at Serra Pelada in the 1980s: photo by Sebastião Salgado

A year after winning the election, Bolsonaro invited miners from Serra Pelada to the presidential palace, reminiscing about “happier” times for miners during Brazil’s two-decade-long military dictatorship and making the widely criticized and crude remark, “Interest in the Amazon isn’t about the Indians or the f***ing trees. It’s about mining."

"It's about mining" 

Bolsonaro’s frequent derogatory comments about Indigenous land titling, his systematic rollback of environmental policing and his promises of a “blank check” for miners fueled a massive surge in illegal mining on Indigenous lands throughout Brazil, even as the coronavirus pandemic threatened vulnerable Indigenous populations. The invasion of the Yanomami Indigenous Lands by tens of thousands of illegal miners helped spread the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed over 20 Yanomami people (out of a total population of 20,000) while increasing deforestation by 30% in just one year. 

Health studies among the Munduruku people of Pará state showed that 60% exhibited unsafe levels of mercury that has been introduced to the food chain by illegal miners. Nonetheless, Bolsonaro’s pro-business environmental minister Ernesto Salles has intervened in support of illegal mining operations in the region. More recently, Minister Salles has become implicated in an international investigation over illegal lumber exports from Brazil to Europe and the US.

Mining in Munduruku lands has fueled an epidemic of mercury contamination.

The Brazilian Constitution of 1988 does not forbid mining on Indigenous lands. Rather, it stipulates that mining will only be permitted after the passage of regulatory legislation by Congress, which would include congressional hearings with affected Indigenous communities and the formalization of agreements on benefit sharing. 

Even before Bolsonaro’s time, Indigenous communities in different regions had considered the possibility of sustainable mining projects. However, experiences with informal mining prior to Indigenous land demarcation highlighted numerous risks, while calling into question the ability of governmental agencies to carry out proper oversight. There are currently over 4,000 requests for mining concessions that would affect nearly a third of Brazil’s Indigenous lands if such legislation were to be passed.

As soon as Bolsonaro consolidated majority control over both of Brazil’s congressional houses in February of 2021, his government announced a list of legislative priorities that included the legalization of mining on Indigenous lands. Bolsonaro has met personally with minority pro-mining voices among some Indigenous communities in order to move this agenda forward.

Bolsonaro has met with Indigenous leaders to promote mining as an economic alternative

Even though Bolsonaro touts himself as a crusader for Indigenous peoples’ rights to benefit from the development of mineral and other resources on their lands, a recent comparative study of data from municipal authorities throughout Brazil has concluded that gold and diamond mining operations do not bring about lasting improvements to socioeconomic indicators, but rather “leave the region poor, sick and lacking in education”.

Growing criticisms of Bolsonaro’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed over 500,000 Brazilians, has weakened his political position. An open admirer of former U.S. president Trump, Bolsonaro is also facing pushback from the Biden administration for his lax attitude towards deforestation and forest fires in the Amazon. 

Just before the Global Climate Summit in April, Bolsonaro wrote president Biden promising to end deforestation in the Amazon, apparently eager to cinch a billion dollar aid deal. Brazilian indigenous leaders warned Biden not to trust such disingenuous overtures. 

Bolsonaro and Salles announce measures to monitor deforestation

The economic devastation wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil as well as Bolsonaro’s falling popularity in 2022 election polls put the Biden administration in a strong position to seek major concessions for any cash-for-conservation deal. High on that list should be reining in illegal incursions and withdrawing the legislative bid to legalize mining on indigenous lands.

After over a month of inaction from federal authorities, the Brazilian Supreme Court has finally mandated the immediate removal of illegal miners from Yanomami and other indigenous lands. It remains to be seen whether this judicial victory will bring about meaningful enforcement, or whether it will only further embolden president Bolsonaro and the wildcat miners he has so vociferously supported.

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This text is the full and updated version of my letter in Nature Correspondence, first published in abbreviated form on June 8.  

"The Camera is our Weapon": Kayapó video warriors featured in new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York

The Kayapó (Mebengôkrê) people of Brazil are living proof of the resistance and adaptability of Indigenous cultures. A new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York highlights the dynamism and creativity of this warrior tribe, and their historical struggle to preserve their lands and culture. Originally inhabiting the dry savannahs of central Brazil, the Kayapó were pushed farther north and west by Portuguese invaders, ultimately moving into the Amazon basin hundreds of miles from their ancestral homelands. In order to survive in this new environment, the Kayapó had to conquer, capture and appropriate new lands, technologies and knowledge from their enemies and retool them for their own ends. The Kayapó people maintain this warrior heritage through the present day, as they have seized on video cameras, international media visibility and even "Kaya-pop music" to broadcast their voices and defend their culture.

Self-portrait of video warrior Bepunu Kayapó, July 2020.

The exhibit is centered on a striking self-portrait of Kayapó warrior Bepunu in full ritual regalia gazing back at the spectator armed with a video camera. This image creates a dialog with an existing exhibit case in the American Museum's Hall of South American Indians that contains a mannequin depicting a Kayapó warrior brandishing a traditional war club. During the course of creating the exhibit, I was able to locate Kubei, a Kayapó activist who had visited the American Museum in 1990 in the company of anthropologist Terence Turner. Kayapó film maker Pat-I recorded an interview with Kubei in March of 2020, especially for this exhibit, in which he reflects on his visit to New York 30 years ago, describes his reaction to meeting his Kayapó "friend" (his name for the mannequin) and responds to how Kayapó culture was displayed at the museum. 

Above: Kayapó activists Kubei and Tapiet visited the American Museum in 1990 and gifted their Kayapó "friend" with a feather headdress and other body ornaments that remain in the exhibit case to this day (photo: American Museum library). Below: the Kayapó warrior mannequin at the American Museum (photo: David Harvey). 

The exhibit was designed by a group of graduate students at Columbia University's Museum Anthropology program in collaboration with American Museum curator Laurel Kendall, exhibit designer David Harvey and other American Museum staff as part of an annual practical course that invites outside specialists like myself to help develop a new exhibit case every Spring. Because of the COVID pandemic, installation of the physical case was postponed, and instead we prepared an online version that includes a 3D virtual reality visualization of the actual exhibit case containing various Kayapó cultural objects. 

Virtual reality 3D visualization of the exhibit case

The online exhibit includes a series of short films made by Kayapó film makers, an activity booklet for children as well as information and donation links regarding the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Kayapó and other indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Playable audio files present the pronunciation of key Kayapó language terms and provide an example of the lively rhythms of "Kaya-pop" music. The exhibit also features images by photojournalist Dado Galdieri. A Portuguese translation of the exhibit website was prepared in a co-launch with the Goeldi Museum in Brazil:

The Camera is Our Weapon: Kayapó Video Warriors in the Amazon

A Câmera é nossa Arma: Video-Guerreiros Kayapó na Amazônia

Read our recent paper on Kayapó film-making in Current Anthropology 

Related stories from this blog: 

Might at the Museum: Indigenous groups revisit their heritage at the Goeldi Museum

Between the Cross and the Pleaides: Missionaries, museums and a Baniwa shaman's heritage

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Special thanks to Laura Zanotti, Janet Chernela, Pat-I Kayapó and Bepunu Kayapó for their invaluable contributions to this exhibit.  

Fifty Shades of Green: Reflecting back on the Oscar-nominated film Embrace of the Serpent in the age of coronavirus [excerpt]

The tragic death from coronavirus of indigenous actor Antonio Bolivar, star of the Oscar-nominated film Embrace of the Serpent, has made me reflect back on all the facts the film got wrong and the truths it got right: Excerpted from Chacruna.net 

As the lights in the cinema went down and the opening scene of Ciro Guerra’s 2015 film The Embrace of the Serpent began to flicker on the screen, I was primed to be blown away. The film, based loosely on the field experiences of legendary Amazon explorers Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Schultes, and shot on location in the Colombian Amazon with indigenous actors, was being hailed as visionary. Within the first few seconds my already high expectations of ethnographic authenticity were already surpassed. In the opening sequence, the protagonist Karamakate, whose youthful self is played by Cubeo indigenous actor Nibio Torres, brandishes a long, slender spear that buzzes like a rattle snake when shaken. As a researcher and museum curator who has worked in adjacent regions of the northwest Brazilian Amazon, I have seen identical ceremonial rattle-spears in ethnographic collections and heard them deployed in rituals. 

Antonio Bolivar, the Ocaina indigenous actor who played the elder version of solitary shaman Karamakate in the film, died at the end of May from coronavirus in the jungle town of Leticia, Colombia.

Cinematic representations of the Amazon have a long and dismal history of exoticism, sensationalism and pure fantasy, from The Emerald Forest to Medicine Man to Anaconda. At last, a popular feature film that represents Amazonian peoples accurately! And yet instants later these admittedly high hopes were dashed. When the canoe containing the German explorer “Theo” (Koch-Grünberg’s pseudonym in the movie) gets closer to the bank, Karamakate pops off the spear’s rattle-tip to reveal a blowgun which he aims menacingly at the intruder. Though indigenous peoples of the Vaupes region indeed use blowguns with curare-tipped darts for hunting, I am not aware of any culture that combines these two pieces of material into a single, interchangeable multi-purpose weapon. “Sssssss”, began the hissing sound, not of a serpent but of my rapidly deflating enchantment...

Continue reading the full article at Chacruna.net

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Covid-19: Lessons from the Yanomami [New York Times Op-Ed]

This essay, which I translated and edited from an original draft written in French by anthropologist Bruce Albert, was first published by the New York Times on April 27.

--Versão em Português--

The Yanomami people are no strangers to fatal epidemics, and yet on April 9, many around the world were shocked to learn that Covid-19 had taken its first victim among this relatively isolated Indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest along the Brazil-Venezuela border.

Alvaney Xirixana was a 15-year-old boy from the Helepe community of the Rio Uraricoera river basin in the Brazilian state of Roraima, a region afflicted by a huge invasion of illegal gold miners. Malnourished and anemic from successive bouts of malaria, the teenager began showing characteristic respiratory symptoms in mid-March.

Illegal miners are penetrating the most remote parts of Yanomami territory, threatening villages with isolated and highly vulnerable indigenous populations.
Photo: FUNAI 

For 21 days he was admitted four times to a local health care facility, three times receiving treatment for other diseases and the fourth time being discharged. He was finally given a coronavirus test on April 3, when he was hospitalized yet again, this time in critical condition. He died six days later. A victim of the absurd negligence of local health services, he probably infected numerous other members of his community as well as health care workers during those three wasted weeks before he was tested. This appalling episode has raised the specter of a major new health disaster among the Yanomami people. And it is a warning for other Indigenous people of the Amazon.

Today, we are all frightened about Covid-19. What we’re feeling is perhaps not unlike what the Yanomami have historically experienced when faced with the mysterious and lethal epidemics that our world has inflicted on them.

Since their initial contacts with outsiders beginning in the 1940s, the Yanomami have lived through wave after wave of deadly viral epidemics, notably the measles and flu.

Many Yanomami still lead a semi-nomadic lifestyle, trekking through the forest to hunt, visit distant villages or relocate to areas with more abundant game. 
Photo G.H. Shepard Jr. 

The expansion of the internal colonization frontier intensified in the 1970s when Brazil’s military dictatorship opened the Perimetral Norte highway in Yanomami territory. Since the late 1980s, Yanomami lands have suffered from regular invasions by illegal gold miners, who have unleashed epidemics of malaria, flu, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases.

Over 20,000 garimperos, or illegal miners, are currently devastating Yanomami lands. These invaders, who are nearly as numerous as the Yanomami themselves (current population 26,780), are most likely responsible for introducing the coronavirus to the region. Even amid the pandemic, illegal mining operations have continued to expand. More generally, rainforest destruction throughout the Brazilian Amazon has accelerated, with deforestation alerts for the first three months of 2020 increasing 51 percent over the same period last year.

Yanomami territories in Brazil have suffered from a massive influx of illegal miners. Photo: Rogerio Assis.

In this context of increasing lawlessness and invasion, Indigenous people throughout Brazil face an intensified risk of infection. So far, over 80 Indigenous people in Brazil have been found to have Covid-19, and seven have died — Mr. Xirixana, three other members of different ethnic groups in the Amazon interior, as well as three residents of the city of Manaus, including an Indigenous health care worker. Yet given the precarious state of Indigenous health care, there are most likely many more cases.

Yanomami ethno-environmental agent inspects illegal gold mining operation.
Photo: Bruno Kelly.

The disease appears to be spreading quickly in poor Indigenous ghettos on the outskirts of large Amazonian cities like Manaus and Belém, which were already overburdened by an influx of Venezuelan Indigenous refugees. The impact of the coronavirus pandemic on such urban Indigenous people has been overlooked in the general flood of data.

The roughly 900,000 Indigenous people are among the most vulnerable to this epidemic in Brazil. Abandoned by weak, underfunded national institutions, some Indigenous communities have taken it upon themselves to close off their villages or isolate themselves in town as best they can, suspending social and political activities and distributing prevention materials in their native languages.

The Yanomami, one of the largest and most well-known Indigenous communities of the Amazon, continue to suffer from inadequate health care and a persistent climate of indifference, negligence and lawlessness concerning the invasion of their lands by miners.

Anthropologist Bruce Albert and Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, co-authors of the book The Falling Sky. Photo: Beto Ricardo/Instituto Socioambiental.

The press, the global scientific community and Indigenous peoples themselves must continue to expose such negligence and denounce violations of constitutionally guaranteed rights. And yet given the chaotic response of President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration to the pandemic throughout Brazil, on top of its open hostility to science, Indigenous peoples and the environment, there seems little hope of significant policy change in the short term.

But something fundamental has changed: We are all united by a tragedy that is unfolding around the world.

Yanomami woman preparing for Wayamo visitation ceremony.
Photo: G.H. Shepard Jr.

We still know little about this disease. We do know that the origins of the new virus appear related to habitat destruction and the commercialization of wild animals. But we don’t yet have immunity, drugs or vaccines to stop it. We are reduced to confining ourselves at home with our families in the hope of evading infection. In some way it reminds me of the stories the Yanomami elders have told me about times when they fled to the forest in small groups to hide from the cannibalistic “Epidemic Spirit,” Xawarari.

However this time, we have become our own victims by loosing on ourselves the epidemiological consequences of this predatory hubris, just as Indigenous leaders like Yanomami shaman and philosopher Davi Kopenawa have been warning us for decades. In today’s hyper-connected industrial world, ecological imbalances or disease vectors that might once have affected only one corner of the planet now threaten us all. And perhaps now, as we are all exposed to an invisible new enemy for which we have no defenses, this harrowing experience of our shared fragility may stir global society to rethink its current course.

Photo G.H. Shepard Jr.

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Special thanks to Boris Muñoz for editorial input and support.

Coronavirus Brings Back Memories: Indigenous priest reflects on the global pandemic [excerpt]

Justino Sarmento Rezende, a Salesian priest of the Tuyuka indigenous people from the upper Rio Negro in Brazil, reflects on the coronavirus pandemic from the perspective of his people’s history. Excerpted from the interview published by Chacruna.net.

“I was born far from the city, at ‘Jaguar-Creek’.

“Whenever my father heard that a dangerous disease was coming, he took us to an even more isolated place. There, we waited until the latest news finally reached us: ‘the disease has passed’.

Justino Sarmento Rezende.
Photo: Luis Miguel Modino.

“We had no doctors or nurses to take care of us. But we were watched over constantly by our sage grandparents who performed protective ceremonies using white pitch incense to fumigate the environment, the people and their pets.

“Every day the sages smoked their cigars and talked about what they had seen in their dreams, what protective prayers they had composed in their nighttime meditations...

..."They protected our lives within rays of sunlight, within the clouds.

"They protected our lives within rays of sunlight..."
Photo: G.H. Shepard Jr.

“This current time with its current viruses, with their own proper names, it takes me back to the past and reminds me of the wisdom of my grandparents who helped to defend life.

“It reminds me of our defensive technique: fleeing from the enemy, not exposing oneself, retreating to a safe place until the disease passes.”

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Interview conducted by Luis Miguel Modino for Instituto Humanitas Unisinos, translated to the English by Glenn H. Shepard Jr. and excerpted for "Notes from the Ethnoground." Read the full interview at Chacruna.net.