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The heroes of the Yanomami?

Writer's picture: Gamboa do JaguaribeGamboa do Jaguaribe


The presidential administration and the entourage of ministers landed in the Yanomami Lands last Saturday (21), in the state of Roraima. This time, even the international media focused their spotlight on the chaotic impacts caused by illegal mining activities in the region, as if it were something new. But the attacks on our peoples are not limited to this fact, this is the tip of the iceberg.


It is extremely important that we know that the mining invasion is not new. Since the military dictatorship, the Yanomami people have been the target of gigantic damage to their existence. A history of constant violations of human rights and countless environmental degradations. Even with the territorial demarcation in 1992, the attacks did not cease and a series of violent episodes are part of these struggles.


Rapes, deaths, illnesses and other absurd consequences add up to the purposeful omission of an assumed genocidal government. In favor of a development logic that has no logic for our peoples and eugenic ideals that keep silencing and erasing us. This neglect has been going on for years and has worsened in the previous administration

Without ceasing to be in solidarity with the Yanomami relatives, I intend to provoke attention and reflection on a larger and more complex case that demands a more sensitive look from us and that we recognize our own ignorance. The main issue is to understand the cultural richness, the set of sciences and the ancestry of each of our peoples.


Bringing the look closer to a closer reality, here in RN, there are about 16 indigenous communities that have their ethnohistories, knowledge and many other values, and that have articulated and fought for the demarcation of their territories. And not only that. The fights are also for education and differentiated health that continue to appear only in constitutional documents.


In addition to the capitalist machine that grinds everything that is different from an imposed standard, many are those who make our existence and contexts invisible and unaware of our existence and contexts, also in other regions of Pindorama. They continue to reproduce narratives that favor colonial ideologies through the cultural industry and its multiple apparatuses to gain titles and take places of speech. These behaviors are also violent, contribute to an increasingly offensive epistemic genocide and are fostered by a harmful inefficiency of training in education about our peoples.

It is not by showing solidarity to the Yanomami people on social networks that you will be contributing to indigenous struggles, nor will you be politically engaging about and with our struggles. It is knowing and strengthening the realities of our peoples around them and stressing really effective measures for the eradication of violence and subordination of ours.


Supporting and strengthening the struggles of our peoples is not done by sharing news at the moment, not least because the humanitarian crisis, deaths and persecutions are violently inserted realities. The Yanomamis, the Potiguaras, the Xucurus, the Tapuias among many others with different cosmoperceptions and ways of coexisting.


Let us not let the riches and cultural and intellectual wonders of our peoples be obscured to the detriment of the violence of this colonizing system. And let us be aware of political games and who is benefiting from our pain.


Text and art by @taangahara

Pic by Christian Baga




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