Earlier this month at a New York art gallery, Davi Kopenawa crossed paths with United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres during the opening of a retrospective, “The Yanomami Struggle”.  The exhibition features the photography of Claudia Andujar who chronicled the early colonization of the Brazilian Amazon in the 1970s.  Kopenawa was coming of age back then – an orphan to parents killed by, of all things, a measles outbreak.  At the gallery,  foremost on the activist’s mind were the emaciated Yanomami Elders and children whose innocent suffering from illegal gold mining recently spurred a humanitarian crisis.  It felt awkward, he thought, to be traveling at a time when he and his tribal community were in mourning. 

Kopenawa, a spiritual leader now in his mid-sixties, looked much older than in Andujar’s photos of yore.  But he showed no signs of slowing down. The real work, it seemed, was just getting started. Newly inaugurated Brazilian President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had charged into leadership with a promise to save the Amazon.  It raised a riveting question: could his pledge help save the warming planet, too? When Kopenawa spoke to Guterres, the concerns he shared about the rogue miners and the rainforest had been lingering with him for decades. These problems were nothing new, he said. “They’re stealing our land, destroying our nature and water, they’re logging and bringing disease.” 

On the eve of Brazil’s presidential election last October, Kopanawa, a longtime activist for the Amazon, knew that the outcome of the political contest would have a major impact on the rainforest – the largest rainforest on Earth.  Twice the size of India, the biome spans nine South American countries, and through absorption of greenhouse gases, regulates the climate for the rest of the world .  But in the Brazilian Amazon, which is roughly sixty percent of the entire forest, excessive gold digging and related deforestation sounded an environmental alarm.  The World Resource Institute, for example, warns that more extraction in the region could trigger “a large-scale dieback” of the forest to the point of no return, along with massive carbon releases.   These threats mattered to Kopanawa at the most grounded and human level.  Not only was his homeland facing serious endangerment, but so too were its guardians, the Yanomami people.  During former president Jair Bolsonaro’s four years in office, he subjected the Yanomami reservation, about the size of Maine, to a shocking rate of  illegal gold mining.  Reports of rapes and murders of the Yanomami spiked.  And then there was the rise of the malnourished – mostly children – who developed malaria brought in by the fortune seekers, or grew sick from territorial rivers poisoned by mercury used to separate the gold from mud.  Kopenawa feared that if the right-wing president were to be reëlected, even more people would be ignored, abused, and die. "We are surrounded by big politicians who don't want to know us or respect us." he told a reporter last fall. 

Large mining area in the region of the Uraricoera river in the Yanomami Indigenous Land  Bruno Kelly / Amazônia Real

Lula, as he is popularly known, eked out a narrow election victory over Bolsonaro largely due to votes from environmentalists and Indigenous people.  Such support has shaped his political agenda: a pledge to achieve “zero deforestation” by 2030 and with an unprecedented reliance on Indigenous leadership.  This includes the establishment of the first-ever Ministry of Indigenous Peoples in Brazil, and the appointment of respected tribal attorney, Joenia Wapichana, to steer the National Indian Foundation known as FUNAI.  The government agency is charged with upholding the rights of Indigenous people including the protection of their homelands – among them, the Amazon.  In his inaugural address on New Year’s Day, Lula made clear his trust in Indigenous land stewardship.  “No one knows our forests better or are more effective in defending them than those that were here from time immemorial.”  

Lula’s outsized embrace of the relationship between the Amazon and its traditional inhabitants holds real promise to shift attitudes of world leaders and thinkers around the globe.   At surface-level is the long-overdue acceptance of Indigenous Peoples as sustainability experts – those best placed to defend the planet against an ongoing cycle of colonization.  This includes the complex renewable energy transition that could be dire for Indigenous land and life.  More deeply, Lula’s initial steps in protecting the Yanomami – first, by declaring a public health emergency followed by the forced expulsion of some twenty-thousand miners – represents another awareness that is less understood but what the climate crisis all too often lays bare:  an overlapping of crises steeped in inequality, racial injustice, and political marginalization.  The Yanomami struggle poses our ripest example, yet. Under Bolsonaro, the killing of the Indigenous got easier in Brazil after he starved the FUNAI of its staff and budget, and let environmental agencies rot to the point where miners could freely invade Indigenous lands with impunity.  Brazil’s supreme court is now investigating Yanomami genocide by the Bolsonaro administration, and it’ll be a case to watch.  Will the high court make a connection that most entities grappling with the climate crisis have yet to make - linking human rights abuses with environmental catastrophe?  

@isoldabrasil

Elaíze Farias, editor and co-founder of Amazônia Real, a digital news operation covering the Brazilian Amazon through a decolonizing lens. Bruno Kelly | Amazôn Real

"Looking forward to another great year of reporting from the front lines. Thanks for all that you do - for all of us."