Indigenous peoples of the Upper Orinoco: the Yanomami

  

About 20 years ago I had the opportunity to tour the upper Orinoco and its affluent-connection with the Amazon basin: Caño Casiquiare. In that place inhabits one of the most numerous nations of the South American tropical jungles. the Yanomami, whose villages I had the opportunity to visit ..

At that time they were threatened by the "evangelization" of the "New Tribes" and other evangelical sects. In recent years, this religious colonization was considerably reduced both in Venezuela and in Brazil. We will see how they are affected by the political changes in those two countries.

  

The world of the Yanomami

  

For the Yanomami, "urihi", the jungle land, is not a mere inert space of economic exploitation (what we call "nature"). It is a living entity, inserted in a complex cosmological dynamic of exchanges between humans and non-humans. As such, it is currently in danger from the blind predation of "whites". In the vision of the leader Davi Kopenawa Yanomami: 

"The forest-land can only die if it is destroyed by the whites, then the streams will disappear, the earth will be burned, the trees will dry up and the stones of the mountains will be broken by the heat." The spirits xapiripë, who live in the sierras and they stay playing in the jungle will end up fleeing, their parents, the shamans, will not be able to call them to protect them anymore The earth-jungle will become dry and empty The shamans will not be able to stop the smoke-epidemics and the beings evils that make us sick, in this way, everyone will die. " 

                                    Yanomami village

The Yanomami form a society of fishermen, slash-cultivators and, in addition, gatherers and hunters of the rainforest of the north of the Amazon region whose contact with the national society is, in most of its territory, relatively recent.

Its territory covers, approximately, 192,000 Km2, located on both margins of the border of Brazil with Venezuela, in the Orinoco-Amazon interfluvial region (tributaries of the right bank of the Branco River and left of the Negro River). They constitute a cultural and linguistic group composed of, at least, four adjacent subgroups that speak languages ​​of the same family (Yanomae, Yanõmami, Sanima and Ninam). The total Yanomami population, in Brazil and Venezuela, was estimated at almost 26,000 people in 1999.

In Brazil, the Yanomami population was 12,795 people, spread over 228 communities (census of the Fundação Nacional de Saúde-Fundación Nacional de la Salud - 1999). The Yanomami Indigenous Land, which covers 9,664,975 ha (96,650 km²) of tropical forests, is recognized for its importance in terms of protection of Amazonian biodiversity and was approved by a presidential decree on May 25, 1992.