Willow tree

For over a thousand years, the Yanomami have lived in the largest Indigenous Land (TI) in the country, in a territory in the north of Brazil and south of Venezuela, in the states of Amazonas and Roraima, in the basins of the Rio Negro and Rio Branco. In other words, five hundred years before these two nations existed, they were already there. Living in the forest is a craft that requires ancestral wisdom, not manufactured in a laboratory, nor found in the pages of the books of the “people of merchandise”. Living in the forest like the Yanomami is being part of it. It is living alongside human and non-human beings, animals, plants, wind, rain and thousands of spirits.

“Omama recreated the forest, because the one that existed before was fragile. It kept changing over and over, until the sky fell on it. So Omama created a new, more solid forest, whose name is Hutukara.”

Davi Kopenawa – The Falling Sky

Under the moonlight of an evening, everyone lies down in hammocks and lights up the darkness in a village without electricity, with lanterns and small fires that help to alleviate the cold air of the Amazon dawn. Our night, however, is their day. Under the influence of yãkoana, a hallucinogenic powder made from tree shavings that gives access to the spirits, the village shamans summon the xapiris. They come with their translucent bodies, always beautifully adorned and shining. Only those who know them can see them because they are very small and shine like light. There are many, many, thousands of them. Xapiri is light that dances and sings.

The songs of the xapiris are so numerous that their words are inexhaustible. They learn these melodies from the song trees. These are immense trees, with trunks covered in lips that move non-stop, one on top of the other. From these mouths come beautiful songs, as abundant as the stars in the sky. All the songs of the spirits come from these very ancient trees. These ancestral spirits were created by Omama so that the Yanomami could avenge themselves against diseases and protect themselves from death. The xapiris are the protectors of humans and their children, regardless of how many there are, and of the forest. They guarantee to all of us, indigenous and non-indigenous, the certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow and that the sky will not fall on our heads.

We glimpse the sunrise. Blue sky, bodies painted red. Covered with straw and leaves, with an open-air square of beaten earth, the villagers set out to hunt and gather pupunha, the main ingredient in their “porridge”. They use bows and arrows. The women take their baskets, their machetes, their babies and head to the fields. They venture into the forest, with their bodies imitating animals, looking for food, following their tracks. Bees feed on the purple jatobá tree, alligators wander through the waters, the kapok tree imposes majesty, and the scents waft from the depths of the jungle. They shoot arrows at the animals, catch fish. Later, they will arrive with armadillos, curassows, tortoises, tapirs… They invite each other, from different houses, to dance during their great reahu festivals.

In the midst of this tragedy, we need to admire their beauty and strength. For the enemies of indigenous peoples, the extermination of the Yanomami involves the destruction of this beauty, and the forgetting of who they are. Because it is by recognizing beauty, culture, memory, and their own language that the Yanomami assert their humanity in the world. Let us fall in love with these people, with their particular way of telling stories. Respect can only be born of admiration, not of pity. After all, the genocide we are witnessing today shows more about who the napë (non-indigenous people) are than about the Yanomami.

Just like the Yanomami dreams that emerge when the flowers of the dream tree bloom, let us dream of an indigenous Brazil. The Yanomami do not just think about their dreams, they dream what they think, expanding and shaping their way of knowing and imagining the world. From North to South, from Northeast to Southeast, throughout the forest-land up to the limits of Hutukara, the dreams of the various native peoples will continue to blossom within us and we will continue to be resistance. Before green and yellow, there was the Brazil of genipap and red. Before the Crown, there was (and still is) the Brazil of the headdress. We will not know Brazil before we glimpse and respect indigenous history. We need to truly dream about our land.

Bibliography

• KOPENAWA, Davi; ALBERT, Bruce. The Fall of the Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. 1st edition.
  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• BALLESTER, Anne. The Tree of Songs. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge, 2022.
• LIMULJA, Hanna. The desire of others: an ethnography of Yanomami dreams.
  New York: Routledge, 2022.
• NOGUEIRA, Thyago (Org.), Claudia Andujar: The Yanomami Struggle (Moreira Salles Institute, 2018).
• PEDROSA, Adriano; RIBEIRO, David. Joseca Yanomami: our forest-land. New York: University of Chicago Press, 2022.
• GIMOVSKI, Fabio. Ancestors of the land. Curitiba, PR: Editora Urukum, 2021.