Tribe fight to save their Amazon

BRAZIL - The uruku red lines painted on her cheeks change shape as she draws a breath. Arms stretched, she blows into the open palms of her hands and lifts an invisible weight into the sky.

Katia Luisa Yawanawa is standing on an open ship's deck, thousands of kilometres upstream on the Amazon, where the great river divides into the black water of the Rio Negro and white water of the Solimoes.

She is offering a prayer called a Shuanka which involves singing to the Yawanawans' ancestors, asking for guidance and protection. Although she is only 26, Katia is among the most important and respected members of her tribe. She is a wise woman, a xinaya and the Yawanawans' first female shaman.

She is also a living symbol of the resurgence of Brazil's indigenous population, and their delicate balancing act between adapting to the modern world while holding on to a traditional worldview.

Across the so-called "arc of destruction", that traces the logging, ranching and farming deforesting the Amazon basin, it is indigenous groups fighting for their lives who are offering the most effective resistance.

For the Yawanawans this adaptation has meant casting aside traditional objections to allow a woman to take on the role of shaman.

Taska Yawanawa, their 29-year-old chief, explains how attitudes were changed. "We said no. The spirit is the spirit, it has no sex, so a woman can be initiated into the spirit."

But Katia faced a year-long ordeal before she could take her leading role, much of it in isolation deep in the forest.

The Yawanawans, like many other tribes, came close to disappearing altogether.

Now they number 620 living in the remote Amazonian region of Acre, and that number is expected to pass 1000 in the next two years. They have established rights of perpetual residence across hundreds of hectares and fought off the threats of loggers, ranchers and corrupt local officials to protect their land.

Hylton Philipson, the trustee of Rainforest Concern, a London-based charity, believes Katia's story and the broader resurgence of Brazil's original inhabitants offers the best cause to be optimistic for the Amazon.

"If you look at a map of where the indigenous populations are, they are the thin red line standing in the way of the destruction of the Amazon. There is a clear relationship between the indigenous people and the survival of the forest. They are the most cost-effective means of protecting it."

The indigenous don't have title to the land but under Brazilian law they have perpetual right of occupation.

"They are unpaid and unrecognised forest rangers," says Philipson.

Brazil is a vast country equivalent in land area to all the other South American countries put together. The Amazon biome covers nearly half of Brazil. But to most Brazilians, who live in the industrialised south, the Amazon is as remote and exotic an idea as it is to most Europeans.

The indigenous have legitimate claim to 20 per cent of Amazonian land. They are only 0.3 per cent of Brazil's population but have rights, acknowledged by the government, to 12.4 per cent of its land.

The Brazilian Government has neither the will nor the resources to extend the rule of law into the remote territories and they are "glad to have the indigenous out there doing it for them," says Philipson.

When Europeans first reached the Amazon in 1500, there were 7 million indigenous people from as many as 2000 distinct tribes, or nations. By 1950 that number had plummeted to just 100,000. The Yawanawans, whose homelands are in the dense jungle of Acre in southeastern Brazil, had their first contact with the outside world 100 years ago.

The chief of the Yawanawa narrates the disastrous impact that followed: "Our first contact was with missionaries. They wanted to change everything about us. We struggled to survive, to hold on to anything from our original education and culture. We had traditional methods to deal with the Yawanawan diseases but we had no method to deal with the occidental diseases."

They were decimated by malaria and stripped of all rights during the rubber boom.

To make matters worse they were infiltrated by Christian fundamentalist missionaries from Florida, calling themselves the New Tribes mission, in the 1960s.

According to Taska, the situation went from bad to worse. "They didn't see Yawanawan culture in a good light. They started calling the Yawanawan leadership communists. We had no idea what communism was. But they told us all communists will go to hell. We decided to go to hell but to stay in our own lands with our own way of life."

The Brazilian stereotype of the Indian is that of a lazy good for nothing. But the "opposite is true," says Philipson. "They are the underpinning of the forest. It's their culture that is rich and ours that is bankrupt."

- INDEPENDENT