A Brave Call from the "Dalai Lama of the Amazon" | Amazon Watch
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A Brave Call from the "Dalai Lama of the Amazon"

August 11, 2014 | Leila Salazar-Lopez | Eye on the Amazon

Davi Kopenawa Yanomami Photo credit: Daniel Schweizer / Dirty GoldWar

Recently I had the great honor of meeting Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, a shaman and internationally renowned spokesman for the Yanomami people of Brazil, while he was on a global speaking tour with our friends at Survival International. It was disturbing to learn that Davi had been receiving death threats from armed thugs linked to gold miners operating illegally on Yanomami land.

Davi has been targeted for his 30-year struggle to defend his people and territory against the devastating impacts of mining in the Amazon, which nearly brought the Yanomani to extinction in the 1980s. Today his life hangs in the balance as criminal economic forces aim to silence his voice and gain access to his people’s territory.

“They want to kill me,” said Davi. “I don’t do what the white people do, who go after someone to kill them. I don’t get in the way of their work. But they are getting in the way of our work and our fight. I’ll continue to fight and to work for my people…defending the Yanomami people and their land is my work.”


Take action to defend Davi Yanomami! Send a letter to the Brazilian government demanding urgent police protection.

Last May while on a speaking tour promoting his book The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, Davi pleaded for action, telling hundreds at the University of California Berkeley that “large-scale mining seems like a big monster that wants to destroy the earth, to destroy nature.” Today this monster threatens Davi’s life and his lifelong struggle on behalf of indigenous peoples and Amazon protection.

“I would like white people to stop thinking that our forest is dead and placed here without reason,” he goes on to state in a beautiful opening of The Falling Sky. “I would like to make them listen to the voice of the xapiri who play here incessantly, dancing on their glittering mirrors. Maybe they will want to defend it with us? I would also like their sons and daughters to understand our words. I would like them to make friendship with our sons and daughters in order not to grow up in ignorance. For if this forest is entirely devastated, no other forest will ever be born.”

We couldn’t agree more.


Please stand with Davi and call for justice from the Brazilian government!

The Yanomami: An isolated yet imperiled Amazon tribe

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