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Helping indigenous Amazonians

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ohayoco

Rising Star
Senior Member
OG Pioneer
I was wondering if anyone knew of any charities who help to protect the indigenous Amazonians?

I read this article and it made me a sad panda. They gave us ayawaska, as well as black earth the inspiration for hydrothermal carbonisation which is one of our few hopes to reverse climate change. I think the least we can do in return is stop the continuing genocide.
http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n5/htdocs/plowboys-and-indians-873.php said:
PLOWBOYS AND INDIANS
Brazilian Farmers Are Slaughtering Native Tribes for Land
BY FELIPE MILANEZ
PHOTOS BY ARAQUEM ALCANTARA

Rita, an indigenous Piripkura Indian, speaks only rudimentary Portuguese, and I can’t understand her native language, Tupi-kawahib, any better than I can pronounce its name. But over the course of our first hour together, we pieced together the story of the massacre of her tribe. It started one night, some 30 years ago, when a group of men invaded their land brandishing pistols and wooden bats. The murderers, known as jagunços and hired by farmers eager for Piripkura land, chased down unsuspecting members of Rita’s tribe and shot or bludgeoned them to death. Her father was decapitated, as were dozens of children and seniors. Her aunt, asleep in a hammock, was shot point-blank and tossed into a large pile of burning bodies. Rita was raped. Maybe they just forgot to kill her. Surveying her village in the aftermath, she assumed she was her tribe’s only survivor.

As she told me her story, Rita and I were sitting face to face in a dilapidated wooden hut deep in Brazil’s Amazon forest. We were somewhere between the states of Mato Grosso and Amazonas, in the city of Colniza. The surrounding region is acknowledged as the most violent in the country, which, given Brazil’s surging homicide rate, makes it among the very worst of the worst. We also happened to be sitting on the plot of land where her friends and family were killed.

In Brazil, stories like Rita’s are routinely covered up or completely ignored. The truth is, similar acts of genocide have been carried out since the region was colonized during the military dictatorship in 1964. The root cause of the violence against Brazil’s indigenous people is nearly always that of encroaching timber interests—soulless and aggressive pricks eager to meet an ever-increasing market demand for raw lumber. Small, displaced groups of survivors like Rita, unable and unprepared to defend against arbitrary raids, are left to roam the jungle like ghosts.

More than a year after the attack, Rita was found wandering alone in the forest. Her discovery was the result of persistent search expeditions organized by FUNAI, the government agency established to protect indigenous people. Left without options, Rita was abruptly immersed in Brazilian society. She got the worst possible reception: In each passing city, she suffered physical abuse and bigotry and was eventually enslaved on a farm. She did house chores and was forced to provide sex services. She later ran away and married an Indian man from another small tribe, and today she lives a quiet tribal existence deep in the forest. Rita told me this in the same sweet manner she has told me things in the countless conversations I’ve had with her since: shy and reserved but with a polite, if untrusting, smile.

In the late 1990s, more than 20 years after the slaughter of Rita’s relatives, two fellow Piripkura tribesmen, Tucan and Monde-I, emerged from the jungle. It caused a minor and short-lived media stir. Tucan was in need of medical assistance. His attending nurse told me he was “pissing Coca-Cola” and needed his gall bladder removed. Monde-I got impatient or annoyed or bored—the two are renowned as the second and third coming of John Rambo—and headed back into the thicket while Tucan recuperated. Three months or so later, Tucan disappeared to rejoin Monde-I in the forest. So Rita was technically not alone, but today the Piripkura tribe still totals just three.

The eradication, in whole or in part, of indigenous tribes is certainly the goal for some farmers. Rita’s tribe was massacred because they happened to occupy land claimed by timbermen—and there are several other tribes that continue to suffer similar fates for similar reasons. Less than a thousand yards from the farm where I met Rita, I spent an afternoon with a Kanoe Indian family. Purá was happily teaching his seven-year-old nephew Bakwa to hunt with a bow and arrow, while his mother, Tiramantu, fastened a bracelet onto my wrist in silence. These three are all that remain of the Kanoe tribe after yet more unprovoked mass killings. They share a 150-square-mile stretch of land called Terra Indígena Omere with the Akuntsu clan, which today consists of just six people. Popak, one of the tribe’s four men, spoke quickly when we met. He also gave me a nasty face when I pointed to a scar on his back, explaining that he was shot during an attack on his tribe. Sometimes I forget that even as a nonmurderous fair-skinned Brazilian, I’m still the asshole.

Filmmaker Vincent Carelli, himself a nonmurderous fair-skinned Brazilian, spent 20 years investigating and documenting the massacre of the Akuntsu Indians, collecting evidence of the participation of local farmers (complete with damning testimonials from the timber-company workers who actually perpetrated the murder). His resulting movie, Corumbiara, premiered in São Paulo this March and is quite possibly the only beautiful thing involved with this story. Because certainly nothing has changed. In fact, things are worse. Since making his film, Carelli has actually witnessed the massacre of another group so remote that they were never assigned a name. It is widely accepted that attempts to oust the tribe were first made with arsenic-and-sugar cocktails. When that didn’t work, a pack of murderous jagunços took over. The sole survivor lives undisturbed, alone, in a hole in the jungle.

“No one was sent to jail—they weren’t even indicted. Not one of those bandits,” said Marcelo dos Santos, the man who first made contact with the tribe and organized a search for those responsible for killing them. Santos has suffered numerous threats and prefers not to identify the people he suspects are guilty. In nearby cities, the citizenry is not so tight-lipped: local high-profile influence peddlers Antenor Duarte, Antônio Vilela Junqueira, former senator Almir Lando, and the infamous Dalafini brothers are all suspected of involvement. As coincidence would have it, they own the farms nearest to where the unnamed tribe lived.

In Colniza, the violent city in northern Mato Grosso where I met Rita, I ran into a timberman, Julio Pinto. His father, Renato, and 70 of his associates spent some time in jail accused, variously, of either killing or ordering the killings of Piripkura Indians. True to form, Pinto and Co. were of the mind that the tribe was on their land. These were Rita’s relatives. All the suspects were ultimately set free, and Pinto told me with a straight face: “I never saw Indians in the region.” As in, How could anybody kill a person they’ve never even seen? (Hint: They order or pay someone to do it for them.) One of Pinto’s partners, Luiz Durski, also owns farms near Piripkura land. In an interview in São Paulo, he had assured me that the case against Renato was “madness” on behalf of the federal prosecutor, Mario Lucio Avelar. Practically as an afterthought, Durski remembered to say that he too has never seen an Indian.

Characterizing these crimes as genocide, convicting offenders, and determining sentences are the primary obstacles for authorities. Well, those and also fear and bribes and the matter of just not giving a shit. The legal system in the Amazon is a quagmire of local colonels wielding political influence. It’s nearly impossible to enforce laws that nobody really cares to have enforced in the first place. The principal offenders are loggers, miners, and farmers, and few outside that circle are willing to tackle some of Brazil’s most fruitful industries. Particularly not on behalf of a few ghosts hoofing around in the bush.
I know this one, Staro http://www.staro.org/index.php?id=home , but it's more about saving the Amazon than helping to protect the people living in it.
 

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I didn't read the whole article but there are two ways to help these people. Support private property rights and rights of indigenous groups. The other is to oppose the kyoto protocol which gives incentives for crappy governments in tropical areas to remove rainforest since its low carbon sink and replace it with high carbon intensive crops. Also this protocol gives countires a huge incentive to create large hydroelectric dams which will further destroy these precious regions. Defend human freedom.
 
goin get raped!

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Ah someone posted this charity in the comments, Survival International Home - Survival International Please support them!

I can't believe that almost exactly the same thing as happened to the North American Indians hundreds of years ago is still happening today in South America.
 
burnt said:
I didn't read the whole article but there are two ways to help these people. Support private property rights and rights of indigenous groups. The other is to oppose the kyoto protocol which gives incentives for crappy governments in tropical areas to remove rainforest since its low carbon sink and replace it with high carbon intensive crops. Also this protocol gives countires a huge incentive to create large hydroelectric dams which will further destroy these precious regions. Defend human freedom.


Wow.. you really do learn something everyday! I would never have known that if it were not for this site..
 
That is hektic - very hektic and sadly only the tip of the iceburg - rubber farmers are also destroying the lives of tribes indirectly, their deforestation is chasing the animals away or killing them, also natural forest foods like peach palm etc are destroyed leaving the tribes nothing to eat.

Many tribes are starving right now - as i wright this children are crying begging their mothers for food, fathers are unable to move due to their bodies being totally wasted because of starvation. (yep as we sip our chocachino's)

By starving i dont mean just hungry i mean really starving until there is no more human left, i was going to post some pictures to get the point across further but im a sensitive viewer and im sure a few ppl here are too.
 
very messed up. what can we do to help??
I firmly believe in concentrating on creating local change and awareness which will, eventually, spread out and affect things globally.

However, in an emergency such as this, I think that philosophy does not work quickly enough.
 
Support Survival International!

Also, you can help the tribes indirectly via the environmentalist charities- the ecological imperative is a powerful string to the tribes' bows. Here is a Greenpeace video asking people to demand to Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Timberland, Clarks and Geox that they stop buying leather from cattle reared on deforested land. Check Greenpeace's website for more info, model letters etc.
[youtube]

I know some people get upset by us Westerners demanding that others don't cut down their forests like we did hundreds of years ago. Of course we must also do our bit to protect and encourage our native biodiversity, and lock carbon in other ways now our forests are gone. We can't allow the destruction of the Amazon in favour of other carbon sequestering methods because of the medicinal potential in the forests- our species may even rely on such unknown medicines for survival one day. But as this thread is about saving the tribes, this is getting off topic... this was just a pre-emptive explanation against the hypocrisy argument. The tribes are the ones who really own the forests if anyone does anyway, not governments nor settlers.
 
I know some people get upset by us Westerners demanding that others don't cut down their forests like we did hundreds of years ago. Of course we must also do our bit to protect and encourage our native biodiversity, and lock carbon in other ways now our forests are gone. We can't allow the destruction of the Amazon in favour of other carbon sequestering methods because of the medicinal potential in the forests- our species may even rely on such unknown medicines for survival one day. But as this thread is about saving the tribes, this is getting off topic... this was just a pre-emptive explanation against the hypocrisy argument. The tribes are the ones who really own the forests if anyone does anyway, not governments nor settlers.

I agree we shouldn't turn the rain forest into a carbon sink. Its a crazy idea that won't work anyway. Instead it will not only allow but encourage corrupt developing nations to do what they are doing now which is taking away peoples land.

I think most of these problems could be solved by having a clear definition of property rights that treats all as legal equals. For example in U.S. in the 1800's citizens had property rights but natives didn't. That was very wrong. Since these cultures don't know much about such legal issues just make it simple. It should be very simple and clear anyway that's the best way to avoid conflict.

Of course they should have a say in the process. I think the land should be based on traditional land areas except in instances where the people who live there want to sell off some of it or whatever. Trouble is some tribes could be fighting over what land was whose when making it a bit complicated I would imagine. If they don't get these rights I am afraid much more of their land will be taken in the coming years.
 
The way to do it has already been tried and accomplished. The 'Yanomami's Dalai Lama' as some people refer to him campaigned hard to create the Yanomami Reserve. All that has to be done is for the rest of the land to be turned into reserves. I'm sure the known tribes could agree boundaries if the only other option is being slaughtered by mining and farming invaders.

The problem is that the unconcontacted tribes have NO voice, which is why it should ALL be protected as a National Park and World Heritage site. The known tribes have their land earmarked, and the rest is left simply as 'uncontacted tribe reserve'. What to do about these people's lack of immunity, I don't know. You say people should control the land through private property rights, but I think there needs to be control over how the land is used. This land is worth far more as a library of unknown medicinal chemicals, carbon sink and nature reserve. The 'wealth' created by farming or mining it would be short lived and inhumanely destructive. Leave the land as it is for the tribes to live on sustainably. If they want to live like Westerners, they can move to the city and become landless slaves to commerce like the rest of us. But this land belongs to everyone, because the rainforest belongs to everyone: we can't let the tribes mow it all down to create casinos and nuclear waste dumps like in North America, even if they wanted to (which they DON'T of course). I'm sure Survival International have got it all worked out... I better read their site first before getting into such a discussion. And that's an excuse to bow out now so as to not clash with you again Burnt over our differing views on property rights haha! ;)
 
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