As the Yanomami spokesman Davi Kopenawa says in his book “The Falling Sky”: “The white people spread their epidemic fumes throughout the entire forest…by tearing the gold and other minerals out of the earth. They do not want to give up their digging frenzy and their thought remains closed. All that matters to them is is cooking the metal to make merchandise. Gold is nothing more than shiny dust in the mud, yet the white people can kill for that!
It is not gold or merchandise that makes the plants grow or feeds and fattens the game we hunt! All the white people’s merchandise will never be enough to exchange for the forest’s trees, fruits, animals and fish. The paper skins of their money will never be numerous enough to compensate for the value of its burned trees, its desiccated ground, and its dirty waters. Everything that grows and moves in the forest or under the waters, as well as the xapiri spirits and human beings, has a value far too important for the white people’s merchandise and money. Nothing is solid enough to restore the sick forest’s value. No merchandise can buy all the human beings devoured by the epidemic fumes.
If the gold miners dig everywhere like wild pigs, the forest’s rivers will soon be no more than miry backwaters, full of mud, motor oil, and trash. They also wash their gold powder in the streams, mixing it with mercury. All these dirty and dangerous things make the waters sick and the fish’s flesh soft and rotten.
The smoke from the minerals is increasing wherever the white people are established. In the past, they lived very far away, in their cities. Now they have gotten closer to us and we are becoming fewer and fewer because their epidemic fumes are encircling us. Our xapiri spirits relentlessly try to drive them far from the forest, but they always return. For we shamans, it is a great torment not to be able to push this xawara smoke away. If we all die, no one will be able to compensate for the value of our dead. … The white people’s money and merchandise will not bring them back down among us! And the devastated forest will never be able to be restored either, it will be lost for all time.”
https://barbara-navarro.com/2020/04/24/the-true-cost-of-luxury-jewelry-cartels-launder-drug-money-selling-blood-gold-to-cartier-and-others-in-the-luxury-industry-and-indigenous-people-pay-the-price/
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