« You don’t understand why we want to protect our forest? Ask me, I will answer you!  Our ancestors were created with it in the beginning of time. Since then, our people have eaten its game and its fruit. We want our children to grow up here laughing. In the past, many of our people perished from your epidemics. Today I refuse to let their children and grandchildren die from the gold smoke!  Chase the gold miners out of our home! They are harmful beings whose thought is dark. They are metal eaters covered in deadly xawara epidemic smoke. »

• Yanomami spokesperson and shaman Davi Kopenawa

30% of what is now recognized as ancestral indigenous lands are in danger of being «legally» opened to gold mining and other extractive operations as well as logging and industrial agriculture. The bill that would permit this atrocity, PL490 – already approved by Brazil’s Constitutional Affairs Committee, will be decided in Congress in August 2021. 

This bill also allows for contact with isolated indigenous peoples if there is «public utility» and authorizes private companies to approach these groups if they are contracted to do so by the Government!

Illegal gold miners have been motivated by the surge in gold prices, pro-mining rhetoric from Bolsonaro and the order of the government’s indigenous affairs agency, FUNAI, that reduced work in the field because of the pandemic. Illegal gold miners do not respect social distancing in regards to indigenous communities near their gold mining sites and are propagating Covid-19 among many indigenous populations in the Amazon region…

PLEASE DO NOT BUY OR USE GOLD!

Gold mining and the indiscriminate use of mercury to ferret out gold are turning swaths of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems into a nightmarish moonscape! 

Worldwide, illegal gold mining is more lucrative for criminal organizations, drug cartels, guerrilla groups and mafias than drug trafficking. For criminals posing as precious metals dealers, gold is the perfect medium for laundering illicit money from other illegal activities since illegal gold looks exactly like legal gold and the proceeds from selling it can be placed in the bank… 

Brazil’s largest gang, the First Command of the Capital (PCC), is known to operate in Yanomami territory in Roraima, a largely indigenous region along their gold and drug trafficking routes. These criminals have apparently been hired to protect the gold mining areas, and have been instigating violence against the Yanomami with the use of automatic weapons and tear gas bombs for over a month!

As much as 75% of the gold extracted each year is used for jewelry, watches and other vain and futile status symbols sold by corporations in the luxury industry as well as discount retailers worldwide.  

Tens of thousands of rainforest trees must be uprooted, hundreds of tons of soil mined and mixed with dozens of tons of toxic environmental pollutants that contaminate indigenous lands for that one special gold ring…

Please make shopping choices that don’t destroy nature and the lives of indigenous peoples!

Please watch this 48 second film of the light installation « Yanomami shamans struggle against xawara, the smoke of epidemics » included here: