Thank you from Davi Yanomami
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- Published on Thursday, 02 October 2014 10:20
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“The world needs to listen to the cry of the earth, which is asking for help. If you carry on killing people and you continue to destroy nature and you take out all the oil, the minerals and the wood, our planet will become ill and we’ll all die.”
Davi Kopenawa Yanomami
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Thank you everyone who attended Davi Yanomami’s talk in London last week. Both he and Mauricio Yekuana were overwhelmed by your support.
For supporters unable to attend, you can watch our recording of the talk below.
The Yanomami tribe
During the 1980s, the Yanomami in Brazil suffered
immensely when up to 40,000 gold miners invaded their land. They were shot at and physically attacked, their villages destroyed. Hundreds died from introduced diseases to which they had no immunity. Mercury effluents from mining poisoned their rivers, killing fish and polluting their water supply. Twenty percent of the Yanomami in Brazil died in just seven years.
In 1992, after a long international campaign
– led by Davi, Survival International and the Pro-Yanomami Commission – the Yanomami territory in Brazil was created, and the miners were expelled. Their territory, which straddles the Brazil-Venezuela border, covers over 17 million hectares, the largest forested indigenous territory in the world.
In spite of this historic success, the rights of many Indians across Brazil are still not upheld. A powerful elite would even like to see the Yanomami territory reduced in size and opened up to mining and ranching.
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