The Falling Sky

A Yanomami woman with severe malaria and signs of malnutrition receives assistance after arriving on a plane at an airport in the city of Boa Vista, capital of Roraima, Brazil, on January 29, 2023. The Government has declared a health emergency for the Yanomami people. “When all the shamans have died, I think the sky will fall. (…) The forest will be destroyed and the weather will be dark. If there are no more shamans to hold up the sky, it will not stay in place. The whites are just ingenious, they ignore shamanism, they are not the ones who will be able to hold up the sky (…) Not only the Yanomami are going to die, but all the whites too. No one is going to escape the falling sky”, wrote David Kopenawa, a shaman and leader of the Yanomami people).

In January 2023, indigenous and socio-environmental entities denounced an ongoing humanitarian tragedy in the Yanomami Indigenous Land. The area, which occupies parts of the states of Roraima and Amazonas, is marked by illegal gold and cassiterite mining, sexual violence against women and children, death threats, and the dismantling of health posts. In 2021, the region already registered almost 50% of malaria cases in the entire country and now there are more than 4,000 indigenous people with nutritional deficits, including children and the elderly.