Shotgun the Newest Threat to Yanomami Indians
9/27/96
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
New Threat To Yanomami Indians
By TODD LEWAN
Associated Press Writer
Friday, September 27, 1996 7:53 pm EDT
Copyright 1996 The Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) -- The latest modern trapping to reach into the remote
Amazon jungle is posing a new threat to the last Stone Age tribe in
the Americas: the shotgun.
Firearms, once used only by invaders of the Yanomami Indians' vast
reservation in Brazil and Venezuela, are proliferating in villages at
such a rate that observers say the tribe runs the risk of "self-
genocide."
Gold miners, jungle traders -- even religious missionaries -- are
introducing shotguns into primitive villages through barter and trade,
said Chief Davi Copenawa, a spokesman for the tribe.
"The white man gives the Yanomami guns so that they fight amongst
themselves, to kill each other, to kill their brother," he said in an
interview. "They are not our friends. They want us to disappear."
Copenawa, who received an award from the United Nations for his
efforts to protect the rain forest, described his tribe's plight
during the seventh annual Amazon Week in lower Manhattan.
Representatives of corporations, nonprofit groups and the Brazilian
government are discussing ways to tap the riches of the 2 million-
square-mile rain forest without destroying it.
But Copenawa's account of gun-related violence in the tribe's villages
was a jarring reminder of how contact with modern civilization has
worsened life for the 23,000 Yanomami.
He said guns began appearing in villages after Brazil's government
withdrew $5.7 million allocated to keep gold prospectors from invading
the Yanomami's 25 million-acre reservation, which is off-limits to
outsiders.
The Finance Ministry said it needed to reorganize the program.
"We're talking about the introduction of guns to a culture that by the
1960s had not yet invented the wheel," said Claudia Andujar, head of
the Pro-Yanomami Commission, a private group based in Sao Paulo,
Brazil.
"Imagine how dangerous the sudden addition of guns and gunpowder can
be to a tribe that prides itself on its ability to fight with poison
arrows, stones and clubs."
For millenia, the Yanomami lived strong and free in a Stone Age style
of preliterate people, escaping religious conversion, epidemics and
forced assimilation.
Combative, violent and chauvinistic, they raided each other's villages
and fended off such raids as a means of establishing their self-
esteem, honor and dignity, as well as providing for the needs of their
communities.
Things began to change 30 years ago, when anthropologists and
missionaries discovered the Yanomami.
Missionaries encouraged the Indians to leave the wooded interior and
live near waterways. They offered 20th-century trappings including
fishing hooks, mirrors, matches, radios, shoes and machetes.
But firearms had never been introduced to the 250 small villages
scattered about the pristine, hilly rain forest between Venezuela and
Brazil.
Until now.
Miners offer the Yanomami shotguns in exchange for food and sexual
relations with the village women, according to an internal report by
Brazil's National Indian Foundation, a copy of which was obtained by
The Associated Press.
At least 13 shotguns had been counted at some "malocas" -- round,
communal wood and straw huts where as many as 50 Yanomami live --
according to the report, issued in May.
In one incident, the chief of the Makabey-There village lost the use
of his arm from an accidental shotgun blast. At the Surucucu village,
three Yanomamis died in shooting incidents in one week in May, the
report said.
"The miners are ... handing out weapons among the Yanomami so that the
Indians will kill each other in conflicts," the report asserted. "They
are inciting tribal conflict."
Copenawa said miners and traders illegally enter the Yanomami
reservation and use guns as payment for "piacaba" -- a reedy material
used to make brooms -- at the villages of Parafori and Cachoeira da
Alianca, in Brazil's jungle state of Amazonas.
"The miner says, `Here's a gun. Now go shoot it at your brother,"'
Copenawa said in broken Portuguese. "And the Yanomami takes the
weapon. He does not know sometimes what it does. And BAM! He kills the
other right there."
He also accused missionaries of bringing weapons to Yanomami villages.
"The priests take baskets woven by the Yanomami, go to the city of
Manaus and sell them," Davi said. "They get the money, buy guns, and
bring them back to the villages and give them to the Indians."