indigenous

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – Yellow and green feathers radiating from his headdress, Davi Kopenawa strode onto the parade route with a mission in mind.

All around him, the city of Rio de Janeiro was pulsing with music and merry-making: It was February 12, and the world’s largest Carnival celebration was under way. But Kopenawa was not in town to party.

Rather, he had travelled more than 3,500 kilometres (2,000 miles) from his village in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest to spread a dire message: His people, the Yanomami, were in trouble.

For decades, the Indigenous Yanomami have suffered at the hands of illegal gold miners, who destroyed vast stretches of their homeland and polluted their rivers with mercury.

But since 2019, the crisis has reached new heights, with hundreds of Yanomami dying from conditions related to the mining. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has gone so far as to declare the situation a “genocide”.

“Every day, we face death in our villages and attacks from illegal miners,” Kopenawa, a shaman, told Al Jazeera.

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