The Indigenous living in the Rainforest
Indigenous people are the people who have lived in the rainforest for many generations. They inhabited the land since a long time ago, but now their land is being cut down and used by other people. This is a personal recount of what a 15 year-old named Zeca from the Yanomami tribe (a tribe living in the rainforest near the Brazil-Venezuela border) says about living in the rainforest.
The Yanomami spend their days in and around the Yano, a ring-shaped hut that many families share (see picture to the left).
The Yanomami spend their days in and around the Yano, a ring-shaped hut that many families share (see picture to the left).
Zeca's story
Rainforest cut down by machinery.
“The rainforest is our home, the only one we know. It gives us all we need – food to eat, medicines when we are sick, wood and palm fronds to build the Yano. We grow cotton to make the aprons and waistbands that we wear, and there’s a forest plant called urucu that provides the red dye we paint on our faces and bodies to make ourselves look beautiful. We use brightly coloured flowers and feathers to adorn our heads and arms, and shells from the riverside to make necklaces.
Days are mostly like one another, except for the special times when we go to a neighbouring Yano for a feast. I wake with the sun, but there’s no rush to get up; maybe I’ll eat some papaya fruit and then get back into the hammock until the family are up and about. Most days I go to the gardens with my mother to help with the weeding, and we make trips out into the forest where she shows me which wild fruit and berries are good to eat. She has taught me everything I know: how to thread necklaces, where to find crabs and crayfish by the riverside, how to make bread from the vegetable called manioc.
Yet my mother seems worried. The other adults talk of the foreigners who have come with huge machines to cut down trees not far from our village. They brought diseases with them, which killed some Yanomami in a nearby yano. We hope they don’t come here. They would spoil everything.”
As the rainforest species disappear, so do many Indigenous tribes all over the world. There were an estimated ten million Indians living in the Amazon Rainforest 500 years ago. Today there are less than 200,000. In Brazil, European colonists have destroyed more than 90 indigenous tribes since the 1900's. Centuries of knowledge about the medicine in the rainforest has also disappeared as well as the medicinal rainforest plants.
Days are mostly like one another, except for the special times when we go to a neighbouring Yano for a feast. I wake with the sun, but there’s no rush to get up; maybe I’ll eat some papaya fruit and then get back into the hammock until the family are up and about. Most days I go to the gardens with my mother to help with the weeding, and we make trips out into the forest where she shows me which wild fruit and berries are good to eat. She has taught me everything I know: how to thread necklaces, where to find crabs and crayfish by the riverside, how to make bread from the vegetable called manioc.
Yet my mother seems worried. The other adults talk of the foreigners who have come with huge machines to cut down trees not far from our village. They brought diseases with them, which killed some Yanomami in a nearby yano. We hope they don’t come here. They would spoil everything.”
As the rainforest species disappear, so do many Indigenous tribes all over the world. There were an estimated ten million Indians living in the Amazon Rainforest 500 years ago. Today there are less than 200,000. In Brazil, European colonists have destroyed more than 90 indigenous tribes since the 1900's. Centuries of knowledge about the medicine in the rainforest has also disappeared as well as the medicinal rainforest plants.