The Yanomami Indians of the Amazon

The Yanomami are an indigenous tribe made up of four subdivisions of Indians that live in the tropical rain forest of Southern Venezuela and Northern Brazil. They believe that their fate, and the fate of all people, is inescapably linked to the fate of the environment and with its destruction humanity is committing suicide. To them, land is everything and everything upon it is treated with respect. They do not look at their land as something they can use to advance their economic standing, but as a way to live. The Yanomami have had very little contact

The influence of the miners goes well beyond physical health. They introduced alcohol outside of ritual, which enlarged existing rivalries and lead to increased violence. Weakened by illness and unable to produce and hunt enough food, the Yanomami are reduced to begging and most recently trading sex for food. For the Yanomami what was once an intricate social system patterned on trading and bartering goods and food amongst themselves has become a game of deadly high stakes where they are trading their culture for their very existence. The arrival of miners, technology and diseases led to the Yanomami’s beliefs and cultural systems to plummet. The Yanomami are not being integrated into Western society; instead begging, prostitution and drunkenness are being introduced into theirs. By 1989, some 50,000 miners had set up operations across the central region of the Yanomami territory in Brazil and crossing the frontier into Venezuela. This was the beginning of a road to destruction.

Before the 1970s, the Yanomami Indians were an insulated, self-contained community. Except for occasional border skirmishes with rubber-latex extractors, piassava, nut gatherers, and hunters, the Yanomami existed peacefully. But in 1973, the Brazilian government began construction on the Perimetro Norte highway, which would eventually extend 200 kilometers through the southern end of the Yanomami territory.

Most Yanomami, especially the ones near a military air base that was built by one of the tribal territory, are no longer nomadic. The military has forced them into a state of dependence. Sebastiao Salgado describes his second visit to the tribal territories thirteen years after his first in A Sadness at the Heart of the World, “Now tribesmen receive food and suppl

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