Yanê Kuema

The Amazon forest is being destroyed today and needs to be preserved. We will only be able to preserve the forest when deforestation is stopped, when the greed for money and capital is stopped. Here in Tapajós, we suffer a lot from the invasion of miners, and mining kills the land, it kills Mother Earth, and pollutes our rivers and the fish we eat. We suffer from the invasion of land grabbers, the soybean farmers who come to plant soybeans on our land, and the loggers who want to take our trees. If they don’t stop, if the greed for money doesn’t stop, we will not be able to preserve the Amazon. And they destroy our forests and our rivers when they want to build hydroelectric dams. For us indigenous people, each place has an owner: the owner of the forest, the owner of the river. The streams are our protectors and our guide is God Tupã, the mother of the forest and the mother of the water. If you kill our forest, if you kill our river, you are killing these owners. That’s why we are concerned about a spiritual disturbance. 
 
We indigenous people get our food, our sustenance and the sustenance of our children from the forest. We grow our crops, we eat manioc. It is from the rivers that we catch our fish, our food and drink the water. If we do not have good water to drink, we will get sick and we will die. There are other ways to survive on the planet, without hydroelectric power. Today many villages here in the Amazon already have solar panels. We have very strong sunlight that we can make energy from with solar panels. We should think about sustainable ways forward for our forest and we want to be seen as human. 
 
People think about projects, the Brazilian government thinks about projects on the indigenous lands, but it doesn't think about the indigenous people who live there, it doesn't think about us. Brazil’s native people are disrespected, they are not consulted. They need to talk to us in order to know what we want, to understand what we want to do with our territory. But they are invading our lands and invading our villages. The indigenous peoples are asking for help. Our leaders are being murdered and our leaders' houses are being set on fire, that's why we need to be heard. The indigenous peoples already preserve the forest, preserve the Amazon and are responsible for the preservation of the planet.

Luana Kumaruara