Deforestation versus Indigenous peoples – Il « What the white people call ‘Nature’s protection’ is actually us, the forest people, those who have lived under the cover of its trees since the beginning of time »

Barbara Crane Navarro

Planes and Illegal Airstrips Bringing Toxic Gold Mining to Yanomami Indigenous Land in Brazil

«We have friendship for the forest because we know that the spirits of the forest are its true owners. Yet the gold prospectors’ and the cattle ranchers’ thought is that of evil beings. The white people only know how to abuse and spoil it. They destroy everything in the forest – the earth, the trees, the hills, the rivers – until they have made its ground bare and blazing hot, until they even make themselves starve…»

• Yanomami shaman and spokesman Davi Kopenawa

Illegal gold mining is also happening on Yanomami lands in Venezuela

Yanomami and other Indigenous peoples use the water in the rivers and streams in their ancestral territories for drinking, cooking, bathing and fishing.

Gold mining and other extractive industries contaminate the water, poisoning people, wildlife and the soil.

The abject destruction caused by…

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