The Yanomami: An isolated yet imperiled Amazon tribe The Indian group has official protection, but its large reserve in Brazil is coveted by mining companies and large farming enterprises with political clout. The Yanomami, the largest Indian tribe living in relative isolation in the Amazon Basin, have for millennia occupied a vast stretch of tropical rainforest in northern Brazil and southern Venezuela. Of the estimated 40,000 Yanomami, around two-thirds live in Brazil, where a landmark presidential decree in 1992 recognized them as rightful owners of a reserve the size of Portugal in two northern states, Roraima and Amazonas. Yet, despite this official protection, alarmed by reports that the tribe’s survival is again at risk, the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado recently traveled to the Yanomami region for the third time in three decades. Indians face threats across Brazil, he said in an interview, but none more than the Yanomami, whose land is coveted by small and medium-sized mining companies and large farming enterprises with political clout. The communities portrayed in these photographs – Demini, 160 miles south-west of Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima state; and Maturacá, 180 miles farther west, in the state of Amazonas, at the foot of the Pico da Neblina, Brazil’s highest mountain – carry the scars of the two worst man-made disasters to have struck the Yanomami since they were first contacted a century ago. (…) Photography by Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas - Contact Press Images, Published: July 25, 2014 washingtonpost/wp-srv/special/world/yanomami/
Posted on: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 06:38:59 +0000
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