Juma indigenous people, from Amazonas, suffer from climate crisis – 01/04/2024 – Environment

On the banks of the Assuã River, in a dirt field, the journey of Amazonian life remains resilient in the midst of one of the most severe droughts in recent years in the region.

The sun is hotter, the climate is drier and the wind carries the smell of fires somewhere not so far away. Even the Anta stream is not like it used to be. “It’s like this because of the felling. The water no longer fills, it doesn’t reach the limit like it used to, it’s not as natural anymore”, says indigenous leader Mandeí Juma.

“It wasn’t like that in the past. We’ve been getting sick more because of the heat, the smoke, the water. Both children and adults have gotten sick, they’ve gotten the flu and I don’t know how we’ll be,” he says.

Data from Inpe (National Institute for Space Research) shows that the state of Amazonas recorded 3,900 fires in the month of October alone, the worst rate in the last 25 years. El Niño, a climate phenomenon that affects global atmospheric patterns, ended up contributing to a situation favorable to the expansion of forest fires, especially in areas where there were already pockets of deforestation.

In 2023, all nine countries in the Amazon basin experienced the lowest rainfall in the last 40 years during the months of July to September, according to recent research by the European Union Scientific Center.

This condition negatively impacted rivers and biodiversity, especially in the headwaters of the Solimões, Purus, Juruá and Madeira rivers, covering the central-south region of the state of Amazonas, where the Jumas village is located, in the municipality of Canutama.

“We’ve been facing a lot of heat, and the river has become drier. We’ve never seen it like this. It’s already December and the water hasn’t even started to fill, and there’s already a lot of concern,” he told Sheet Mayta Juma, deputy chief of the Juma people and one of the members of the Regional Department of Opiam (Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Alto Madeira).

“We used to live in the forest and it wasn’t like that, the water was normal. It’s changed a lot, even when we go bathing it’s hot. I see that every year deforestation has increased and so have the fires.”

The traditional maloca, a wooden school, five residences and a flour mill form the Juma village, which is surrounded by small cassava and banana plantations.

Access to the territory is via the Assuã River, a tributary of the Purus River, in a journey that takes about an hour from the bridge on the BR-230 (the Transamazônica highway) to the Anta stream, which borders the population center. From the edge of the watercourse, you need to walk another 500 meters to reach the village.

The village has a generator that only works for a few hours, and the internet signal in the region fluctuates.

There are no roads. The only paths are the trails in the middle of the forest that the indigenous people use to reach the chestnut trees and also to hunt peccary, paca, nambu, curassow and tapir.

Everything there is a sacred place for the 24 indigenous people who form the six ethnic families, who today inhabit one of the most tense regions of the Western Amazon.

“The Jumas who lived on the Aswan River were massacred by local farmers who wanted that land, who wanted riches and saw those people as threats to their interests”, says anthropologist Luciana França, who lived with the indigenous group in the 2000s.

“It’s a case of genocide like so many others, but it was documented and was brought to justice. Before 1998, there were around ten people,” he adds.

Diseases, animal attacks and conflicts brought the ethnic group very close to disappearing. With this risk so imminent, Funai (National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples) transferred, in the 90s, the seven surviving Jumas to the village Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau (Jupaú) Alto Jamari, in the municipality of Governador Jorge Teixeira, in state of Rondônia: chief Aruká, his daughters Boreá, Mayta and Mandeí, in addition to the elders Ité and Arimã.

“In 1998, they [jumas] they began to want to join together with other indigenous peoples. They knew about the existence of these people, because, years before, there were small incursions by Funai in which the agents took some Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau indigenous people as mediators”, recalls França.

“There was this idea of ​​associating with these indigenous people, since their language, Kagwahiva, is from the same linguistic stem and in the village of Alto Jamari there were many men and few women. The young Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau understood each other with the Jumas and decided to get married. They knew that if they were left alone, the ethnic group would end up disappearing.”

In 2004, the federal government officially demarcated and approved the Juma Indigenous Land even without the presence of traditional inhabitants. However, the 38,351 hectare area was left without care for a long time, which made it vulnerable to land grabbing, timber theft, deforestation and the entry of illegal fishermen and hunters.

Aruká Juma pressured Funai and, in 2008, after an action by the Federal Public Ministry against the indigenous body, the Federal Court ordered him to guarantee the return of the Jumas to the reserve in Canutama (AM), coming from the Uru-Eu-Wau Indigenous Land -Wau.

Funai and the Kanindé Ethno-environmental Defense Association monitored the resumption of the Jumas in their territory, which only happened definitively in 2012.

The trips were challenging. “It was very difficult, the truck often got stuck. There were several trips over a year”, says Israel Vale, coordinator of monitoring and territorial protection at Kanindé Etnoambiental, which today uses drones to combat deforestation in the region.

“On one trip, they opened a field, on another they cleaned where the village was going to be. This process took about two years back and forth, until they were able to build the houses and, finally, move permanently to Juma land.”

A decade later, the Juma people face new challenges — in addition to the constant pressure from land grabbing, deforestation, illegal hunting and fishing.

“This climate change, this year’s drought, the delay in rain have greatly affected the village, which depends on planting corn and cassava for subsistence and for commercialization. Everything is unregulated and the concern is what this will be like next year “, says Vale.

Mayta questions herself even further. “We are very concerned about the forest and the territory. I have seen a lot of the advance of deforestation, the burning that is coming, the health problems. I am afraid of non-indigenous people taking over everything”, he says.

“I’m afraid of not having our sacred territory, our cemetery, indigenous land for my daughters and my grandchildren. I say this to my community, to the movement: what will it be like in a month, in 30-odd years? What will the our future?”

^{This report is part of the Tapajós Journalism Microgrants Program, a partnership between the Amazônia Communication Laboratory, the Saúde e Alegria Project and Folha to stimulate the journalistic production of young professionals from the Amazon.}