Yanomami association says governor of Roraima has colonizing vision – 01/31/2023 – Panel

The Hutukara Yanomami Association, whose main leadership is Davi Kopenawa, published this Monday (30) a note in which it repudiates the statements made by the governor of Roraima, Antonio Denarium (PP), in an interview with the Panel.

The governor said that the crisis affecting the Yanomami is not exclusive to the state, it is restricted to some groups and has been happening in the same way for decades. He also stated that he does not consider it possible to link mining to the situation of the indigenous people and defended that they acculturate, that is, integrate themselves into large urban centers.

“I have 260 schools in indigenous communities. They want to be lawyers, teachers, doctors. I think it’s right. They [indígenas] they have to acculturate, they can no longer stay in the middle of the forest, looking like an animal. They have to be there properly, with a road, a school, a health center, doing their own farming, producing cassava, flour,” said Denarium.

According to the Yanomami association, speeches of this type denounce the degree of prejudice and discrimination to which indigenous people are subject.

“Our ways of life are denied to us as if we were primitive, incapable, inhuman. Far from being limited to political discourse, this thought was reflected in policies with a genocidal tendency that were systematically implemented in recent years to make it impossible to maintain the lives of the Yanomami” , states the text.

Denarium is described in the note as “an accomplice in the tragedy” for promoting prospecting activity in the region. According to the current Minister of Health, Nísia Trindade, mining is the main cause of the health crisis for the indigenous people of Roraima.

The note says it is necessary to repudiate the colonizing view of indigenous peoples that reduces them to “animals, incapables, or any subcategory of subjects who must submit to the ways of life in the city.”

“The Yanomami people are one of the most populous indigenous peoples of recent contact in the world, and holders of great ancestral knowledge about the forest where they live. It is our right to live in the forest according to our customs, with health and life”, he concludes.

The Lula government (PT) declared a public health emergency on the 20th, after the president received images of indigenous people with severe malnutrition. He paid a visit to Roraima the next day, which highlighted the explosion in cases of malnutrition, diseases associated with hunger (such as diarrhea and respiratory infections) and malaria in Yanomami territory.

Minister Luís Roberto Barroso, of the STF (Supreme Federal Court), determined that the PGR (Attorney General of the Republic) investigate suspicions of the practice of genocide and other crimes by authorities of the government of former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) .

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