He has the natural authority of a pope or a prince, much simpler. At 54 years old, a man figure, with strong hands, Davi Kopenawa, shaman and leader of the indigenous Yanomami people of Brazil, is an angry man. Faced with the destruction of the forest and the deadly advance on its lands of timber traffickers and other garimpeiros, illegal gold panners, it sounds the alarm around the world.
In December 2019, in Stockholm, he received the Right Livelihood Award, known as the "alternative Nobel Prize". At the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris on January 30, he opened the wonderful retrospective dedicated to photographer Claudia Andujar alongside artist-activist and anthropologist Bruce Albert.
It was with them that he succeeded in demarcating, in 1992, the Terra Indigena Yanomami, a territory of 96,650 km², an area slightly larger than that of Portugal. Land regularly threatened by innumerable mineral exploration projects today openly supported by the government of Jair Bolsonaro.
When Davi Kopenawa speaks, it is with a contagious force of conviction, forged by a sovereign detachment from material things. As a child, he saw his home group, a collective home of about 200 people in the far northeast of the state of Amazonas, devastated by infectious diseases spread by whites.
For a time, he underwent the proselytizing of North American missionaries, to whom he owes his biblical first name, the learning of writing and an uninviting glimpse of Christianity. Despite his initial curiosity, he was quickly put off by their fanaticism and their obsession with sin.
Revolted by the successive mournings but intrigued by the power of the Whites, Davi will leave his native region to work in a post of the Funai, the National Indian Foundation. He will strive, in his words, to "become a white man." He will only end up contracting tuberculosis there. Healed, he will travel through Yanomami territory. He will gain from this experience a more precise understanding of the predatory logic of what he calls the "people of the commodity" and the threats it represents. Before returning home to the Amazon on Friday January 30, Davi Kopenawa delivered to World his reading of the situation.
