image credits: Pedro Fonteles
YANÊ KUEMA,
I am Luana Kumaruara from Muruary Village, Rio Tapajós Santarém, Pará Brazil
The Amazon forest is being destroyed today and needs to be preserved. We will only be able to preserve the forest when deforestation is stopped, when the greed for money and capital is stopped. Here in Tapajós we suffer a lot with the invasion of miners, and mining kills the land, they kill Mother Earth and pollutes our rivers, pollutes the fish we eat. We suffer from the invasion of land grabbers, the soybean farmers who come to plant soybeans on our land, and the loggers who want to take our trees. If they don’t stop, if the greed for money doesn’t stop, we will not be able to preserve the Amazon. And they are destroying our forests and our rivers when they want to build hydroelectric dams. For us, indigenous people, there is an owner for each place. The owner of the forest, the owner of the river, the streams are our protectors and our guide is God Tupã, the mother of the forest and the mother of the water. If you kill our forest, if you kill our river, you are killing these owners. That’s why we are concerned about a spiritual disturbance. For us, indigenous people, it is from the forest that we get our food, our sustenance and the sustenance of our children. We make our crops, we eat manioc. It is from the rivers that we catch our fish, our food and drink the water. If we do not have good water to drink, we will get sick and we will die. There are other ways to survive on the planet, without hydroelectric power. Today many villages already have solar panels here in the Amazon. We have a very strong sun that we can make energy from solar panels. We should think about sustainable ways for our forest and we want to be seen as human. People think about Project, the Brazilian government thinks about project inside the indigenous lands, but doesn’t think about the indigenous people who live there, doesn’t think about us. The original people from Brazil, they are disrespected, they are not consulted. They need to talk to us to know what we want, to understand what we want to do with our territory. But they are invading our lands and invading our villages. The indigenous peoples are asking for help. They are murdering our leaders and setting fire to our leaders’ houses, that’s why we need to be heard. The indigenous peoples already preserve the forest, preserve the Amazon and are the responsible for the preservation of the planet.