Tribe wants burial rites

Amajari – In the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, the advance of Covid-19 presents indigenous people with a cruel cultural dilemma – remain in their villages with little medical help, or seek safety in the city and risk being deprived of their funeral rites.

Lucita Sanoma lost her twomonth-old baby to suspected coronavirus in May. The boy was buried, without her knowledge, 300km from her village.

The infant died in hospital in Boa Vista, capital of the northwestern state of Roraima.

The burial followed government health guidelines that run counter to Yanomami culture, which dictates that the deceased must be cremated.

The authorities “have to understand and respect the cultural issue”, indigenous leader Mauricio Yekuana said, outraged at the suffering of the young mother and three other women with similar experiences.

As part of the Yanomami’s funerary rites, the remains are displayed in the forest before they are cremated. The ashes are collected in an urn to be buried in a new ceremony much later.

“I want to bring my son’s body back to the village, we must mourn him together,” Lucita Sanoma said.

The young woman wiped away tears as she described her distress in her own language.

“I went straight to the hospital with my son ... The last word I received is that he died. I never saw him again,” she said.

Not being able to mourn in her community, according to her ancestral rites, “is a lack of respect, which has a strong psychological effect on the mother”, said Junios Yanomami, president of the Yanomami Indigenous Health Council.

After her ordeal, Lucita Sanoma returned to her village in the region of Auaris. But her son’s body remains in an unmarked grave in a Boa Vista cemetery, until the authorities decide if she can bring him home.

Mauricio Yekuana said such situations are the result of health policies that disregard the indigenous perspective. “The government just wants to impose its view of things on the indigenous people and force them to listen. It uses them for propaganda.”

An online appeal for donations has been started by the Uniao Amazonia Viva collective to buy medical equipment. – AFP