Indigenous people use new tool to fight for land rights
WHEN Damiana Cavanha was issued with an eviction order last month from her small patch of ancestral land in southwest Brazil, the Guarani Indian put on her feather headdress and danced around the graves of her ancestors chanting for their help.
She also appealed directly to the outside world. ‘‘We Guarani Kaiowa are being massacred by ranchers who want our land,’’ she recorded into a videophone as she circled the graves, surrounded by sugar cane. ‘‘If the government don’t map out our land we will die. Do they want to kill us all?’’
More than 500 years after colonisation that saw the massacres of indigenous people, Indians in Brazil are still being killed for their land but today they have a new weapon. Tribal communities, some of whom who have never seen electricity, television, computers or the internet, have been given solar-powered, waterproof smartphones by Survival International, the London-based organisation that campaigns for the rights of tribal people.
The Tribal Voice project, launched yesterday on the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, means that some of the world’s most remote tribes are now broadcasting live from the rainforest.
‘‘Video is a really important weapon in their fight for land rights,’’ said Sarah Shenker, the project leader. ‘‘There’s always a delay of hearing about an atrocity, then sending a researcher in, so we thought: why shouldn’t people speak to the world directly?’’
The Guarani are one of two tribes chosen to receive the phones. Locked in a daily battle with ranchers in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, they have lost most of their forest land to cattle ranches, soya and sugar cane plantations.
Most of the 43,000-strong tribe live in crowded reserves ridden with violence, alcoholism and drugs. They have one of the world’s highest suicide rates. Other members of the tribe, like Cavanha, live by squatting at the edge of plantations on their old lands.
The grandmother became the leader of her community after the men were killed. Her husband, two sons and four-year-old grandson were all run over by trucks on the highway from the local sugar mill.
Her video message was followed by one from another Guarani village. A man called Tupi showed the charred remains of his house that he said had just been burnt down by the gunmen of local ranchers. ‘‘We lost everything, even our IDs,’’ he said.
The other tribe now making videos are the Yanomami in the mountains and forests of northern Brazil. Unlike the Guarani, the Yanomami had their land demarcated in 1992. The Brazilian government created a reserve twice the size of Switzerland amid international fanfare and expelled about 1000 illegal goldminers.
Many miners have now returned, however, bringing diseases such as malaria and poisoning the rivers with the mercury they use for gold extraction.
‘‘The idea is they [the tribes] make short, snappy videos and circulate the phones between communities,’’ said Shenker. ‘‘In the face of the Brazilian government and multinationals trying to silence tribal people, [who are] being murdered and called primitive and backward, it’s a chance to show they are human beings and have a different kind of life.’’
Most of the Yanomami have had no contact with the outside world, so explaining smartphones was not easy. ‘‘It was quite a learning curve,’’ said Shenker. ‘‘But they were very excited when they realised what it could do.’’