Word: yanomamis
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...your map showing how people around the world will spend New Year's Eve [LIVING, Nov. 29], you suggested that Yanomami tribe members in Roraima, Brazil, will probably ignore the millennium and go to bed early. But at midnight the men will in all likelihood be wide awake, huddling over their campfires and talking about life, just as they do every night. A tribal leader may explain what will be going on in other parts of the world on this night. The men will stand in awe trying to fathom this--for all of three minutes, after which they...
RORAIMA, BRAZIL The Amazon Jungle The Yanomami tribe, which has no calendar, will ignore the millennium and most likely go to bed early in their thatched huts --Free --About 20,000 Yanomami remain...
Davi Kopenawa Yanomami cures ailing tribal brothers with incantations given to him by a fearsome anaconda spirit that slithers up from Amazonian waters. At least that's the way Davi describes it. Like other native medicine men in the Amazon rain forest, Davi relies on hallucinogenic powders to reach the spirit world, but this leader of the Yanomami Indians also wields a more modern means of communication: a two-way radio. When an otherworldly voice squawks through the speaker, Davi wraps up his shaman's crown of toucan feathers, dons uncomfortable city clothes and walks to a clearing...
Aided by his knowledge of Portuguese, which he gained as a child when missionaries took him to a city for treatment of tuberculosis, Davi has helped alert the world to outside threats to the Yanomami culture. The chief danger has come from gold miners, who have polluted Amazonian rivers with deadly mercury. Backed by London's Rainforest Foundation, Davi has formed alliances with indigenous leaders and environmentalists all over the world...
Prodded in part by pressure from Davi and his supporters, Brazil in 1991 set aside 36,000 sq. mi. as a Yanomami homeland. Now mining interests and loggers want the territory cut into patches totaling 7,700 sq. mi. "They want us corralled like animals," says Davi. So when the radio in his hut calls him to a new battlefront, Davi is ready to go, no matter how far it takes him from the spirit world of forest and river...