Blood Gold

/ Current Affairs
  • From the remote rainforests of Brazil, a little-known tribe has made an emotional appeal to Indians:
    • “The gold which has come from our Yanomami territory is Blood Gold”, gold at the cost of indigenous blood.
    •  I’d like to send a message to the people of India, to the Indian government and the companies which import it: You must stop buying Blood Gold.
    • Buying Blood Gold is not good. It’s important that the government thinks again, that the Indian people think again and do not buy Yanomami Blood Gold.”
  • The appeal, by Dario Kopenawa of Brazil’s indigenous Yanomami people, was posted in a video online with English subtitles by Survival International, an international human rights advocacy based in London, which campaigns for the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples around the world.
  • The Yanomami live in the rainforests and mountains of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela, and are, according to Survival International, the largest relatively isolated tribe in South America.
  • The Yanomami are believed to have crossed the Bering Strait from Asia into North America perhaps 15,000 years ago, and travelled southward to their home in the Amazon.
  • The Yanomami practise an ancient communal way of life.
  • They live in large, circular houses called yanos or shabonos, some of which can hold up to 400 people.
  • It is a Yanomami custom that a hunter does not eat the meat he has killed.
  • “He shares it out among friends and family.
  • In return, he will be given meat by another hunter.
  • The Yanomami consider all people to be equal, and do not have a chief. Instead, all decisions are based on consensus after long discussions and debates Gold rush in Yanomami country
  • Since the 1980s, the Yanomami have been facing an onslaught from illegal gold miners.
  • According to Survival International, Yanomami land was invaded by up to 40,000 miners who killed the indigenous people, destroyed their villages, and brought them deadly diseases.
  • A fifth of the Yanomami population perished in just seven years.
  • Following a sustained campaign led by Survival International, the Brazilian government notified a ‘Yanomami Park’ in 1992, and the miners were expelled.
  • However, they kept returning, and in 1993, they murdered 16 Yanomami including a baby in Haximú village.
  • A Brazilian court subsequently found five miners guilty of the massacre.
  • However, the illegal entry of gold miners in Yanomami country continued.

       What now for Yanomami

  • The tribe has launched an initiative called MinersOutCovidOut to enlist the support of Brazilian society and the international community to lobby the Brazilian government to take urgent action to remove the miners and to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.