CONTACT: THE YANOMAMI OF BRAZIL. 1990 Laura R. Graham, University of Iowa Imagine yourself to be a Yanomami Indian. Describe your subsistence economy before outsiders came onto your lands in the 1950s. Think of the kinds of tools you would have used to obtain food, including what you would have used to hunt game and fish. How would you have cut fruits from trees or dug tubers? Now, imagine yourself to be a Yanomami in the present. What have you adopted from outsiders and incorporated into your ways of obtaining food? What Western tools did you see in the program that you now use to hunt, fish, and gather crops? Describe the effects mining operations have had on your subsistence economy. In what ways is mining affecting the game population in your territory? How is it affecting fish in the rivers? What are the effects on the environment in general? Are there new ways of obtaining food that have come about as a result of the miners' invasion? Have miners influence ways in which food transactions are conducted (bartering vs. begging, exchange)? Have the miners introduced new foods? How do the miners see the Indians? How do they perceive themselves in relation to the Indians? Do they think they are influencing the Indians in positive or negative ways, or a combination of both? Explain. How do the Yanomami perceive the miners? Does more than one viewpoint exist, as shown in the program? What are Yanomami views about taking things from outsiders? Are they unanimously in favor? If not, what kinds of individuals are opposed? Why? How has mining affected Yanomami health? What new diseases have they brought? Why are these so devastating? To what do the Yanomami traditionally attribute disease? In what ways are their views of disease similar or different from Western understandings? How have outsiders and their diseases changed the ways that Yanomami understand disease? cure disease? How, according to Yanomami thinking, are illnesses cured and what role do Western medicines have? What is the miners' position on the illnesses that have devastated the Yanomami in recent years? Do they think they are responsible in any way? To what cause, as articulated by the leader José Altino, do miners attribute the remarkable decrease in the Yanomami population? How do you think the miners would view their portrayal in this program? Do you think the program is unfair to them [OR, alternatively, biased]? Do you think the Indians should receive a share of the wealth generated from gold extraction in their territories? What kinds of arrangements did you see being explored in the program? What ideas do you have about ways that profits could be distributed? What strategies, as shown in the program, have some Brazilian Indians begun to use to assert their rights? In what ways are the Yanomami different from other indigenous groups that have been organizing for their rights, for example those who had a strong presence at the Altamira protest? What other strategies for organizing and achieving rights do you think might be effective for remote indigenous peoples? What sorts of solutions do you envision for the situation portrayed in the program? In what ways might you help? Here, provide information about human rights organizations and NGOs working on behalf of the Yanomami and other indigenous groups in Brazil. Bibliography "Sanuma Memories: Yanomami Ethnography in a Time of Crisis," Ramos, Alcida. University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. "The Fierce People," Chagnon, Napoleon. Holt, Rineheart, & Winston, 1988. "Amazon Journal: Dispatches from a Vanishing Frontier," O'Connor, Geoffrey. Plume, 1998. "Yanomami Warfare," Ferguson, R. Brian. School of American Research, 1995. "Darkness In El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated The Amazon," Tierney, Patrick. W.W. Norton, 2002. "La Fumee du Metal: Histoire de Contact chez les Yanomami (Bresil)," Albert, Bruce (article).