Politics of the Forest
Davi Kopenawa
Holding up the Sky: Words of Ancestral Wisdom
Debate
Davi Kopenawa, spiritual and political leader of the Yanomami people, and pioneer in the struggle for the rights of the Indigenous people of the Amazon, discusses with anthropologists Ana Maria Machado and Gemma Orobitg on the wisdom of his ancestral culture and the urgent need to preserve life on Earth.
In the cosmology of the age-old peoples of the Amazon, the forest is a world inhabited by beings with other forms of life and coexisting on different planes. Humans, and in particular shamans, are responsible for maintaining the balance of this interdependent political community by means of respectful negotiation with the other beings which, ultimately, enables them to “hold up the sky” or, in other words, to avoid destruction and preserve life. Davi Kopenawa, spiritual leader of the Yanomami people, shares the ancestral wisdom of a people who have been able to maintain this balance for centuries, and speaks about more than five decades of struggle for the rights of the Amazon’s Indigenous communities. Born deep in the forest, Davi Kopenawa was witness to the systematic destruction of his world by white men. Defending the indivisible whole of his people and territory became his life’s work, as he describes in the book he coauthored with the anthropologist Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Harvard University Press, 2023 – in Spanish, La caída del cielo, Capitán Swing, 2023).
As a political activist, Davi Kopenawa has led campaigns to protect the territory and rights of the Yanomami and Ye’kuana people. He has addressed the world’s most powerful political forums giving voice to the protests of Indigenous peoples against the predatory, extractivist dynamics of global capitalism, and his valuable work has been recognised with the Right Livelihood Award, otherwise known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize”. As a shaman and spiritual leader of the Yanomami, Davi Kopenawa, continues to speak in his dreams with the xapiri, the spirits of the forest, in his attempt to prevent another end of the world, and to safeguard not only life in the rainforest, but also the future of a shared planet.
Moderators: Ana Maria A Machado, Gemma Orobitg
Participants: Davi Kopenawa
This activity is part of Amazons, Politics of the Forest