Davi Kopenawa

Davi Kopenawa is one of the world’s most widely recognised Indigenous leaders in the struggle for human and environmental rights. A shaman and chief of the Yanomami people, one best-known ancestral communities of the Amazon, Davi Kopenawa has spent almost five decades defending the rights of this region’s peoples who are suffering the devastating effects of illegal mining, extractivism, and violence. A recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, otherwise known as the “alternative Nobel Prize”, Davi Kopenawa played a key role in the campaign that led to the Brazilian government’s demarcation of Yanomami territory. He is co-founder and president of the Hutukara Association, which is devoted to protecting the territory and environment, managing educational and health projects, and political organisation among the Yanomami and Ye’kwana peoples.

Davi Kopenawa has published his memoirs in The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Belknap Press, 2013 – in Spanish, La caída del cielo. Palabras de un chamán Yanomami, Capitán Swing, 2024), which is jointly authored with the French anthropologist Bruce Albert. This comprehensive account of the culture, cosmology, and history of the Yanomami people is also a cry of alarm about the destruction being caused by western consumer society and an avowal of the importance of the role of Indigenous peoples in preserving the Amazon. The book and a homonymous documentary based on the book and directed by Eryk Rocha and Gabriela Carneiro have both been internationally acclaimed.

As an ambassador of the peoples of the Amazon and the Indigenous cause, Davi Kopenawa has participated in social and cultural forums of the highest order, as well as addressing the parliaments of some of the leading world powers, the UN General Assembly, and the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. He also received the Global 500 Award of the Geneva-based UN Environment Programme, the Bartolomé de las Casas awarded by the Spanish government for defence of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, and the Order of Rio Branco and the Order of Cultural Merit awarded by the government of Brazil. He is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Federal University of São Paulo and the Federal University of Roraima.