For a number of months now, we’ve been monitoring the progress of a movie by the name of Hakani: A Survivor’s Story, which has stirred hate against tribal peoples.

The film apparently shows a tribal community in the Amazon ritualistically burying a child alive. We are told that this is because the child was thought not to have a proper human soul.

Only at the very end of the film does it explain that the footage is a ‘reconstruction’. This leads many viewers to believe that the scenes are real.

In fact, even the film’s makers have no proof that the events it shows ever happened.

It was made by David Cunningham, son of the founder of fundamentalist Christian missionary group Youth With A Mission. Now, it is being used by such groups to fight for a new law in Brazil, Muwaji’s Law, which will force government officials to take a child from its parents if somebody merely suspects that the child is at risk of being killed in this way.

This is an extremely sensitive issue, but it has reached the stage where tribal peoples in general are being targeted for an exceedingly rare practice, at a time when they are already threatened on all sides.

For more info, see our Hakani background briefing, download Survival’s reaction or read it at Scribd.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Act Now. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.