‘We work differently. We work with our arms using machetes. We use food from the earth, bananas, pawpaw, manioc, sweet potato, pupunha, and other fruits like acai, uriti and nuts - all that’s there. We don’t eat like you, there is no oil or pepper. The food is natural and we can’t destroy the taste. We eat how we want. We can’t use a lot of salt because it destroys our health. Yanomami women get up early and make the food, then they go to the gardens to collect manioc to make manioc bread. Men hunt. The children play and learn as nature teaches us.’

‘If anyone has read a lot of books and thinks I am primitive because I have not read even one, then he should throw away those books and get one which says we are all brothers and sisters under God and we too have a right to live.’

‘Our ancestral land contains forests, rattan, birds, monkeys and other wildlife. We defend them because they are our food. That is why the earth is sacred to us. The mountains are our cathedrals. The earth is filled with life: bees, wild pigs, birds, monkeys, trees, fish and wild chickens. This gives abundance to our lives. The earth is our parent: it is our father and mother who helps us grow and wakes us from our sleep. The earth is dear to our bodies.’

‘I am the environment.
I was born in the forest,
and I grew up there. I know it well.
Without land and nature, we can’t live, the world can’t work.
You talk of the planet, yet you don’t
think it has a heart and breathes,
but it does.
You talk politics and study on paper.
But we study in the forest and look
carefully. You don’t know our wisdom.
It’s very different.
We understand that all living things have a noreshi - another living being which is born at the exact same time
as yourself.
Your noreshi may be a bird, or a boar, or a deer, or a fish, or an anteater, a
butterfly or any other kind of living plant or animal.
It rests when you rest, it feeds
when you feed, it sings when you sing.
It dies when you die.’

‘The phrase the discovery of America is obviously inaccurate. What they discovered was an America that had been discovered thousands of years before by its inhabitants. Thus what took place was the invasion of America - an invasion by a very alien culture.’