Posts tagged "yanomami"
16
December 11

Anonymous asked: what do yanomami children do

Yanomami children

Thanks for your question.

Yanomami children play like all children do! They learn to swim at an early age, and so playing in the river is a favourite pastime.

Boys often go hunting with their fathers, and learn the skills they’ll need as an adult. 

As the women are generally responsible for fishing, girls learn how to catch fish with their mothers. They also collect nuts and fruits from the forest, plant vegetables in communal gardens and learn to weave baskets and bags to carry fish and harvested vegetables. 

1
November 11
"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."
- Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami, Brazil
23
September 11
The Yanomami people of Brazil and Venezuela know their rainforest intimately, using approximately 500 plants on a daily basis.  They make slings for babies from silk-grass twine, arrow shafts from the stem of pampas grass and extract salt from the ashes of the great Taurari tree.

The Yanomami people of Brazil and Venezuela know their rainforest intimately, using approximately 500 plants on a daily basis.  They make slings for babies from silk-grass twine, arrow shafts from the stem of pampas grass and extract salt from the ashes of the great Taurari tree.

21
September 11
‘The Yanomami shaman doesn’t distinguish between the fate of his people and the fate of the rest of humanity. Whilst desperately seeking to preserve his beliefs and his rituals, the Yanomami shaman believes he is working towards the salvation of even his cruellest enemies. Expressed in metaphysical terms with which we are no longer familiar, this concept of humanity’s solidarity and diversity, is strikingly important. There is a message here. For it is the responsibility of the last spokesman of a society that has been endagered, together with so many others, through our own actions, to express such wisdom. There are, however, still too few of us who understand that our own survival depends on such philosophy’ - French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss

‘The Yanomami shaman doesn’t distinguish between the fate of his people and the fate of the rest of humanity. Whilst desperately seeking to preserve his beliefs and his rituals, the Yanomami shaman believes he is working towards the salvation of even his cruellest enemies. Expressed in metaphysical terms with which we are no longer familiar, this concept of humanity’s solidarity and diversity, is strikingly important. There is a message here. For it is the responsibility of the last spokesman of a society that has been endagered, together with so many others, through our own actions, to express such wisdom. There are, however, still too few of us who understand that our own survival depends on such philosophy’

- French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss