Sunday, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, seemed like a celebration. We intend to celebrate and honor Aboriginal peoples, but instead we mourn the deaths of many deceased friends and colleagues. The infernal Covid virus threatens everyone everywhere, yet it was the one that fooled marginalized communities the most. And of these marginalized communities, indigenous teams seem to be the ones suffering the most.
Here in the United States, Covid-19 wvocling the Navajo Nation, without the knowledge of most Americans who have been besseed through reports of how the virus was being unleashed in places like New York and Houston. Lack of access to timely data and good enough Western health care, as well as malnutrition that increases to the maximum after contact with the industrialized world, mix to turn these unfortunate friends and colleagues into relatively simple prey to this killer virus.
And there is another facet of this fatal microbe that makes it an embodiment of evil: it kills some of the greatest vital voices and heroes of Native Americans. In June, he shot and killed Kayapo’s boss, Paulinho Paiakan, one of the first to emerge from the Brazilian Amazon in the 1970s, to warn of the risks of rainforest destruction. Antonio Bolívar, who played the unforgettable shaman in “The Embrace of the Snake,” had died in Colombia shortly before. Xingu leader Aritana Yawalapiti, one of the world’s most charismatic and effective voices for the rights of other indigenous people, died last week. And just a few days ago our dear friend and colleague José de los Santos Sauna Limaco del Kogi others died, two years after the day when he co-signed a decree to the “Black Line”, the invisible line that connects the sacred sites of the Kogis.
Today, his remains were transported to the heights of the sacred mountain which is his home. The Kogis have not only lost a formidable, sensible and inspiring leader, but also the world at large. Those of us who have been blessed enough to know Him will regret it forever.
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