Featured Article: Yanomami Mothers Plead for Their Babies’ Bodies

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Three women are experiencing a horror for which a name must be devised. They are Sanöma, a Yanomami group, and their village, Auaris, is located in what the whites call Roraima, on the border between Brazil and Venezuela. They don’t understand the concept of borders, for them land is only one – and there are no fences. They do not speak Portuguese, they speak their own language.

In May, these women and their babies were taken to Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima, with suspected pneumonia. In the hospitals, the children would have been contaminated with Covid-19. And they died there. Then their tiny bodies disappeared, possibly buried in the city cemetery. Two of the mothers are infected with Covid-19, crammed into in the ‘Casa de Saúde Indígena’ (Indigenous Health House – CASAI), packed with the sick. There, eroded by the virus, they plead for their babies.

With the help of several people, one of them managed to send me a message, recorded, in Sanöma. She recounts what she is experiencing. And she says: “I suffered to have this child. And I am suffering. My people are suffering. I need to take my son’s body to the village. I can’t go back without my son’s body.” I listen to her message before the translation. I can’t understand the words. But I understand the horror. The universal language of one being wrenched from the world of humans.

To be wrenched from a village in the interior of the Amazon forest because your son has symptoms of a disease, pneumonia, passed on by the first whites who decimated part of the Yanomami population last century, is violent. To move from this world to a hospital, and an overcrowded hospital because of Covid-19, is more violent. To have your baby infected by a second disease, when he was there to be healed from the first, which was still hypothetical, is even more violent.

And then she loses her child. Each one of them loses their child.

The Sanöma mothers don’t understand Portuguese. Although Roraima is the most indigenous state in Brazil and almost two hundred Yanomami have already been infected by the novel coronavirus, there is no translator for this population. No one explains anything to them. The women do not understand what the whites are saying. And the bodies of their children vanish. One of the community leaders who understands Portuguese, explains that the three babies may have been buried in the cemetery. But there are no guarantees. No one assures them or their leaders.

The prosecutor in Boa Vista Alisson Marugal sent a letter to the Yanomami Special Indigenous Health District (DSEI-Y) to gather information on the whereabouts of the babies’ bodies. “The situation is very complex, particularly with regard to the Yanomami population. We have had four official deaths and in all of them we have had problems. The first was the case of a 15-year-old teenager. We had assistance issues, we had lack and missing information and we are also investigating whether there was lack of medical assistance,” he says. “The case of the Sanöma babies has only just begun to be investigated. We don’t know if there was a diagnosis for Covid-19 and, if so, what protocol was followed and where was the burial site.”

Marugal took up the post mid-pandemic; he says he is working from Monday to Monday to tackle a very challenging situation. “I don’t rule out the prospect of bringing a civil class action in the future demanding moral damages not only for the parents, but for the whole Yanomami ethnicity,” he says.

Burying the body of a Yanomami is wrenching it from the world of humans

The level of violence involved in this set of events inflicted on the Sanöma women is tremendous, even by Brazilian government standards, a historical perpetrator of attacks against indigenous peoples. But the violence extends much further, because if for a white person the pain is that which so many families are experiencing in this pandemic, unable to say goodbye to their loved ones, unable to bury them properly due to the biosafety protocol, for a Yanomami woman, for a Yanomami man, to bury one of their own is incomprehensible – and unacceptable.

The Yanomami are not buried. Never, under any circumstances, do they bury a body. Bodies are cremated and there is a long ritual for the dead to die for themselves and the community. The Yanomami are not individuals, as a white person living in Brazil or Spain or the United States is. The Yanomami understand themselves as part of a community and intertwine with several dimensions of visible and invisible worlds in shaman-mediated relationships. The rituals of death must be followed in every detail and take months and even years to complete. Several villages travel to the community of the dead to take part in the cremation. The ashes are then kept.

Months later there will be a second part, when the visitors once again return for the celebrations. The deceased will then be remembered in their deeds, in their disagreements, in all the significant milestones of their trajectory. They will be remembered so that they can be forgotten, their traces erased and the community moves on. In the last act, the ashes of the dead are diluted in banana porridge so that the deceased will dissipate into everyone’s body.

The ritual also allows the dead to die as a memory, so that the living may live. If the ritual is not performed, the deceased will not be able to be forgotten, nor will they let themselves be forgotten, which is very harmful to their relatives and the entire community. The Yanomami death ritual is of extreme complexity and wisdom in its symbology. It is a collective ritual and it is also a time to establish sociopolitical and even loving relationships. In the end, there is only one dead, the one who died -and not the living who feel dead because they were unable to mourn, as so often occurs in the world of whites, who no longer have the time or space to make the transmutation of the lacking into the absence of which Carlos Drummond de Andrade spoke.

Burying the body of a deceased is an absolute horror for the Yanomami people. It wrenches them from the world of humans. “For these mothers, knowing that their children are buried in the city cemetery is equivalent to a white woman having to live with the notion that her son’s body is dumped and displayed in a public square,” says Silvia Guimarães, professor of anthropology at the University of Brasília (UnB), who has been doing research with the Sanöma people for many years. She is one of the 40 researchers and supporters of the Pro-Yanomami and Ye’kwana Network, founded to fight the invisibility afforded to the suffering of the Yanomami during the pandemic, based on the disclosure of qualified studies.

Without an emergency plan, 40 percent of the Yanomami people could be infected

The Yanomami Indigenous Territory covers an area of some 9.6 million hectares on the border between Brazil and Venezuela, in the states of Amazonas and Roraima. Over 26,000 indigenous are scattered across more than 300 villages. The Sanöma subgroup is made up of 3,164 people, according to 2018 figures from the Socio-environmental Institute. Some groups live in voluntary isolation, which means they prefer not to socialize with whites. Since the Yanomami made their first contacts in 1910, they have been decimated by diseases, which they call shawara, and also by gunshots from prospectors who invade their land in search of gold.

David Kopenawa, the great intellectual and Yanomami leader, has been denouncing to the world that his people are at risk of genocide. He calls the whites “the people of merchandise”. His son, Dario Kopenawa, of the Hutukara Yanomami Association, leads the “Fora Garimpo! Fora Covid!” (Prospection, Out! Covid, Out!) campaign. At the height of the pandemic, there are over 20,000 prospectors on Yanomami land, considered the most vulnerable to the novel coronavirus in the Amazon. A survey conducted by the Federal University of Minas Gerais, the Socio-environmental Institute and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation showed that if there is no emergency contingency plan for infection among the Yanomami, 40 percent of the population living in villages near the mines could be contaminated.

According to the latest report by the Pro-Yanomami and Ye’kwana Network, dated June 21st, there are 168 infected and five dead. The Indigenous Health House (CASAI), where the Yanomami who are brought to the city stay, has become one of the main hotbeds of infection. According to the network of researchers, over 80 indigenous have already been infected there, 48 percent of the Covid-19 cases among the Yanomami and the Ye’kwana. There are cases of Yanomami patients who were discharged from other diseases and had been waiting for over two months for their return to the Indigenous Land. They were ultimately infected by Covid-19 in the CASAI.

Since the death of the first 15-year-old Yanomami on April 9th, despair has escalated. The victims of massacres of all sorts perpetrated by the whites, it seemed impossible that there could be any form of violence as yet unknown. But there always is. And then the Yanomami began to see the bodies disappear, followed by vague explanations of burials by authorities who they can hardly understand. “It’s a gross disregard for our culture. The bodies are buried with no one explaining anything, without consulting the families, without asking the mothers’ permission. They don’t know where their children are buried, I, their representative, have no idea where they are buried,” says Dario Kopenawa. “We want to know where they are and when we can dig up their bodies to take them to the village, where they were born and grew up, where their parents, their aunts and uncles, their cousins live, where the children’s souls can be happy. We understand the need for [biosafety] protocols, but we need to know and understand what will happen. We need to know when the bodies will be returned. We want to know how long the virus will survive in the body. If the infectologists explain it to us, we will understand and we can respect it. And we can convey that information to the community.”

According to the Pro-Yanomami and Ye’kwana Network, the biosafety protocol would determine three years for exhuming the body, but to date evidence that the children were infected with the disease is still lacking. “Why three years? Why not more? Why not less? Who will explain this to the Yanomami women?”, asks Silvia Guimarães.

Braulina Baniwa is one of the indigenous women who, despite belonging to another ethnic group, sympathized with the Sanöma mothers: “These women are suffering unspeakable violence. It is a part of each one of them that is going to remain out of their territory,” she says. “In addition to everything they are experiencing, they don’t speak Portuguese and there is no care in understanding them.” An anthropologist, she is part of the Matula Laboratory, developed from the CNPq’s “Sociabilidades, diferenças e desigualdades” (Sociabilities, differences and inequalities) research group.

In a public letter, Matula said: “In the case of the Sanöma women, the pain of the indigenous women in this pandemic stands out, leaving their children’s bodies behind with no chance of negotiating the terms of the ceremonies to end this life, which violates their rights as a people. This situation is repeated in several places in Brazil, but what is the weight of this pain for an indigenous woman who does not master Portuguese, is far from her support network and is waiting to know if she is infected? What is her chance of being heard, of having her experience of death shared and decided? We agree that the types of infection are multiple and of great risk, but there are still some questions to be asked: is it possible to be transparent, to be open to dialogue, to share knowledge and decisions? What ethical criteria will we experience in this pandemic? This pandemic has exposed social inequality and what was standardized. The public service infrastructure has been absent for this part of the population, the risks of their children and their indigenous mothers dying are growing. And there is a standstill for action. The Sanöma women are the strength of this indigenous woman, of the territory, of the forest, of the fields, of the food, of the rivers, that they manage to care for life and deserve respect, care and appreciation from the State.”

The Yanomami leaders demand a specific protocol for those indigenous who died from Covid-19. “We want the bodies to be sanitized or, if that is not feasible, they should be cremated. Then we can take their ashes to the villages,” says Dario Kopenawa. There is no crematorium in Boa Vista. And there also seems to be no desire to understand the drama of indigenous people in a society where racism reigns against native peoples – 896,917 people, the equivalent of 0.47 percent of Brazil’s total population, according to the 2010 IBGE Census. The cultural wealth they represent is voiced by 256 tribes who speak over 150 different languages. Decimated by viruses and bullets for five centuries, they have withstood up to this day. And then came Covid-19. The Bolsonaro government, with the opening of indigenous lands for private exploitation as one of its main projects, does nothing to prevent the disease that is currently spreading across the Amazon forest, producing a new massacre.

According to Dario Kopenawa, the Yanomami were infected with Covid-19 by prospectors. In Boa Vista, prospectors not only move around and penetrate the public sector through several doors, but they also become monuments in a public square. This daily reality reflects the tension between the native peoples and the whites who got there driven by state projects at first, then by their own feet. “Before the pandemic we already had the mining disease, our rivers were being polluted by mercury, our people were dying of tuberculosis and pneumonia. Now they have also brought us Covid-19,” he says. With the prospectors, malaria is also spreading and claiming victims among the indigenous throughout the territory. “And after all that, they bury us,” says Dario Kopenawa. “There had never been a Yanomami buried before. Never. I think it’s violence. But I believe that not consulting us or asking our permission is also a crime.”

The newborn baby died and disappeared

There is still a fourth Yanomami woman, infected with coronavirus, who was rushed to the hospital to deliver her baby and never saw his body. The newborn may have died of complications unrelated to Covid-19, according to prosecutor Alisson Marugal, but a hospital employee may have improperly entered a suspicion of coronavirus in the document. The family is part of another Yanomami group who live in an area called Catrimani Mission, in the Nara Uhi village. Born prematurely at seven months, the boy was born and died on April 28th. He has also vanished.

The account of this baby’s father to the Pro-Yanomami and Ye’kwana Network illustrates how the virus began to decimate the Yanomami – and also how the state became a perpetrator of violence by producing new suffering. This Yanomami is known among the whites as Remo.

“This is how it happened. First, shaman Andre showed Covid’s symptoms. He’s older, he was the first to get sick. Then Miguel performed shamanism to cure his father and also got sick. One day after Miguel began to feel sick, he walked to the health post at the Catrimani Mission. The third person to fall ill in our community was my wife, Zita Rosinete, who was pregnant. She had a cough, diarrhea, fever, headache, chest pain and severe belly pain. The shamans didn’t do any work for her because they were afraid of getting sick, since this illness is very powerful.”

“The next day, when Zita Rosinete was feverish, we walked to the Mission post. I was very sad there. Rosinete passed out three times. She was very weak and very feverish. On April 27th, we were removed by plane from the Catrimani Mission to the maternity ward in Boa Vista. When we reached the hospital, she passed out again and I kept holding her… So maybe I have Covid in me. But I had my nose and mouth tested, it came back negative.”[Later Remo was infected in the Indigenous Health House and tested positive for Covid-19.]

“My wife was having a hard time breathing, she was very weak and almost died! And I asked the doctor, ‘Is she going to die?’ ‘No. She is still strong inside,’ he said. In the maternity ward they placed us to sleep separated from other people”.

“My son died. Right on the 28th [of April], the day he was born, he died. He was born in the morning and died in the afternoon. Zita Rosinete was very weak, but she was still somewhat strong because she didn’t want to die. If she had thought of dying, she would have died.”

“I never saw my son. Zita Rosinete gave birth to the baby, the doctors took him and said: ‘Take him to the hospital, to the ICU’. Then he died. I was very sad. I am still sad. The doctor did not explain why he died. He just asked me, ‘Hey, are you the daddy? Yes, I’m the daddy.’ ‘Sorry, your son died. He was struggling to breathe and that’s why he died.”

“He died at 2 PM, but I don’t know… It’s all in the document. I said to the nurse: ‘I want to visit my son!’. But he said, ‘Wait, only later. The doctors are still examining him’. So I waited, I waited, and then the news came: ‘Your son died in the daytime’. The body, I think, is still there in the ICU, I don’t know where it is. At the CASAI [Indigenous Health House], they also didn’t tell me where my son’s body is. They don’t give any information on where the body is. I have a paper that mentions my son [declarations of live birth] and here at the CASAI the nurse asked, ‘Where is your son? I said, ‘He died!’ ‘Where is the document saying that he died in the maternity hospital on the 28th?’ ‘I don’t know! The doctors didn’t give it to me!'”

Remo and Rosinete only managed to return to their village on June 19th. Without their son’s body. And thus another act of violence was inflicted on the Yanomami people. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the case and also that of other deaths of adults whose bodies are being claimed by the Yanomami.

“Stealing other people’s deceased is the ultimate stage of barbarism”

French anthropologist Bruce Albert compares “the secret and compulsory (‘biosafe’!) burial” of the Yanomami victims of Covid-19 with the ‘disappearance’ of the bodies of the victims of the torturers in the military dictatorship (1964-1985). “Stealing other people’s deceased and denying them their mourning has always been the ultimate stage of barbarism, in the contempt and rejection of the Other (ethnic and/or political),” he says in an interview with EL PAÍS. Together with David Kopenawa, Albert wrote a book that is a milestone in the history of anthropology: ‘A queda do céu’ (‘the sky has fallen’ in Portuguese, published by Companhia das Letras).

In 1993, the incident known as “Haximu’s Massacre”, in which 16 indigenous people were murdered by prospectors, illustrates the non-negotiable value that the Yanomami people attach to their funeral rituals. ” Despite the terror of being hunted by the prospectors, they did not hesitate to put their lives at risk to recover their dead, mourn them, and properly burn them on their escape route,” recalls Albert. “For the Yanomami, it’s better to die than to leave their deceased without a grave.”

In ancient wars, the Yanomami always called a truce so that the wives of their enemies could recover their dead in the forest and mourn them properly. To vanish with the dead enemies, according to the anthropologist, was considered “a dishonor and a display of literally inhuman hostility: worthy of the savage animals or the evil spirits of the forest.”

At the end of the interview, Bruce Albert adds: “I hope it will be useful for your readers to understand: there is no worse offense and suffering for the Yanomami than to ‘vanish’ with their deceased.”

The case of the Sanöma babies reflects the opening of a new chapter of state violence against native peoples. The disrespect and indignity with which death is addressed by public authorities are the same as with life. It is not enough to kill by virus contamination, women and also men must be tortured. This chapter is just beginning, but the victims have already given it a title: genocide.

Source: Eliane Brum, El País Brasil, June 24th, 2020