In the 1980s, he began working for the Brazilian government organization
Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI) at a post in Demini in the center of Yanomami territory as an intermediary between the government and indigenous peoples with whom outsiders had little or no contact. He also accompanied health workers to Yanomami villages and has worked closely with organizations such as Comissão Pró-Yanomami (CCPY) and Survival International in the fight for the integrity of Yanomami lands in Brazil. Kopenawa has been an advocate for his community for over 30 years. In the process, he has visited many countries to spread his message about the importance of respecting indigenous peoples rights and their fundamental and unique role in conserving the rainforest for the benefit of humanity. In 2004, Kopenawa and other Yanomami in Brazil founded the Hutukara Yanomami Association (Portuguese:
Hutukara Associação Yanomami) to formally defend their rights. As well as advocating for Yanomami rights, it runs educational projects where Yanomami teachers work in the communities teaching literacy, maths, geography and human rights, and records deforestation images using drones to back up the case for land protection. Yanomami continues to speak out about the dangers facing the Yanomami. He has warned about the impact large scale mining will have on the Yanomami if the Brazilian congress votes to allow mining on indigenous lands. In a
CNN interview published in February 2023, Yanomami criticized
Jair Bolsonaro, who served as the president of Brazil from 2019 to 2022, for encouraging mining in the Amazon Rainforest. He also expressed hope for improvement of the situation with the crackdown starting in 2023 on illegal mining by the administration of
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the appointment of the first Brazilian
Minister of Indigenous People,
Sônia Guajajara.
Criticism Yanomami's unique role among his people has been commented on skeptically even by those sympathetic to him and his cause.
Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon wrote regarding Yanomami: Survival International and many others with extensive experience of the Yanomami have severely criticized Chagnon's work which detrimentally portrays the Yanomami as "sly, aggressive, and intimidating" and falsely claims that they "live in a state of chronic warfare". It was referred to by the Brazilian government when it planned to fragment Yanomami land in 1988, in a proposal which would have been catastrophic for them and which was only prevented by a vigorous campaign. Chagnon's views in this matter were criticized by
investigative journalist Patrick Tierney in his controversial book
Darkness in El Dorado.
Awards In 1988, Yanomami received an award from the
United Nations Environment Programme for his work protecting the forest against rubber tappers and establishing Yanomami Park. and later gave a speech to the UK parliament where he warned that the goldminers are once again invading Yanomami land and disease is spreading. Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, together with the Hutukara Yanomami Association (Brazil), received the Right Livelihood Award in 2019 "for their courageous determination to protect the forests and biodiversity of the Amazon, and the lands and culture of its indigenous peoples".
Published works In his role as activist and spokesperson for his community, Kopenawa has worked on a variety of published projects to disseminate Yanomami knowledge and warn the world of the ecological destruction caused by the extractivist exploitation of the Amazon. He has both co-authored and contributed to books as well as written and appeared in documentary films.
Written works • Contributor to ''Rêves d'Amazonie'' (2005) published by Centre Culturel Abbaye de Daoulas (French) • Co-author for
La Chute de Ciel (2010), by Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, published by Plon, Paris (French). Translated to English, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and German. • Co-author for
O Desejo Dos Outros Uma Etnografia Dos Sonhos Yanomami (2022) published by Ubu Editora in São Paulo (Portuguese) • Co-author for ''Yanomami: l'esprit de la forêt'' (2022), by Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, published by Actes Sud Editions, Arles (French). Translated to Portuguese, Spanish and Italian.
Film • Writer for
Holding Up the Sky (2023), directed by Pieter Van Eeck, produced by Hanne Phlypo • Writer for
The Last Forest | A Última Floresta (2021), directed by Luiz Bolognesi, produced by Gullane
The Falling Sky The Falling Sky was Kopenawa's first major published work. It was originally published in French by
Plon as
La chute de ciel: Parales d’un chaman Yanomami, co-authored by Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, with a preface by Jean Malaurie. Since then, the book has been translated to English, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and German. The English version was published in 2013 by
Harvard University Press, translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy and with a foreword by Bill McKibben. The book is a collaborative work between Kopenawa and French anthropologist Bruce Albert. Albert's introduction to the volume states that he first met Kopenawa in 1978 and encountered him again in 1981. From 1985 on, Albert frequently visited Kopenawa's village of
Watoriki for his research on the Yanomami. Albert and Kopenawa got to know each other thanks to Albert's frequent visits to
Watoriki, and they built the trust necessary to embark on such a project. However, it was the decimation of the Yanomami by
gold prospectors in the late 1980s that spurred Kopenawa's desire to speak to the Western world. The two began serious work on the book in 1989 (Kopenawa and Albert, 2013; 7). Albert himself calls it “a life story,
autoethnography, and cosmological manifesto” (Kopenawa and Albert, 2013; 1). ==See also==