Conversation with Ehuana Yaira Yanomami and Eliane Brum

Gigantic women

The artist, researcher, and Yanomami leader Ehuana Yaira Yanomami speaks about the body-land viewpoint of rainforest women and tells the journalist and writer, Eliane Brum about the present situation of her people who are threatened with genocide by illegal mining.

The Yanomami people have lived for millennia in land on the border between Brazil and Venezuela. For decades now, illegal gold mining has been destroying their rainforest habitat and threatening their existence as a people. Their rivers, plants, traditions, language, health, and lives are in danger. Confronting this extractivist threat, the Yanomami leader Ehuana Yaira uses her art to resist and exist, to testify against the violence suffered by her community every single day, and to show the strength of the female rainforest.

Still living in the village of Watorik? (Serra dos Ventos), where she is raising her four children, Ehuana Yaira, speaks with the journalist and writer Eliane Brum and the anthropologist and translator from Yanomami Ana Maria Machado about the present situation of the Yanomami, and about her art as a form of expression and protest.