AMAZÔNIA TOUCH Case

Located in northwest Brazil, Amazonas is the state with the largest surface area in the country. It is bordered to the north by Colombia and Venezuela, and to the west by Peru. The paranás are similar to lakes, and are connected to the great rivers by natural channels called “furos”.In periods of high water, lakes and large rivers tend to merge, as if the river was widening.

The portrait of this man, named Adão, was taken by Sebastião Salgado in the village of Nova Esperança, located in the indigenous territory of the Yawanawá of the Rio Gregório. The Yawanawá people speak Pano. They are proud of their name, which means “people of the peccary.” This animal, close to the wild boar, is one of the most feared in the forest.

The Yawanawá live in the heart of the Amazon but have been decimated by colonizers and imported diseases. They were enslaved due to the exploitation of rubber, and forcibly evangelized. They recovered their land in the 1990s. Until 2014, their population in Brazil was estimated at 813 people. Members of this group can also be found in Bolivia and Peru.

One of the most remarkable aspects of their ancient traditions is the feather art: the Yawanawá create some of the most elegant ornaments in the entire Amazon, most often made of white eagle feathers, an animal sacred to them, such as the type of headdress worn here by Adão, whose face is covered with paint made from plant pigments.

This map shows the entire Brazilian territory with its 27 states, distributed over a total area of over 8.5 million km². It is divided into two areas:

• The right part (in grey) includes the North-East, the South-East, the South and the South-West regions as well as half of the Center region. Most of Brazilian’s states are concentrated there.

• The left part (in green) covers the North, the West and the other half of the Brazilian Center region. There are fewer states there. Two of them, however, are the largest ones in area: the states of Amazonas and Pará, occupying almost 1/3 of the country’s total territory.

Together with the states of Acre, Roraima, Amapá, Rondônia, and part of Mato Grosso, Maranhão and Tocantins, they constitute the Amazon biome.

The Amazon biome covers an area of 6,700,000 km² across several countries. It includes the Amazon rainforest, an area of dense rainforest, and other ecoregions that cover most of the Amazon basin. The biome contains flooded forests, lowland forests, grasslands, bamboo groves, palm groves, swamps and savannah, sand barrens, and alpine tundra. It is throughout this area that Sebastião Salgado will travel for 7 years, photographing its forest, rivers, mountains and people by navigating its waters, and flying over the thick jungle and mountain ranges, as well as staying with the ethnic communities living there, scattered in this biome, in the heart of the largest forest in the world.

Arsa and Txipu are children from the Korubo tribe. The Korubo is an indigenous group of about 120 people living in two villages on the banks of the Ituì, located in the territory of the Javari Valley, in the western Amazon, near the border with Peru.

The Korubo’s skin is always painted red with a substance they obtain from urucum seeds but it is the color of the mud that gave them their name. They are a people of the highlands, far from the rivers and the mosquitoes that inhabit their banks. When the Korubos approach those banks, they cover their skin with clay to protect themselves from insect stings. Seeing them like this, their neighbors – the Matis – started calling them “Koru-bo”, which means “people covered with clay”. Today they have little contact with other people, and their traditional culture is almost intact. Other than the urucum paint on their skin, the peculiarly cropped hair and the two armbands they eventually put on, the Korubo don’t wear many adornments.

Jaú National Park, with an area of 23,000 km², is the largest national park in the Amazon basin. Located about 200 km northwest of Manaus, it contains a good proportion of the hydrographic network of blackwater, with its specific fauna and flora. On a single hectare of forest, one can find up to 180 different species of trees. The darkness of the water is due to the acids released from decomposing organic matter and to the low content of land sediments. During the dry season, the rivers turn into white sandy beaches, while the rainy season floods the forests, creating secondary river beds of different sizes, as well as lakes and paranás (river channels separated from the main stream by a strip of land).

The waterways provide a convenient way to move through the sprawling forest. On the Amazon and major rivers, boats act as buses, but to move on to a secondary tributary, travelers must take a motorized dugout canoe capable of crossing the rapids. If it runs into cascades, the passengers have to carry the boat to a safe location upstream. “Traveling through the rainforest is an exhilarating adventure and a privilege, but it is also a challenge, always” Sebastião Salgado reminds us.

In texts from the 16th century, Jesuits referred to a people on the banks of the Amazon River, in the area where the city of Santarém is located today. They described Indians with faces decorated with a wooden cone in the lower lip. This tribe then disappeared, keeping their distance from the modern world until the 1980s, when a group of evangelists met them 300 kilometers north of Santarém. It is said that they owe their name to the first word that the first Indian contacted by the missionaries uttered: “Zo’é”, which means in their language: “It’s me”.

Sebastião Salgado has been close to this tribe: “I went on a long expedition with them, and it felt like a trip to Paradise: two months of walking in the jungle with the Zo’é, during which, in 2009, I was able to visit all the villages where the 300 or so inhabitants live. I followed the families living their daily life, caring for their crops, hunting and fishing, from one end of the territory to the other, as I followed the fishing camps on the Cuminapanema and Erepecurú rivers.”.

This photograph shows an igapó forest; this word refers to forests seasonally flooded by Amazonian waters on the river banks. Similarly to other forests in the tropics, it is common to see only a few dominant tree species, which seems to be the case here. The waters never completely recede; the soil remains spongy. It is an ecosystem where the vegetation cannot actually set its roots down. Very few flowers grow there.

The Awá-Guajá are an almost isolated indigenous people, with about 450 members living in Maranhão, a state in Brazil that has experienced intense illegal logging in recent decades.

Today, they live in two territories – Upper Turiaçu and Carú – which they share with other ethnic groups – the Ka’apor, Timbira and Guajajara – who have had more contact with the rest of the world. Today, the Awá-Guajá subsist in untouched forest areas and are one of the last hunter-gatherer people in Brazil. They use materials from the forest to build their houses. They collect fruits and honey, and hunt animals such as armadillos, peccaries (a mammal similar to a small boar), coatis (close to raccoons) and monkeys.

The Suruwahá have chosen to live in almost total isolation and have preserved their cultural traditions. For these reasons, they are the indigenous people who probably resemble the most to the ones that the first Europeans encountered when arriving to Brazil. Their population is of around 150 individuals and it is increasing (they were 100 in the 1980s).

The Suruwahá speak a language from the Arawá family, as do several other groups inhabiting the same area. In the early 1980s, fishermen, hunters and rubber tappers (people who extract latex from the tree barks by cutting it) began to threaten the region. This indigenous territory was certified in 1991. Since the early 2000s, the Suruwahá have benefited from the “No-contact” policy. In order to be allowed to meet them, Sebastião Salgado had to undergo twelve days of quarantine, like all other visitors, to ensure that he was free of any transmissible disease. This portrait of three girls was taken at the Special Secretariat for Indigenous Health, near the Pretão River.

The Upper Rio Negro, where the city of São Gabriel da Cachoeira is located, is situated in the heart of the Amazon Basin, in a trinational border area comprising Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela. The region was annexed late to the Portuguese Brazil: the first contacts between the Indians and the Portuguese took place only in the 17TH century, the mouth of the Rio Negro being identified and described only in 1639. This marked the beginning of a profound demographic drain on the Amerindian populations, which were either captured and enslaved – around 1750, an estimated 20,000 captives were deported – or decimated by smallpox or measles epidemics. The Brazilian traders settled after 1830. The rubber boom at the end of the 20TH century increased the pressure on the indigenous labor force, which was forcibly moved to areas with rubber trees, resulting in a breakdown of their traditional way of life.

Today, the region is mostly composed of Amerindian territories, known as “Indigenous Lands”, and protected areas, constituting an ecological and cultural corridor, inhabited by several dozen ethnic groups. This vast area is still entirely covered by forest over approximately 350,000 km² and is far from any road infrastructure.

The Yanomami population is of around 40,000 people, 28,000 living in the mountain ranges and valleys of the far North of Brazil. The remaining people live in Venezuela. In the northern Brazilian Amazon, illegal gold miners’ violence against local tribes is an ongoing threat. The fate of the Yanomami illustrates the worrying situation of many indigenous peoples in South America facing intensive exploitation of the forest subsoil, whether by legal or clandestine groups. This endangers the survival of populations who are often despised and perceived as outdated.

Sebastião Salgado, who first met them in 1986, had a completely different idea: “That first experience of living with the Yanomami, one of the largest ethnic groups in Brazil, was so powerful that it shaped my relationship with the Amazon natives forever. Cut off from the outside world in a remote village in the northern state of Roraima, I soon realized that the Yanomami were in fact not very different from me. After a few hours in their company, I began to relax, to feel accepted. The emotions we shared – loving, laughing, crying, feeling happy or angry – were our common language. I felt at home, in my own tribe, the tribe of human beings, the one where all the logical and rational systems intermingle with each other, with my own, my fellow Homo sapiens.”

Since that first trip, he has visited the Yanomami four times, in various far apart communities.

The Asháninka are one of the indigenous groups with the longest known history. There are traces of their economic and cultural relationship with the Inca Empire in the 15TH and 16TH centuries. Called “Antis” or “Andes”, they used to sell to the Incas the products of the forest such as feathers, pelts, cotton, fabrics and plants.

Their name survives in the geography of the continent as a memory of pre-Columbian times. The area where they lived – on the slopes of the mountain range in the north of Cuzco – was called “Antisuyo,” or land of the Antis. The Spaniards understood this word as referring to the mountains, so they began to call the whole mountain range that way, from Patagonia to Colombia. The Andes, therefore, bear witness to the history of the Asháninka.

Their connection with the Incas is so ancient and deep that it still appears in myths about the creation of the world and of the humans, as if the two of them were born from each other. Men and women still wear the handmade cloth tunics called kushma. The men plant cotton, the women spin and weave. The men’s clothes are woven with threads of different colors while the women’s tunics are in plain brown fabric like the one Luisa wears.

With a length of approximately 2,400 kilometers, the Juruá River is one of the largest tributaries of the Amazon. It emerges from the highlands of Ucayali (Peru) before entering the territory of the state of Acre in northwest Brazil. It is navigable for 1,800 kilometers, but as soon as it enters the low and flat lands of the Amazon region (west of Manaus), it becomes agitated and forms a maze of meanders. Even when they can use the currents, navigators need a lot of effort and patience to cover any distance.

Located in the southwest of Brazil, in the state of Mato Grosso, the indigenous park of Xingu, with an area of 2,642,000 hectares, is the country’s most famous indigenous territory. It is inhabited by 6,000 indigenous people, with 16 ethnic groups and languages belonging to 5 main linguistic families. It is the first large indigenous reserve created to protect several ethnic groups. When the park was created, in 1961, the people of Upper Xingu suffered a demographic catastrophe due to a succession of epidemics.

Sebastião Salgado spent several months in this area meeting three of these communities: the Kuikuro, the Waurá and the Kamayurá, whose population is estimated today at around 600 individuals.

This photo is a group portrait on a black background of eight Kamayurá shaman chiefs, shot in his portable studio in a rather smoky atmosphere.

The indigenous park of Xingu is famous all over the world thanks to the images of its indigenous festivals.

This photo immortalizes a scene from a Kuarup festival, which brings together several tribes around shared rituals. During these days of ceremonies, warriors from various villages confront each other in the Huka-huka fight, like in a sports competition.

In 2014, Sebastião Salgado set out to climb Pico da Neblina, the “Peak of the Mist” in Portuguese, or “Yaribo” Mountain for the Yanomami living in this territory for about a thousand years. With its highest altitude at 3,000 meters, this peak is located at the northern edge of the State of Amazonas, in a national park on the border with Venezuela.

It is Brazil’s tallest mountain and its access is restricted: climbing it requires a special authorization, and only an accredited guide can accompany visitors. The climbing lasts four days, including three days in the Amazon jungle where rescue services have no access. Sebastião Salgado remembers this expedition: “Up there live the great gods of the Yanomami: Moxuhemayoma, the god of winds and the feminine entity Yoyoma, who creates all storms. In four days, we climbed the peak’s slippery slopes until we reached a small plateau. Only nine of us reached the top. The climb took 15 days, and it never stopped raining. In the camp, at the base of the summit, our roof was washed away twice by the intense Yoyoma storms.”

This photo was taken at the beginning of the ascent.

In March and April, it rains almost continuously over the Amazon. A considerable volume of water descends from the Andes keeping the rivers in flood until the end of June. Almost every night, the rains are often torrential due to the drop in ground temperatures. Clouds play a central role in the Amazonian ecosystem. Small or big, peaceful or threatening, whether you are on the water or in the air, they are always visible. Even in the forest’s spectacular vegetation, they remain very present and, at the end of each day, torrential downpours are more than likely to happen.

When flying over the forest, it is essential to be able to read the clouds as well as a topographic map. Being airborne over the jungle can be dangerous, especially when storm clouds are forming. Those can be several kilometers high and release hale and winds of 200 km/h, while riddling the jungle with lightning strikes and violent rainfall. They are so powerful that when a helicopter spots one, they quickly look for a clearing to land in the jungle. The planes, even large ones, also do everything they can to avoid them. On rare occasions, a storm can even tear down thousands of trees, as it happened in 2005.

In half a century and despite having experienced a very high rate of alcoholism that ravaged the population in the 1970s, the Yawanawá have managed to avoid social and cultural disintegration.

Their first contact with non-indigenous people happened during the rubber exploitation great expansion, between the end of the 19TH and the beginning of the 20TH century. Treated as slaves by the rubber plantation owners who dominated the forests of Acre at that time, and until the creation of the protected Indigenous Territory in the 1980s, they were forbidden to speak their language outside their community.

“Our language was forbidden, only the tribe elders knew it, the children only learned Portuguese. Our beliefs and traditions were considered evil by the missionaries and many of us trusted them. We started living like slaves, both in work and in culture” says Biraci Brasil Yawanawá, the leader who took over the group in the early 1990s when he expelled the evangelists.

As we have indicated in another portrait, one of the most remarkable aspects of the ancient Yawanawá traditions is the use of feathers. In this photograph we have a great example of it: the young Bela wearing a stunning headdress.

The Roraima Mount is situated in the extreme north of Brazil. Located on the border with Venezuela and Guyana, it represents a unique geological formation. At 2,810 meters high, this typical Pacaraima range’s mountain plateau is one of the planet’s oldest landforms, dating back around 2 billion years.

Strong, moisture-laden Atlantic Ocean winds enter the continent and cross the Amazon, carrying their clouds over the flat top of this tepui, where a specific microclimate has given rise to endemic animal and plant species, which are regularly the subject of new discoveries – including many carnivorous plants and even a species known as the Roraima bush toad, named after this mountain.

For the Pemóns Indians who live at its foot, the Roraima Mount is a source of legends, as it is the home of the deceased healers’ spirits. Probably spotted by Westerners during the colonization at the end of the 14th century, these heights were first ascended by foreign visitors – a British expedition – in 1884. Despite numerous observations, its fauna, flora and geology remain largely unknown.

“Thanks to the impenetrability of the jungle, ethnic groups have been able to preserve their traditional ways of life for centuries. Today, here they are, seriously threatened. One of the goals of the AMAZÔNIA project is to bear witness to what still exists before more disappears” explains Sebastião Salgado.

The map here represents the Amazon biome, which covers 49.29% of Brazil, including the North, the West, and small part of the Northeast and Center regions.

Numerous different sized areas, indicated in light orange, are scattered over this territory. They indicate the indigenous lands still inhabited by preserved ethnic groups. Nine areas appear in dark orange, corresponding to indigenous lands and twelve photographed communities:

• in the north of the Amazon biome: Macuxi (Raposa-Serra do Sol indigenous territory, 1,743,089 hectares), Yanomami (9,600,000 hectares), and Zo’é (668,567 hectares);

• in the west: Korubo and Marubo (Javari Valley, 8,544,482 hectares) – Asháninka (Kampa do Rio Amônea, 87,000 hectares) – Yawanawá (Rio Gregório, 187,000 hectares) – Suruwahá (239,000 hectares);

• in the south: Kamayurá, Kuikuro and Waurá (Xingu Indigenous Park, 2,642,000 hectares);

• in the east: Awá-Guajá (116,582 hectares).

This map represents the entire Amazon biome with its rivers and streams. It indicates the regions overflown by Sebastião Salgado for his aerial shots, situated mainly in the north of the biome and along the great Amazon, Negro and Solimões Rivers. The photographer also overflew part of the west and east side of the biome.

We can only really realize the magnitude of the size of the Amazonian Forest from above, since it occupies a third of the South American continent, i.e., more than the entire European Union. Over 60% of this territory is located in Brazil and at the heart of this extravagant nature flows the most powerful river in the world: the Amazon. Fed by around 1,100 tributaries – 17 of which are more than 1,500 km long – it discharges 20% of the world’s fresh water, crossing the north part of the country and flowing into the Atlantic Ocean. Its course, that runs almost as a horizontal line through northern Brazil, is splited in two when halfway into the biome, forming two other large rivers: the Negro and the Solimões.

The striking images made by Sebastião Salgado, seen from an airplane or a helicopter, show the equatorial forest suddenly turning into a gigantic green carpet traversed by sinuous curves formed by the meanders of lazy rivers.