"It hurts and it burns," the Macuxi shaman admitted. "But it will help them see more clearly and stop them falling ill."
It was a crisp August morning and a dozen members of an Indigenous self-defense team had assembled in the hillside village of Tabatinga to receive Pereira's blessing before launching their latest mission into one of the Amazon's most secluded corners, near Brazil's border with Guyana and Venezuela.
Some of the men clutched bloodwood truncheons as they prepared to journey down the Maú River in search of illegal miners; others held bows and arrows adorned with the black feathers of curassow birds. Marco Antônio Silva Batista carried a drone.
"If I die, it will be for a good cause - ensuring our territory is preserved for future generations," said the activist-journalist, whose ability to spy on environmental criminals from above has made him a key member of GPVTI, an Indigenous patrol group in the Brazilian state of Roraima.
Batista, 20, who belongs to South America's Macuxi people, is part of a new generation of Indigenous journalists helping chronicle an age-old battle against outside aggression. For centuries, non-Indigenous writers and reporters have flocked to the rainforest to tell their version of that ancestral fight for survival. Now, a growing cohort of Indigenous communicators are telling their own stories, providing first-hand dispatches from some of the Amazon's most inaccessible and under-reported corners.
"It's dangerous work and we suffer a lot when we're out in the field," said Batista, one of about 26,000 inhabitants of Raposa Serra do Sol, Brazil's second most populous Indigenous territory. "But it really gives me strength because I'm showing the reality of our lives to the world."
This story is from the September 04, 2023 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the September 04, 2023 edition of The Guardian.
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