Yet while life has been irrevocably altered by contact with "the white man", the ancient customs and traditions of the Yanomami have survived so far. As Davi Kopenawa says ..."We are a strong people still, we have a great spiritual energy, and great power. We will not be destroyed."
Although the government programs that once granted land to settlers have been theoretically abandoned, there is little political will in Brazil to protect the rights of Indians. At least 60,000 farmers have poured into Roraima from Brazil's impoverished northeast since the territory was made a state in 1988 and some 40,000 miners have swarmed into the reserve since 1987. There are still about ten families arriving every day to claim new land in settlements. As Manuel Andrade Freitas, Roraima s superintendent of the federal land-management agency INCRA, told a reporter in March: the situation is out of control.
When the rains came in at the beginning of April some 5,400 square miles of rain forest had been destroyed. The Brazilian government had for two months denied that the fires were of a serious nature and had on numerous occasions declined help offered by the United Nations and other agencies both national and non-governmental to put out the fires.
By February 2,000 separate blazes were speeding west through the savanna towards Roraima. Fuelled by winds the fires traveled as much as 30 miles a day. The fires already grown too powerful for the 1,700 firefighters who bravely tackled the blazes. It was as if the life-giving oxygen-producing rain forest had become the world's largest chimney.
