Working with the Surui

Posted in Amazon, Carbon, Chief Almir Surui, Deforestation, Indigenous Peoples, Surui by Vasco van Roosmalen on April 26th, 2010

I attended with Chief Almir the COP15 Climate conference Copenhagen. There, with the help of Google Earth Outreach and in partnership with Dr. Jane Goodall and the Jane Goodall Institute, Chief Almir presented in front of four heads of states and numerous business and NGO leaders a Google Earth tour showing the work that his people are doing to help mitigate climate change.

Knowing how far the Surui have come since the loss of over 90% of their people after first contact only 40 years ago —this gives us hope and reminds us that it is possible to turn things around, given the right determination and willingness to work together.

I was born in Holland. My father is a biologist and when I was six weeks old, my parents moved from Holland to a traditional indigenous village in the rainforests of Suriname where I spent my first years. After spending more time in the rain forests of French Guiana, my parents immigrated to Brazil where we lived in Manaus in the heart of the Amazon.

vasco-and-chief-almir-cop15

Chief Almir and Vasco at Copenhagen

I first met Chief Almir at a USAID Environment meeting in Manaus in 2004 where we had just presented the results of the Amazon Conservation Team’s mapping work with other tribes in the Amazon. After that first meeting it took another year for us to begin the process of working together and in 2006 we were able to help the Surui people map their own lands as part of their 50 year plan for their future and to provide a basis for their management plan for the Surui  forests (please see related stories in Smithsonian Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Monthly and Mongabay on Almir Surui and ACT’s mapping efforts.

Ever since then, we have expanded our partnership with the Surui thanks to the support of donors like USAID, the Overbrook Foundation and others. We have seen their capabilities grow to take on ever more complex projects that benefit their people and strengthen their protection of their forests. It is our aim to work with the Surui and the other partners to replicate the results and projects pioneered with them with other indigenous groups in the Amazon and beyond. Just in the Brazilian Amazon, indigenous lands cover over 20% of the forest and their inclusion and effective participation is crucial to any solution to end large-scale deforestation.

Vasco painted with jenipapo root by the Waura indians in the Xingu Reserve

Vasco painted with jenipapo root by the Waura indians in the Xingu Reserve

The Documentary “Children of the Amazon” gives the viewer a first-hand look into the issues facing forest peoples in the Amazon today in a way few other movies have done. Denise Zmekhol’s account of her return to the Surui tribe is breathtaking. I hope that it can help move more people to reflect and to take action.

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Letter from the Forest

Posted in Amazon, Carbon, Deforestation, Indigenous Peoples, Surui by Chief Almir Surui on April 14th, 2010

I’m writing this to share with you part of my struggle to make the world a more equitable and sustainable place, starting with preserving the forest where my people live, and improving their well-being. During the last few decades we implemented a series of initiatives, including the formulation of a 50-year Paiter/Suruí plan ** in which we establish, as a community, what we want to accomplish and where we want to be in the next half a century. Using this plan, and with the support of our long-time partner—Kaninde – Associação de Defesa Etnoambiental— we already executed an ethno-environmental study of our territory. And, with the support of ACT —the Amazon Conservation Team— we mapped out our territory based on our traditional vision.

During these last years we have also strengthened the Metareilá Association of the Suruí Indigenous People (Associação Metareilá do Povo Indígena Suruí), which currently coordinates all management activities related to our lands and culture. In 2007 we began developing a carbon-focused project — Surui Carbon Project — based on our reforestation program, of which Associação Aquaverde has been a long-time supporter. During the months of December, January and February we planted 45,000 saplings of açai, mahogany, cherry, pupunha, copaiba, cocoa and jatoba trees.

Saving the ancient forest that is still standing in much of our lands is also important. Today we also have partnerships with IDESAM for the development of a carbon project of deforestation that was prevented, and with FUNBIO, for building a financial management tool for our 50-year management plan. In 2007 I traveled to California where we started a partnership with Google Earth Outreach to help the Suruí people tell the world about their work by using the web.

The Surui Carbon Project provides us an opportunity for managing our lands, which hopefully will ensure the sustainable use of the forest and the survival of our culture, and also will create an opportunity for recognizing indigenous people’s knowledge of the forest and for allowing them to contribute to a sustainable and equitable development. This project also involves discussions on how to help solve global problems such as climate change by enabling the creation of a green economy based on sustainability and social justice. In these discussions we asked for support from an institution called Forest Trends.

The Surui Carbon Project also provides a means for supporting the implementation of civil rights policies and creating a “green” awareness and interconnection among all peoples of the world.

– Chief Almir Surui

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Forest Time

Posted in Children of the Amazon, Forest Time, Indigenous Peoples by Denise Zmekhol on February 4th, 2010

This clip from “Children of the Amazon” is about Forest Time – tempo de floresta in Portuguese – the time before the settlers came to the Amazon.

Below it is an excerpt from my interview with Bruce Gellerman of Living on Earth

GELLERMAN: This is the sound of the Amazon rainforest. It’s one of the richest places on the planet for plants and wildlife and home to scores of remote indigenous tribes. The forest is also one of the most important places in the world for regulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

[CHAIN SAWS AND TREE FALLS]

GELLERMAN: This too is the sound of the Amazon. Chainsaws and bulldozers have been carving away at the rainforest for decades clearing land for highways, cattle ranches and soybean plantations. It’s estimated that nearly 20 percent of the Amazon has been cleared, including an area almost the size of New Hampshire just last year.

Much of the destruction of the Amazon forest has taken place on the territory of indigenous tribes. In just a few brief years, members of many of these isolated societies were wrenched from the stone age into the space age… some driven nearly to extinction by their first contact with the outside world.

Almost 20 years ago, Denise Zmekhol traveled deep into the Amazon to photograph and document their struggles. She recently returned with a film crew to examine the changes the people of the rainforest have gone through since her first visit. Her new film is called “Children of the Amazon.”

It focuses on one tribe in particular: the Surui. Denise Zmekhol says the Surui never had contact with the outside world until the roads we built.

ZMEKHOL: The first official contact happened in 1969 when they were still living in what I call in the film “forest time.” It’s a very recent contact and I think they had to learn a lot about our society and our world in such a small time. So for thousands of years they were living in one way and just 39 years ago everything changed for them.

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The Surui on the Internet: Trading Bows & Arrows …

Posted in Amazon, Google Earth, Indigenous Peoples, Surui by Chief Almir Surui on February 1st, 2010

Among the Surui tribe of the state of Rondonia in Brazil, a gift is given when a gift is received. This is how our Bioneers experience ended – with an exchange of gifts between Māori tribal representative, Wikuki Kingi of New Zealand, and myself. Presented with a fertility amulet carved out of whalebone, I, Chief Almir Surui, responded by offering a necklace of traditional beads from around my neck.

This past weekend, at the 20th anniversary of the Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California indigenous representatives, socially-conscious entrepreneurs and foundations, as well as other green-minded participants, gathered for an exchange of ideas to discuss innovative solutions to the social issues that matter in the “new” green revolution. Honored to be a part of this forum, I and my colleagues, Rebecca Moore, Manager of Google Earth Outreach, and Vasco van Roosmalen, Brazil Director of the Amazon Conservation Team, unveiled the “Trading Bows and Arrows for Laptops” Google Earth tour. Our goal with this tour is to tell the world about my people, the Surui, our struggles and our successes, and how our lessons-learned can contribute toward a more sustainable world for everyone. This tour uses Google Earth to share the history and realities of the Surui people and our contributions to preserving the world’s largest rainforest – the Amazon.

In September 1969 – only 40 years ago – the first white men entered our forests. With great hope, we welcomed these visitors in order to build peaceful relations with the outside world. However, our hope for the future was met with great tragedy. Just two years after first contact, the Surui population had dropped from 5,000 people to only 290. Not only did we lose our people to new diseases, our culture was threatened with extinction as a result of the deaths of our elders. At 17, I assumed a leadership role and am now looking to the outside world with renewed hope.

The illegal logging of the rainforest in our territory began by outsiders two decades ago, and still continues today. With help from the Amazon Conservation Team, Kaninde, Google Earth Outreach and other partners, we are bringing the Surui story to the world so that we can strengthen our ability to protect and sustainably manage the 600,000 acres of threatened rainforest which is our home.

Explore the tour in Google Earth

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The Story of “Children of the Amazon”

Posted in Amazon, Chico Mendes, Chief Almir Surui, Children of the Amazon, Deforestation, Film, Indigenous Peoples, Rubber Tappers, Surui by Denise Zmekhol on January 1st, 2010

I traveled to the Brazilian Amazon on several occasions between 1987-1990 to assist on television documentaries. During my journeys, I had the opportunity to visit many Indigenous communities, always with my camera by my side. What caught my eye were the children. Born to parents who had relied on the rainforest for their survival, these children were growing up surrounded by new ways—ways that were destroying the forest.

I was also drawn to the children of the rubber tappers…the people who harvest the wild rubber trees. The trees they relied on were also being cut down. I photographed the legendary rubber tapper Chico Mendes and his family. Chico had become renowned the world over for his nonviolent resistance movement to protect the rainforest.

15 years later—and a world away—I returned to these slides, which were never printed, never shared.  The images brought back a particularly searing memory: a phone call from Chico in December 1988, asking me to film his funeral. I told him he was crazy, he wasn’t going to die, he had too much work to do. Two weeks later he was shot dead by a rancher. Stirred by faces of the children in my photographs and haunted by Chico’s untimely death, I was inspired to travel to the Amazon again—this time, to make a movie.

While I expected change, I was not prepared for the extent of it. So much of the forest had been destroyed. My response to the loss is the creation of Children of the Amazon — a tribute to a people struggling to save their forest home. But the goal of the film is more than to bear witness. I hope to offer insight to a distant and remote land while simultaneously drawing connections to our own lives. For we are—all of us— Children of the Amazon breathing the same air, walking the same planet, and in some sense that we have yet to understand, sharing the same fate.

~ Denise Zmekhol

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