The Yanomamo of the Amazon Forest

The Yanomamo’s or also referred as Yanomami and Yanomama, are a group of nearly 35,000 indigenous people who live in some approximately 200 villages in the Amazon rainforest of South America between Venezuela and Brazil. Like most other tribes the Yanomamo migrated across the passages between Asia and America about 15,000 years ago making their way down to South America and is one of the last ancient cultures still remaining. The meaning of Yanomamo is “Human Being.” The Yanomamo are made up of four subdivisions within their tribe and have their own language which consists of: The Sanema which live in the Northern Sector, the Ninam which live in the southeastern sector, the Yanomam that live in the southeastern part, and the Yanomamo which live in the southwestern part of Yanomami area. The Yanomamo were one of the tribes that remained unknown until the 1960’s who were discovered by anthropologists, Napoleon Chagnon and which his first impressions described them as fierce people.
Men are usually the hunters and the women the gatherers. Men will go on long distant hunts that may last up to a week. The Yanomami are known as hunters, fishers, and horticulturists. The women cultivate plantains and cassava in gardens as their main crops. Men do the heavy work of clearing areas of forest for the gardens. Another food source for the Yanomami is grubs. The practice of felling palms to facilitate the growth of grubs was the Yanomamo’s closest approach to cultivation. The traditional Yanomamo diet is very low in salt. Their blood pressure is usually among the lowest of any demographic group. The Yanomamo often move from area that becomes overworked, which is known as a practice of shifting cultivation and is when the soil is drained and ...

... middle of paper ...

..., and to invasions which may involve the killing of individuals and kidnapping the women.
In the 1970’s, gold miners or “pompeiros” entered the area bringing even more disease to the virgin forests. These pompeiros fought and killed members of the tribe in order to obtain more land to mine on. Their mining techniques also washed-out much of the Yanomamo land. By 1990, more than 40,000 independent pompeiros had flooded the last frontier of the Amazon. In 1992, Brazil's president Collor de Mello allowed for the opening of a Yanomamo Park in order to reserve this ancient culture. However, non-Yanomamo people have been able to come and go on this land, as right monitoring has never been established. The most famous act of violence on the Yanomamo was that of the Haximu Massacre. It happened near Haximu, where 16 Yanomamo’s were killed by gold diggers in 1993, Brazil.