Yanomami youth turn to drones to watch their Amazon territory

When illegal miners started invading their land seven years ago, many Yanomami felt helpless. How can you surveil a territory the size of Portugal in a remote area of the northern Amazon with no police, planes or technology? Around 20,000 illegal garimpeiros, as illegal miners are known in Brazil, invaded the land searching for gold and cassiterite, causing a severe humanitarian and ecological crisis.

The Yanomami made several appeals to the Brazilian federal government. However, the nation was led by far-right President Jair Bolsonaro between 2019 and 2022, who supported mining on Indigenous lands — even though the activity is forbidden in any circumstance by the Brazilian Constitution. Bolsonaro and his team stalled all efforts to evict invaders from the Yanomami land.

Left alone in the largest Indigenous territory in the country, in a remote region bordering Venezuela, the Yanomami decided they were alone to protect their land. In 2022, the Hutukara Yanomami Association (HAY) sought partnerships to implement and organize a project to train individuals to use drones. Maurício Ye’kwana, director at HAY, began developing this project in 2021 as a participant in the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. He reached out to European funders who decided to support the training initiative through the international humanitarian organization CAFOD.

The 32,212 Yanomami and Ye’kwana, an ethnic group that shares the territory, couldn’t possibly watch over approximately 10 million hectares (24.7 million acres) on foot and canoes, but with drones they could see a bit further.

“The course’s objective was to train young Yanomami, try to spark innovation in their thinking, so they could act as teaching multipliers for other young people,” Maurício told Mongabay.

26-year-old Cidiclei Palimitheli was part of a group that completed the advanced training module as drone operators last September and can now use this equipment in territorial monitoring and surveillance. “I really enjoyed this workshop because I learned more about how to drive the drone and map our territory,” Palimitheli told Mongabay. “In this third advanced stage, the new thing was letting the drone take off automatically.”

Palimitheli and his colleagues say this technology, created by non-Indigenous, will help safeguard ancestral cultural traditions and strengthen environmental protection in one of Brazil’s most emblematic Indigenous territories. He is already part of a territorial protection group in a village ravaged by invaders. “Now the drone will give me more security to map the communities and see if the miners are nearby, threatening them,” he said.

Since 2022, three in-person workshop modules have been held, with both theoretical and practical classes in Yanomami Indigenous communities in the state of Roraima, the most affected by illegal mining activities in the past seven years.

“I’ve been taking this workshop for two years and I’ve already learned a lot,” Alexandre Ye’kwana, 24, told Mongabay. “For example, I want to map the mining area and I can already do that without the teacher. I already know how to make a flight plan and I learned more about automated functions.”

The program focuses on the area in Roraima most heavily affected by illegal mining. In the future, drone monitoring is expected to extend across the entire Indigenous territory.

New hope

When left-wing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva beat Bolsonaro to become the President in 2023, hope returned to the Indigenous people in Brazil. The new President promised to evict invaders from Indigenous territories and protect the Amazon Rainforest and all Brazilian biomes.

The raids and assistance to the Yanomami finally arrived in 2023. However, it soon became clearer that the Yanomami couldn’t count solely on government efforts. The illegal miners resisted leaving the territory, and many came back after the initial raids. Now, two years later, the Yanomami see success in the eviction efforts, but the challenge remains in the long run. The federal government carried out 3,536 raids to remove invaders, which led to a loss of 267 million reais ($46.6 million) to organized crime networks involved in illegal mining in the territory and a 91% reduction in gold mining.

To build the drone program, the Hutukara association asked for help from the Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR) to carry out training. Three in-person workshops on the beginner, intermediate and advanced modules were held from 2022 to 2024.

Giofan Erasmo, an agronomist from the Office for Territorial, Environmental and Climate Change Management at the CIR, is enthusiastic about the results. He represented the partner organization in the mission, which he considered “very successful.” “After studying the advanced module, they taught others how to use drones to take photos of the Indigenous territory,” he told Mongabay.

Erasmo directly trained six Yanomami and Ye’kwana who, in turn, shared the knowledge by training eight other young Yanomami communicators.

“In addition to enhancing protection, this work helps them better understand their extensive territory and help plan and manage the territories where their communities are located,” Erasmo said. He added that the use of interactive technologies made learning much easier. Gradually, the students started adding ideas and suggestions for its practical applicability in their communities.

Mapping rivers was specifically requested in the workshops, teaching how to operate drones with hands-on experience and how to produce georeferenced photos and videos. Rivers are especially at risk in the territory since mercury from gold mining is the leading pollutant in the Amazon, where 20% of the staple fish are contaminated.

Erasmo said he considers the outcomes remarkably positive. “Three years ago, they had no idea about drones or how to use them, and now, they have already reached an advanced level of operation. From now on, they’ll be able to do concrete work for the benefit of their communities,” he said. According to Erasmo, a future training demand is to learn Geographic Information Systems to expand their mapmaking skills.

Erasmo also said he believes that the Indigenous background of instructors made all the difference in the project. “The point of view of Indigenous people is different from that of non-Indigenous people, and as ‘relatives’ [an expression used to designate other people of Indigenous origin, regardless of their specific ethnicity], we talk and understand each other,” said Erasmo, who belongs to the Macuxi ethnic group. He explained that despite their cultural particularities, Yanomami and Macuxi have similar worldviews.

“This partnership is super important, and a lot of their collaborations are extremely useful. ‘Relatives’ get along well, so they can learn things easily from each other,” Maurídio said.

He said the Yanomami need continuous training to surveil the land since “the government may not continue forever what is being done today.” “The Yanomami themselves must play a leading role,” he said.

Banner image: Equipped with drones and other technologies, young people from the Yanomami Indigenous Land actively monitor their territory, which has faced a serious humanitarian and environmental crisis due to illegal gold and cassiterite mining. Image courtesy of Evilene Paixão/HAY.

Yanomami sees success two years into Amazon miner evictions, but fears remain

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Alexandre de Santi Editor

This story first appeared on Mongabay

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