The coronavirus has hit indigenous communities of the Brazilian Amazon particularly hard and further exposed the deep fissures in society surrounding racism and inequality while also highlighting regional issues of urban migration, cultural assimilation and the development and urbanization of the Amazon rainforest.
Around 80 confirmed covid-19 deaths were reported each day in May 2020 in the first Brazilian city to dig mass graves. In the second wave in January 2021 that number exceeded 100.
“If we have to buy oxygen for our elders to survive, they will die. We have no income,” says Marcivana Sataré-Mawé, head of the Coordination of Indigenous Peoples in Manaus and Surroundings (Copime).
Indigenous communities in Manaus – a city of over two million in the middle of the Amazon – are some of the most vulnerable with many living informally with little government support. For Marcivana and her community, the pandemic and its consequences are just the latest in a long line of injustices that have threatened the survival of her people and their way of life.
I've spent weeks working closely with local activists and community leaders to bring personal experiences to light. These stories relate to important global issues that are present and underreported not only in the Brazilian context but in other western settler-colonial societies. It is a story of a community's resilience in a centuries-long struggle to maintain a shared history and culture at risk of extinction in the face of a deadly pandemic, social injustice, and a failure of public policy.