Happy Birthday Mayalú

Imagine being told on your birthday that you have to go extinct. I think I'd just give up. She didn't.

This is Mayalú Waura Txucarramãe, a young leader and friend from the Xingu reserve in the Amazon who taught me how to kickbox and fight Muay Thai. Yesterday she turned thirty. This week it was announced that nine reserves are to be scrapped in the Amazon without the consent of their indigenous inhabitants. Where will they go? How will their culture survive? What will happen to those who resist?

Enough indigenous people have already been displaced by the removal of their land rights. Mayalú and her siblings started a movement to support young displaced indians who are vulnerable to mainstream culture and its influences. It is called the Movimento Mebengokrê Nyre. http://bit.ly/2xKFskk

Indigenous people in the Amazon are the victims of systematic scandals at the hands of lousy corrupt governments who have long been opening the doors to loggers, cattle ranchers and Canadian mining companies but I don't know if it's Canada's mining industry that scares me, or the sheer indifference of Brazilian evangelists and their coup d'etat president. Anyway, his name is Michel Temer and it's time you knew what he was doing.