Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Indigenous Communities in Brazil Are Being Denied COVID Treatment" video.

  1. Hey, brazilian here. I don't necessarily disagree with most of what was said in the Vice piece, but like most pieces I saw produced by Vice here in Brazil, I have to say once again that the indigenous topic in Brazil is far more complex and far more difficult to navigate than the piece lets on. Or tbh, far more complex and far more difficult than what most international pieces lets on, because it's a very complex topic. Let's start with the non-political easy part. If you have a map of Brazil, this part is easier to understand. Look up for Manaus, see where it's located on the map. It's the capital of the state of Amazonas here in Brazil, northwesternmost state... right in the middle of the Amazon forest. Manaus is stuck in the middle of it, which is all sorts of crazy. It's among the most isolated capitals in the country. Access to it is mostly done by boat through the amazon river, little of it by roads which are treacherous, rare and non-trivial to navigate, and then plane, which is expensive. It's unfortunately also among the poorest brazilian capitals, despite several attempts from successive governments to industrialize it (read more on the subject Zona Franca de Manaus if you wanna know). It's there because as you might imagine, it was a hub for exploitation of natural resources that goes back to when Brazil was a colony from Portugal. So it's really a city that sprang up for extraction of natural resources. The northern states of Brazil are also very unfortunately the poorest, the ones with most corruption, crime, where cities are most far apart, where colony exploitation hit the hardest, where levels of education are the lowest, where federal attention and money reaches the least, and history is the bloodiest. For someone living in southern states, where the biggest, most modern and more affluent cities in Brazil are, it might as well be another country altogether. It's far away, hard to reach, isolated, and the culture is very different... I've personally been there myself, visited several states in northern Brazil over the years. Like the video showed, around Manaus, inside the Amazon forest, is where lots of indigenous communities live. Now, do understand. It's not one major community with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of indigenous people living in close contact with Manaus and other cities... it's an untold number of small communities living anywhere from relatively close to cities, to deep into the Amazon rainforest with little to no access to other brazilian cities. I think most people in other countries heard about this - we're still finding native indigenous peoples tribes that are uncontacted to this day inside the amazon forest. Tribes living inside this jungle who had never had direct contact with people from the outside. Can you imagine that? In the midst of globalized 21st century? So, you have a wide range of different situations, different levels of communication, different distances from brazilian cities, different relationships between people outside communities, different degrees of education, civilizatory processes, aggressiveness towards strangers, interdependance, governmental contact, levels of understanding of what is going on outside tribes and communities, etc etc. You can have one tribe where most people speak and understand our language, have descendants who live in brazilian cities, have people who studied in brazilian universities, have relationships with brazilian organizations that take care of indigenous rights, culture and help... and one tribe that attacks anyone who comes from outside, who don't know what the situation is outside their territory in the amazon rainforest, who don't speak a language we can understand, who doesn't want anything to do with brazilians, brazilian government, brazilian culture and situation, etc etc. If you live in a country that has a large population of indigenous people you'll know how complex it can get, but it's far more raw and intricate in comparison to several other countries around the world. Particularly countries like the US, Canada, and some other developed countries that had a colonization process and natives people genocide, I think people in general have a level of understanding how complex these relationships are, but in Brazil it's much much worse. It's a big territory that is not as explored as people might think. It's not outside the realm of possibilities to have uncontacted tribes inside the Amazon rainforest who don't even know about Brazil as a country, about colonization from Portugal, etc etc. Thanks to this huge untamed barrier that is the Amazon rainforest, you still have several indigenous communities inside it with people who might not even know about Brazil, about the rest of the world, about the modern world at all. Just recently, one of the biggest most prominent experts on indigenous people who dedicated his entire life to the cause got attacked and killed in one of his incursions while going after uncontacted tribes... by indigenous people themselves. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-54109584 They might not even know they killed a guy who dedicated his entire life to help them. But that's the sorta thing that happens here... because of how impossibly raw the situation still is. So, these situations described on the Vice video are in big part, more complex and less one sided than they sound. The video is covering but a tiny, probably well doctored part of it. For instance, early in the video they were talking about local medical stations that didn't get visits from doctors and staff for months during the peak of pandemic. Sure, that might be true, these situations do happen. But on some tribes and communities, it wasn't just because of some one sided governmental stance aiming to cripple these communities, it wasn't abandonment, or treating like they weren't there. Several indigenous communities themselves prohibited visitation from people external to the communities to avoid any chances of them bringing yet another white man plague, and they were given authority to take decisions like that. I dunno what the situation was in the specific community that Vice visited, but the way medical help, governmental funds, and general contributions to indigenous communities work is extremely complex and extremely hard to navigate, because it's not only about what the government or governmental institutions decide, it's about the will of individual tribes and communities. This conundrum between going there to help, and not going there to avoid making the situation worse, really does exist to this day. And you don't really have a united consensus on what should be done, because it's not a unified community of indigenous people, but rather a multitude of hard to reach far apart and far away tribes spread everywhere, that can be in any level of education, community consensus, internal order, and whatnot. You add that to the fact that lots of those communities are located in poor, hard to reach places, in a country that is still in development and doesn't have unlimited funds to dedicate to every problematic aspect of the country, it's easy to see how things can go awry. You see, attending all those communities and reaching out to help is a far bigger, more complex, expensive, and difficult task than it lets out. Now, on to the political side. It's true that our current president has said several extremely ignorant and condemnable things regarding indigenous people of Brazil. He has admited by himself a very Trump like stance, strong man politics, with an insane ammount of fake news-like conspiratorial direction on the information he choses to consume. More importantly, he is extremely pro agro business, because the agricultural sector in Brazil is the largest part of brazilian economy. He favors whatever large agriculture businesses lead him on because of lobbying, because of greed, because of corruption schemes, because of money speaking louder, and because he also has a stance of brazilian economy above everything else in a very dim ignorant analysis of the situation. And he has put people in key positions of governments who either thinks exactly like himself, or they get immediately fired at the slightest sign of contradiction. His minister of agriculture was caught on camera suggesting that the government passes several laws that the agricultural business suggested to pass during the pandemic because people would be paying more attention to the pandemic rather than environmental causes, indigenous peoples rights, and other related issues. Now, all of this does not mean that the only problem, or even the biggest problem regarding indigenous people lies in this administration alone. It's not like if Bolsonaro wasn't there, the life of indigenous people would be all rosy and dandy.
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  2. Due to this immense diversity and disparity amongst communities and tribes, you should also understand that yes, there are indigenous tribes and people who directly contribute to Amazon fires, deforestation, exploitation and whatnot. It's not all of them, obviously, but the number might be way more significant than what you might have heard on international press. And it's only logical. You see, imagine if you lived in a community or tribe isolated inside the Amazon. The first contact you had with people from outside was perhaps criminal people coming in to exploit a natural resource, open up land for agriculture, chop wood down to sell, capture animals, etc etc. They tell you that this gets them a lot of money and goods. Obviously, there will be a a lot of native or indigenous people, perhaps living in very poor conditions in spread out communities inside the Amazon, that will see this as an opportunity to upgrade their living standards. You will have relationships that goes anywhere from going to war against criminals trying to exploit the environment, to actively contributing, competing, trying to copy, and everything in between. It's not as clear cut as one or the other side will tell. I know international press loves to portray these indigenous communities as nature loving peaceful people who would never do any harm to the Amazon forest, would never harm others, that they all dedicate their lives to preserving their surroundings, blah blah blah. But that's a highly romanticized picture of reality that doesn't really translate what you see there. You do have tribes and communities where people work their entire lives in preservation and environmental causes, you really do. It is an admirable thing. You have tribes that are very well integrated to brazilian cities, well organized, with people who studied at universities, that are experts in several subjects related to their surroundings, that have high levels of education. Probably the case of one of the interviewed, and the community that was visited. But in this mix, you also do have communities that have a culture of painting themselves a certain way for tourists and foreigners to see. You have tribes that depends on NGO and tourism money that have agreed to behave a certain way for people from outside to see, so that they can get the resources they need. You have communities and tribes that are totally outside this range, they don't have people that speaks a language we can understand, they don't behave in predictable ways, they don't see the environment in a way that conforms to anything we understand, and the internal culture is not as romantic as people would like. The range goes from extremely primitive and insular to just another relatively modern community with unique cultural practices. Indigenous people are just that - people. And given their often precarious conditions, their cornered state, their contacts with the rest of the country or the world, and their own state of mind, they can see their environment and nature as sacred, but they can also see it as a natural resource to be exploited for personal gain. You have people there all the way from wanting to stay inside their communities and preserve it, up to wanting to do anything needed to improve their living conditions and get the money to modernize, and perhaps even leave their communities entirely. It's not that hard to picture the struggle if you understand that in the end, they are just people. And so, it also gets easy to see how there can be some of these communities that are very in favor of Bolsonaro politics despite all of what Bolsonaro has already said and done. You can understand how some indigenous peoples' communities could be exploiting natural resource, causing fires, and even directly cooperating with big agricultural businesses. You can see how several indigenous peoples and communities also didn't take the pandemic seriously. How some of the negationist and bad information around the pandemic also infiltrated those communities. They are as vulnerable to pseudo scientific fake news crap as most people are, if not more. Lots of those tribes, understandably, are very much against any form of modern medicine. It's a very complicated relationship with doctors coming from the outside. There are lots of communities and tribes that are extremely against stuff like vaccination. They have their own rituals, witch doctors and whatnot who they trust more than people coming from outside the community. It's not really an uniform consensus amongst those tribes that you need to reach for external help, you need to let doctors examine them, you need to follow what these doctors are saying, you need to take the medicine, etc etc. The community Vice showed is but one single case in an extremely diverse and complicated universe. But it's usually the view that is presented on international news coverage, because it's simpler and easier to follow, even if it's often lopsided to attend a very particular perspective on the entire issue. People should know though, that despite the current government standing, between governmental agencies, NGOs, private groups, universities, scientific research groups and whatnot - a ton of brazilian and international resources are dedicated to the indigenous cause. Because you know, much like in any other country, just because the current president in Brazil has a certain way of looking at things, doesn't mean we all see it the same way. In particular, local governors, mayors and whatnot might and often have an opposite opinion. There are lots and lots and lots of people, brazilians and foreigners, that dedicate a substantial part of their lives, their means in support for indigenous people in Brazil. But like I already said, it is a very complex subject. And it'll likely stay this way, because there is no single thing that can be done here. And so, I ask of people not to oversimplify this topic. Understand that nothing here is as black and white as what you might see in press coverages, particularly international press. That yes, there have been injustices commited, there are communities that need and accept help, and it's important that we preserve their culture, and collaborate. That our president have a very negative view on the indigenous people situation, but that most brazilians don't agree, and that foreign countries would do better by trying to help rather than just criticizing our president. He won't change his mind, but what goes through his mind doesn't matter much. So there ya go... sorry for the long text, but sometimes it needs to be this way.
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