Makushi tribe seeing their culture being pushed aside for mining interests

RAPOSA, Brazil -- Summer evenings in the community of Raposa are golden and gentle. Half-wild horses wander in from the fields to feed on mangos that have fallen from huge trees in front of St. Isidore’s Catholic Church. A few young Makushi grab rakes to push the mangos into piles out of harm’s way. The setting sun seems so close, a giant ball of fire slipping behind the mountains that ring the prairie where the Makushi live. Makushi tradition says life exists as a kind of force — stkaton — that comes from the sun. It’s hard to disagree.

The community sits in the middle of 1.7 million hectares of savannah where a few hardy bushes are able to survive the soaking of the rainy season and the desert of the dry months. The region is an area of the vast Amazon ecosystem that, unexpectedly, defies the jungle cliché. John Wayne would look natural riding down the mountains onto the plain toward Raposa.

The Raposa do Sol reserve is home to 25,000 Indigenous people who live a rural idyl of small-scale farming and village life. They raise a few cattle and grow a variety of organic crops, mostly to feed their own families. If there’s a place in the Bible that Raposa evokes, it’s Eden.

But to Brazil’s government, there’s no value in the natural beauty of Eden. With the support of evangelical pastors and global mining interests, a new government is pushing to exploit the gold, bauxite, diamonds, molybdenum and copper that may lie beneath Makushi territory. Huge soy farms are also moving in, taking away Makushi land to satisfy markets in China and the United States. Despite no geological studies to support the claim, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro says the Raposa do Sol holds niobium, a rare and versatile metal used to strengthen steel.

The threat to the Makushi people’s way of life is a story being played out across the pan-Amazon region. Indigenous tribes and their cultures are being pushed aside as industry creeps farther and farther into unspoiled areas of the vast river basin.

At the pottery shed the Makushi have a different use for the rust-red soil. There’s a kind of open joy in making pottery and engaging in a Makushi tradition. Children, young mothers and teenagers drop by to try their hand at making a panela from the deep red clay women dig from a nearby mountainside. A panela is a clay vessel used to slow-cook beans, rice, vegetables, chicken — just about anything.

Food tastes better cooked in a Makushi panela, the president of the pottery club, Lilibeth, tells me. There are deep, mostly secret traditions held among the grandmothers who once did all the panela making. They include special prayers said while walking up the mountain to dig the clay. Men are not allowed to dig the clay or come too close to the place where it is dug. Fish are left as an offering wherever clay is dug.
If prayers are not said before making the clay, it is said the pot will crack in the kiln. If a grieving woman makes a pot, it will crack in the kiln. If a man watches the pot being made, it will crack in the kiln.

In recent years the panelas that were once made exclusively for storing and cooking food among the Makushi have found a market in the city. Women have begun making a little extra money taking pottery into Boa Vista for sale to urban cooks, who also swear food tastes better cooked in a Makushi panela.

The pottery club also produces decorative sculptures, plates, cups and quirky serving dishes. At the weekly fair in the city, three-hours drive away, a potter can get 10 reis ($3.50) for a breakfast plate, or 15 reis ($5.25) for a dinner plate. Panelas come in all kinds of sizes, but even the smallest of useful panelas sell for 30 reis ($10.50).

Pottery in Raposa is just a small part of life, but it is out of these small parts that a culture is made. Hundreds of years ago, the Church began sending missionaries to the Amazon and, over the years, they passed judgment and replaced native cultures. At the Synod on the Amazon, which opens Oct. 6 in Rome, the Church will examine and perhaps rediscover the sacred truth embedded in Indigenous cultures.

“You can’t separate culture from the natural world. It’s all interlocked,” said Swiss anthropologist and missionary Adriana Maria Huber Azevedo. “Everything is interrelated. Our culture is the natural world, according to the Indigenous way of thinking.”

“It is essential to show special care for Indigenous communities and their cultural traditions,” Pope Francis wrote in 2015 in Laudato Si’. “It grieves us to see the lands of Indigenous peoples expropriated and their cultures trampled on by predatory schemes and by new forms of colonialism, fuelled by the culture of waste and consumerism.”

It should not surprise anyone that those words are repeated exactly in the 2018 preparatory document for the Synod on the Amazon. The intent of the synod is to demonstrate what a Laudato Si’ Church would look like. It is not just a Latin American Church. It is as universal as the values it celebrates.

The synod is aiming for a new, more inculturated form of evangelization because the old evangelization betrayed the Gospel.

“Christ was often proclaimed in connivance with the powers that exploited the resources and oppressed the populations,” said the working document for the synod that came out in July. “The (evangelical) encounter is an openness of heart which makes possible that closeness of spirit.”

Thirty years ago linguist Fr. Ron MacDonell of the Scarboro Missions came to live two years with the Makushi, learning their language and the quiet, rural life that goes with it. In the years since, MacDonell has preached in Makushi, listened to Makushi stories, helped the Makushi broadcast their language on radio, encouraged them to teach their language to children in the schools and in their homes, published a Makushi dictionary along with a collection of Makushi legends, plus a children’s Bible in Makushi.

All of this is part of a plan to strengthen and protect the Makushi culture.

On Sunday morning in Raposa, the 8 a.m. Mass fills to standing room only. The music shakes the little wooden church. MacDonell’s sermon involves bringing children to the front of the congregation, greetings in Makushi, some joking in Portuguese and all the tender truths of people who live their lives in hope and in close communion with their land and their God. As priest and missionary, MacDonell is not there to give them the Gospel but to share it by living it with them.

When he’s done greeting the village there’s yet another visit to a sick parishioner. MacDonell faces a long drive back to Boa Vista and he could leave the sick call to the resident priest. But MacDonnell cannot turn his back on the Makushi people and the Eden they struggle to preserve.