Nomination: Ruben Caixeta de Queiroz, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, FAFICH – UFMG
Period: November 4th to 8th, 2013
A great scholar and defender not only of indigenous populations in Brazil, but also of the environment, Kopenawa has already been awarded by the UN and has been fighting for years to guarantee the right to land for his people and has a biography published in French. He is also a shaman, deeply knowledgeable about cosmology and the world in which the Yanomami live.
In 1988 he received the Global 500 Award from the United Nations – the same award given to Chico Mendes. In 1989 he received the Right Livelihood Award, considered the alternative Nobel Prize. In 1999 he was awarded the Order of Rio Branco by the President of the Republic of Brazil. In 2008 he received a special honorable mention from the Bartolomé de Las Casas Award, granted by the Spanish government, for his fight to defend the rights of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
In 2010, together with Bruce Albert (French anthropologist who has worked with the Yanomami since 1975), he published the book La chute du ciel: Paroles d’un chaman Yanomami, na France. Davi Kopenawa’s reports in the Yanomami language were translated into French by Bruce Albert (the work is in the process of being translated into Portuguese, Spanish and English), with numerous explanations to support the reader, all with the aim of conveying the thought from indigenous people and shamans to white people. Davi Kopenawa describes his life, the predatory contact of white people that his people were forced to face from 1960 onwards, his shamanic function and his fight in favor of the Amazon forest and against the predatory action of the “commodity people”, the nabë , the white people.