“We have a very strong spirituality, so she was there and she took my hand and said she would get out of this to take care of my people,” he said.
Five days after her mother’s death, her father also died. Tseremeywá, with her head shaved in a traditional display of mourning, hopes to be able to comply with her mother’s instructions to remove her people Xavante from Covid-19.
Now recovering from his own battle with the coronavirus, Tseremeywá’s first step was to try to get his people to stop listening to Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro.
“I would like Jair Bolsonaro to stop talking silly nonsense. The doctors have to prescribe, not the president,” Tseremeywá tells me in a video call from his house in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. “With this fascist, anti-indigenous and anti-poor government, prevention was not taken seriously. It was not prepared, ignoring that the government belongs to the people, to the people.”
His thread did not mention the more than 72,000 deaths and nearly 2 million infections, second only to the United States.
“Millions of jobs destroyed, tens of millions without income and a country on the brink of recession,” he tweeted when he asked families to “depoliticize” the pandemic after so much “misinformation that was used as a weapon.”
A century ago, when British explorer Percy Fawcett disappeared into the thick jungle of Mato Grosso in search of the Lost City of Z, Xavante de Tseremeywá had this edge of the Amazon for them.
But with the area now surrounded by cattle ranches and massive farms, many of which supply soybeans to the United States and China, there was no way to avoid the outside world and its pandemic.
It was a soy trucker who unknowingly brought the coronavirus to this region before he died. Once it touched indigenous peoples, the virus burned itself in a population that was already struggling with vulnerable immune systems, diabetes, a deep mistrust of the outside world, and a community way of life that makes social distancing almost impossible.
Tseremeywá and his people have an ally in the mayor of Barra do Garças, Roberto Angelo De Farias, who fears that the virus is out of control.
“It is like a bomb,” he said. “Today they are 200, tomorrow 1,000, 2,000, 3,000. Because they do not do isolation, they continue to do their ceremonies of old. And my suggestion to the President and the Minister, and welcomed by the deputies and senators, that we would build a hospital campaign “.
According to official Brazilian figures, 13,801 of the nation’s 850,000 indigenous peoples are infected with the coronavirus and 491 have been killed, but given the serious lack of evidence, those figures are unlikely to reflect the actual number.
Many groups have to rely on charitable neighbors, NGOs, or donations from strangers to help flatten their terrifying Covid-19 curve.
“Our young people are becoming orphans,” says Clarêncio Urepariwe, who is now campaigning to raise enough money to buy oxygen for her Xavante village.
“We are not only losing our parents, but we are becoming orphans of knowledge, wisdom, life and culture itself. We are losing our elders and taking our lifestyle with them.”
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