THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A MINKE WHALE IN THE AMAZON AND OTHER STORIES OF THE BRAZILIAN RAINFOREST

A collection of essays exploring issues faced by Indigenous peoples of the Amazon.

While researching, journalist Zuker traveled the region, getting to know and interviewing many of the local residents and leaders, offering an up-close and personal view of their struggles. “The Indigenous struggle,” he writes, “is not merely for existence but for a different existence: not to let themselves be absorbed into an all-encompassing white culture.” As these essays demonstrate, the Indigenous residents feel that they are being forced to integrate into modern society. Additionally, many rightfully fear that they will be expelled from their land—as has happened repeatedly in the past due to the Brazilian government’s financial interests. Zuker shows how the traditional communities are consistently threatened by mining, deforestation, industrial agriculture, and the government’s unwillingness to protect ancestral lands. “What corporate soybeans operations call development means ruin for small, local farmers,” writes the author, noting how the Indigenous farmers are suffering from the widespread use of pesticides, which degrade the adjacent lands and water sources that are necessary for them to support themselves and their families and remain healthy. Some teachers in the region have mounted grievances about how the pesticides are being sprayed on fields close to schools even when children are present. Zuker also explores how modern medicine fails to take into account centuries-old Indigenous knowledge. As one researcher in the area points out, “technically there’s a proposal for integration, but [Indigenous] wisdom and experience ends up being disqualified in favor of biomedicine.” Thanks to Zuker’s essays, neglected voices from a remote part of the world receive much-needed attention. “It is my attempt to bring out not only a sense of the conflicts and fear,” he writes, “but also of the resistance exhibited by the Amazonian peoples’ joyous fight for life, which is so often and so easily dismissed.”

Recommended for anyone seeking to better understand the often overlooked world of Indigenous Amazonians.