In September, Victor Moriyama, a Brazilian photojournalist whose work focuses on environmental issues and the Amazon rainforest, spent five days alongside Xinã Yura, a young man undergoing his initiation as a shaman of the Yawanawá Indigenous people. Here, Moriyama shares a diary of this journey and the traditions of the group from their territory in Brazil’s northern state of Acre.
It is midday when we set off from the town of São Vicente for the Rio Gregório Indigenous territory, in the northern state of Acre, and deep in the Brazilian Amazon. In a metal canoe powered by a tail motor, I am travelling to the village of Macuã with Xinã Yura, a young Yawanawá Indigenous man, and his wife Érica Txivã Roni.
The scenery is apocalyptic: during the five-hour journey, we travel up the Rio Gregório that gives this territory its name, encircled by thick smoke. It is September – the dry season – which this year exacerbated the fires around us by drastically lowering the level of the waterways in Earth’s largest rainforest. Only a foot of water separates the hull of our boat from the riverbed.
When we arrive at Macuã, the smoke hovers in the distance. Established three years ago, the village is comprised of a trio of wooden houses. At the back, banana and cassava plantations provide subsistence, while an artesian water well is about to be built.
Although remote, the village already has solar panels and an antenna for internet access via satellite, like many other Amazonian communities beginning to adopt these technologies.
Xinã, Érica and I tied our hammocks under a thatched gazebo near a stream and an imposing kapok tree. These trees are sacred to the Yawanawá and Noke Kuin peoples who inhabit this territory.
Here, 33-year-old Xinã was to undergo an important ritual to become a spiritual leader and Indigenous healer – a shaman.
The shamans are guardians of ancient Indigenous traditions. They are also intrinsically linked to the preservation of the forest, through their use of medicinal herbs and their connection with its spirits. Living between this territory and the city of São Paulo, Xinã sees the ritual as a return to his ancestral origins.
A history of violence and exploitation
Xinã was born in the Rio Gregório Indigenous territory in 1991, the same year it was demarcated by the federal government. This moment marked a turning point in the destiny of the Yawanawá and Noke Kuin peoples, who had suffered from the impacts of extractive industries, infrastructure works and religious intolerance for decades.
In the 1970s, Xinã’s parents and many of his other relatives worked in semi-slavery to extract latex from rubber trees, native to the Amazon.
“Xinã’s father started working in the rubber plantation when he was 12 years old,” says Xinã’s mother, Shaneini, as she prepares a breakfast of green bananas and eggs. “He would leave at two in the morning with his lamp and return at four in the afternoon.”
The latex pieces were dried at the family’s home and exchanged for goods such as oil, coffee, salt, sugar and soap.
The Amazonian rubber industry, which emerged around 1880, peaked during the following three decades as it supplied the growing North American car industry as the Industrial Revolution continued. Facing persecution and disease – introduced by rubber tappers from beyond the territory – the Noke Kuin and Yawanawá joined forces during this period to guarantee escape routes and survive attacks.
In the 1970s, Brazil’s military government employed Indigenous labour to build the Acre stretch of the BR-364 motorway. In return, the Noke Kuin received a piece of land on the banks of the road, which led to the formation of another Indigenous territory.
Today, the BR-364 links Acre’s state capital, Rio Branco, to Cruzeiro do Sul, more than 600 kilometres to the north. Like other highways opened during the military dictatorship, the road was intended to boost the industrialisation of the Amazonian states. However, it led to intense deforestation, and defined a logic of colonising and occupying the rainforest that persists to this day.
The tarmac on the road had barely dried when evangelical missionaries from the New Tribes of Brazil Mission (MNTB) settled in Yawanawá and Noke Kuin villages. The Indigenous people complained that MNTB representatives banned the local language and demonised the shamanic practices that these peoples had preserved for centuries.
During this period in the region, forest medicine – based on the trio of oni (ayahuasca; a drink made from an Amazonian vine), kapum (poison from the kambô frog) and rome (snuff; a powder made from medicinal plants and tobacco) – fell out of practice.
“The people stopped taking forest medicine,” says Shaneini. “When we got sick, they wouldn’t give us medicine until we asked for it in Portuguese.”
During the missionary occupation, elders say the transformation of local life was overwhelming. The conversion to the evangelical faith in the villages was concerted – even today, the elders keep bibles and rosaries – and traditional cultural, food and spiritual habits came close to extinction.
When contacted by Dialogue Earth, the MNTB vehemently denied “any accusation of ethnocide”. The mission also said it respects the culture, free will and self-determination of the peoples who receive them.
But Xinã says this violent process only took another turn due to internal resistance. During the 1980s, one of the region’s foremost leaders, the chief Nikiwaka Yawanawá, went to study in urban areas and returned with ideas of his people’s emancipation. With the support of the now-defunct Pro-Indian Commission, the MNTB was expelled at the end of the decade and the land demarcated.
Resumption of Yawanawá traditions
The following years paved the way for the resumption of the Yawanawá people’s traditions. Today, they are known for organising international ayahuasca forums and spiritual festivals, as well as forging partnerships with forest-product brands.
A week before my arrival in Macuã, the 24th Mariri Festival was held. The five-day event allows visitors to become immersed in Indigenous cultural and spiritual practices. Taking part costs over BRL 7,000, (USD 1,225), the proceeds of which go towards preserving the territory.
“The Yawanawá people have a lot of political influence,” says Érica. “Many leaders have taken part in various conferences and oni rituals in Europe and the United States. Acre’s economy revolves around the Indigenous peoples.” Érica herself is the creator of the annual International Union of Peoples Festival (Fiup), which brings together Indigenous leaders for political debates and cultural exchanges between the municipalities of São Paulo state.
In the ancestral Noke Kuin and Yawanawá traditions, only elderly men became shamans. But since their revival, Xinã’s aunts, Raimunda Putani and Hushahu, have taken the initiative to become shamans.
Both women took on strict spiritual diets beforehand, and helped to guide Xinã in his early steps too. “When I was about 16, my aunt [Putani] asked me if I wanted to take oni,” Xinã recalls. “I took some and saw everything change.”
“Since then,” he adds, “medicine has shown me that I had to be strong in my purpose of helping and healing people.”
Xinã and Érica describe how during the week of the Mariri Festival they took steps to “cleanse” their internal and spiritual energies. This process involves herbal baths, and applications of the secretions of the kambô frog. Small burns are made upon the arm, and the frog’s dried secretions are applied inside these wounds. This causes physical reactions, such as a bitter-tasting mouth, hot flushes, shaking and vomiting. They symbolise the body’s expulsion of destructive spirits that ordinarily consume the individual’s daily life.
In Noke Kuin cosmology, the kambô frog was the first shaman in history, who cured a woman on the verge of death. These secretions, says Tani, another shaman, “drives away all the diseases that exist”. He shows off around 200 scars on his arms from the kambô frog ritual.
Xinã and Érica’s cleansing had been in preparation for an encounter with a sacred snake. I was here to witness that encounter and its associated rituals. Tani and Pocha Kamanawá, who lead both the preparation and the snake ritual, became shamans when they were still children, after each of them met one of the sacred snakes in the forest.
The snake ritual
Xinã’s journey begins the next morning, with a snuff session. The kupi, an inhaler made of the bones of pacas – large rodents native to South and Central America – carries the powder like an arrow to the nostril. The first inhalation takes place while smoking sepá tree bark, which was also used during Xinã and Érica’s cleansing ritual.
The couple are covered from head to toe with black nane, a paint made from the fruit of the genip tree. Geometric shapes cover their bodies, symbolising the power of ayahuasca and bringing them closer to the snake. “It doesn’t like outsiders. They recognise their own by the paint on their bodies,” explains Pocha.
Climbing once again into the metal canoe, I sail with our group for 10 minutes to the other bank of the Rio Gregório. We walk into the forest, to a muddy area of buriti, or moriche palm trees. Tani cuts a seven-metre branch off a tree and sinks it into the soft ground until it disappears.
“This is where the snake sleeps. When it gets close to midday, the earth gets very hot, and they come out of the holes to cool off,” he explains.
It’s 9.30am and the sun is already burning. We sit on straw mats while Pocha takes shamanic items out of her bag: a bottle of ayahuasca, annatto paste (made from the seeds of the native tree, Bixa orellana), a glass with an engraving of a snake, an inhaler and snuff.
The session begins with prayers and snuff to invoke the vinö ronö – an anaconda that, according to them, measures around one metre in diameter and 18 metres in length. Blue and red, it is part of a family of sacred snakes that guard the portal between the physical and spiritual worlds.
“I’m looking forward to seeing her,” says Xinã, apprehension in his voice.
Meanwhile, it seems Tani has incorporated a jaguar, by welcoming its spirit into his body. Tani leads Xinã to the edge of the hole, sucking up the yushin tiaká, negative energies, and spitting them out onto the ground. After blowing on his hands, Tani places two dozen urumã, small crystals symbolising snakes, on Xinã’s back, chest and head, to remove the bad spirits from his body.
Everybody else remains seated in silence, immersed in ayahuasca and lulled by the shamans’ prayers. Then Érica goes through the same process.
I was apprehensive, camera in hand, hoping to record an anaconda in an unprecedented way. But my efforts were in vain. During the two hours we spent near vinö ronö’s home, only pigeons and parrots approached the hole to drink water.
“She may be in the hole, but she’ll teach me in stages, receiving my presence little by little, if I’m really worthy,” Xinã says as we walk back to the boat.
The first snake dream
Night falls to the sound of cicadas, and an aromatic smoke envelops Érica and Xinã’s hammock. Dreams are eagerly awaited.
A powerful energy takes hold of the couple in their first dreamlike experience since visiting the snake pit: they tell of scenes of cars exploding, of people imprisoned in iron works, and of fire consuming metal.
“Vinö ronö liked Érica and Xinã. She told me in my dream,” says Pocha, who comes to our thatched shelter at dawn.
The day was to be spent resting, to prepare for the ayahuasca ritual planned for that evening. Recognising the importance of purifying my energies before Xinã’s consecration, I opened myself up to be cleansed, which Pocha conducted calmly and efficiently while our stomachs were still empty.
Then, for breakfast, we are served kaissuma, a porridge made from boiled cassava. It is prepared by the women of the village and soaked in their saliva. This will form the basis of the couple’s diet for the next six months.
Defined by the shamans, these diets last up to a year, with restrictions ranging from sweets to game – as well as no sexual relations nor smoking. They say this abstinence strengthens the body, mind and spirit, helping to ensure that Érica’s and Xinã’s dreams are not interfered with.
“The silence of the diet brings a very strong clarity. It’s about controlling yourself in everything, not just in your diet, but also in your attitudes and words,” says Xinã.
Becoming a shaman involves three elements: dreams, orality and oni visions. In dreams, the spirit world is manifest, revealing illnesses and the plants that cure them. Orality, as in many Indigenous traditions, preserves and transmits knowledge. It is the pulsating vein of Indigenous culture and cosmology. Ayahuasca is the Yawanawá’s source of wisdom. Through its consumption, the divine teaches them about life, animals and humans.
Initiates to shamanism learn about their own traumas and then access new knowledge. The portals from this world teach that time is not linear, promoting experiences of regression to the past and premonition of future events.
Passing through the portal
Dusk in the rainforest offers a fantastic listening experience. Birds return to their homes singing in symphony. Cicadas and other insects reverberate sounds occurring dozens of metres away.
Little by little, young people from neighbouring villages, along with the shamans Tani and Pocha and their families, are settling at the foot of the kapok tree where we have taken shelter.
Hammocks are tied to the trees, and instruments such as a guitar and a djembê drum are arranged next to an improvised altar. Upon it are a large bottle of oni and glasses adorned with metal snakes. A tarpaulin covers the floor, surrounded by benches made from sections of a large log.
In the centre of the canvas, Tani explains the reason for our meeting on this starry night: the ritual marks an important stage in the spiritual formation of Xinã Yura, accompanied by Érica.
Tani and Pocha are soon chanting prayers in rhythm, like a duet invoking the forces of the forest. A small queue forms for the first shots of oni, a black, dense liquid with a coffee-like aroma. Gradually, the young people settle down. Some lie down, others move away, while Xinã and Érica remain seated. It is cold; blankets are distributed.
At midnight, the second dose is served. The couple now lead the prayers, and their voices carry an impressive spiritual power.
Under the influence of ayahuasca, I realise the couple’s connection with the spiritual world. The oni brings me a marvellous feeling that will mark my life forever. I feel intense joy, but I also cry with sadness, aware of my privilege and the reality that many will never understand the Amazonian peoples’ ancestral connection to the forest.
This ignorance will continue to accelerate its destruction.
“People are connected to technology, not to nature,” says Xinã, as the day dawns and a few people awaken. With his rituals complete, he rises into this the new day having taken significant steps towards becoming a Yawanawá shaman, but it is just the beginning of his journey: his purpose in life from now on will be to expand his studies of Indigenous medicines.
The shamans follow a journey that continually deepens their shamanic practices. It is a lifelong commitment that Xinã had embraced years before. “The whole cure for the world’s illnesses is here in the forest, and that’s why we’re concerned with keeping it alive,” he says.
Xinã’s journey has intertwined with mine, both of us dedicated to preserving the forest. For almost a decade, I have been recording the impacts of the colonisation and occupation of the Amazon. Shamanic experiences have strengthened my commitment and deepened my connection with nature – which I now carry with me, in my rome pot.
Produced by multimedia editor Nanauí Amorós Silva and Brazil editor Flávia Milhorance
