Over years and across long distances, an international filmmaking team collaborated to bring to life the origin story of how agriculture came to Kayapó communities, Indigenous peoples in…
Most Carnival celebrations in Brazil were canceled for a second year in a row in 2022 due to the resurgence of COVID-19. This poem, which I wrote during…
–Synergetic Press has just released The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence, edited by John C. Ryan, Patricia Vieira and Monica Gagliano, and with a foreword by D…
When I first created this blog ten years ago, I had trouble deciding on a name for it. So I called Jay Dautcher, my multi-talented polyglot musician-climber-anthropologist friend…
A shootout on May 10 between Yanomami Indigenous people and heavily armed illegal miners in Roraima state, Brazil, left three miners and two Yanomami children dead. Since then,…
This poem, written fifteen years ago as my youngest son began (thankfully successful) chemotherapy for a rare immune system disease, was recently published for the first time by S…
The Kayapó (Mebengôkrê) people of Brazil are living proof of the resistance and adaptability of Indigenous cultures. A new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York …
The tragic death from coronavirus of indigenous actor Antonio Bolivar, star of the Oscar-nominated film Embrace of the Serpent, has made me reflect back on all the facts…
This interview launches a new partnership with Linda Matney Gallery. Proceeds from the sale of selected photographs will directly support vital health services including emergency Covid-19 prevention …
This essay, which I translated and edited from an original draft written in French by anthropologist Bruce Albert, was first published by the New York Times on April…
Justino Sarmento Rezende, a Salesian priest of the Tuyuka indigenous people from the upper Rio Negro in Brazil, reflects on the coronavirus pandemic from the perspective of his…
As governments around the world decide on public health measures to contain the spread of coronavirus, indigenous peoples across the Amazon, from the Madre de Dios region in…
Yellow jessamine infects a premature Spring: Fragrant and lethal. Gelsemium sempervirens, known as yellow jessamine or Carolinajasmine, is a toxic plant with alkaloids related to…
The fish trapThe fish trap is sun bleached dry halfburied in squeaking whitesand under an equatorialmoon that wants to walk across the blackmirror but instead is twiceswallowed by…
As Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro stood before the United Nations in September of 2019 downplaying media reports of increasing forest fires under his administration and denouncing world-renowned i…
The Path of DayHenchi, a young man from a remote Matsigenka native community in Peru’s Manu National Park, left home one morning to go hunting in the vast…
So it was, long ago, people had no clean water to drink. Instead, they drank from muddy swamps and stagnant puddles of algae and slime. One day, Shigentiri,…
So it was, long ago, people had no clean water to drink. Instead, they drank from muddy swamps and stagnant puddles of algae and slime. One day, Shigentiri,…
José Carlos Meirelles, a retired field agent from Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, FUNAI, refers to the current moment for isolated indigenous people of the Amazon as “The Decade…
José Carlos Meirelles, a retired field agent from Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, FUNAI, refers to the current moment for isolated indigenous people of the Amazon as “The Decade…
Abanti blew the tobacco with fast furious puffs. The snuff entered my nostrils as a sequence of chartreuse explosions that expanded in chain reaction and spread backwards and…
Abanti blew the tobacco with fast furious puffs. The snuff entered my nostrils as a sequence of chartreuse explosions that expanded in chain reaction and spread backwards and…
Francisco Evangelista, a Paumari Indian who grew up along the Piranha River within the Purus River basin in the Brazilian Amazon, tells a tale from his boyhood about…
Francisco Evangelista, a Paumari Indian who grew up along the Piranha River within the Purus River basin in the Brazilian Amazon, tells a tale from his boyhood about…