All about the ancient tribes
The Kayapo grow vegetables, eat wild fruits and Brazil nuts, and hunt fish, monkey, and turtle to eat. They use over 650 plants in the rainforest for medicine.
Traditionally, Kayapo men cover their lower bodies with sheaths. Due to increased contact with outside cultures, contemporary Kayapo often wear Western-style clothing such as shorts. Kayapo chiefs wear a headdress made out of bright yellow feathers to represent the rays of the sun.
The Kayapo people use shifting cultivation, a type of farming where land is cultivated for a few years, after which the people move to a new area. New farmland is cleared and the old farm is allowed to replenish itself.
5 • RELIGION The Kayapos believe that at death a person goes to the village of the dead, where people sleep during the day and hunt at night. There, old people become younger and children become older. In that village in the afterlife, Kayapos believe they have their own traditional assembly building.
Mẽbêngôkre, sometimes referred to as Kayapó (Mẽbêngôkre: Mẽbêngôkre kabẽn [mẽbeŋoˈkɾɛ kaˈbɛ̃n]) is a Northern Jê language (Jê, Macro-Jê) spoken by the Kayapó and the Xikrin people in the north of Mato Grosso and Pará in Brazil.
Kayapo have fiercely protected their vast territory but face increased pressure from illegal incursions for goldmining, logging, commercial fishing, and ranching.
The Kayapó maintain legal control over an area of 10.6 million hectares (around 26 million acres) of primary tropical forest and savanna in the southeastern Amazon region of Brazil. They number approximately 7,000 people scattered across 46 villages in five territories.
The Kayapo’s land is also under threat from logging and some farmers want to clear the rainforest to make fields for cattle. In an effort to preserve some of the remaining natural wilderness, laws have been passed banning development in sections of the rainforest. These protected areas of land are called reserves.
Since the early 1980s, several Kayapó communities have acquired considerable wealth by allowing outsiders to exploit their natural resources ( especially gold and timber ) and receiving a portion of the proceeds.
The Kayapó (ka-yah-POH), who call themselves Mẽbêngôkre (meh-bingo-KRAY), are a dynamic Indigenous people of more than 12,000 individuals. Surviving centuries of warfare and forced migration, they use their warrior heritage to protect their lands from new invaders.
With outside help, tribes like the Kayapo defend their land against ranchers, loggers, and miners. The destruction of the Amazon in Brazil can be seen by satellite: Where logging roads have spread their tentacles and ranchers have expanded their grazing, all is brown.
The Korubo, also known as the “clubber Indians” because of their war clubs, live in the region surrounding the confluence of the Ituí and Itaquaí rivers in the Javari valley. Most of the population (more than 200 people) still lives in isolation, moving between the Ituí, Coari and Branco rivers.
Their hunting and war weapon of choice is the club, and aside from poison darts they use no other ranged weapons – their workday is about 4–5 hours long, and often live inside large, communal huts known as malocas.
The Amazon rainforest, alternatively, the Amazon jungle or Amazonia, is a moist broadleaf tropical rainforest in the Amazon biome that covers most of the Amazon basin of South America.
The Amazon is a vast biome that spans eight rapidly developing countries— Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname —and French Guiana, an overseas territory of France.