This Is Not Your Winter

It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. The mountains were white like the skin of the invaders, those who forced the last of us to run into this weather of death.

Better that Pachamama take us herself than let the land thieves claim us.

Antisuyu was not a land for my people. We have lived in Omagua since Pachamama created us.

We swim in rivers, we climb trees, we gather the fruits of the jungle.

We carry the heat of the forest in our bodies.

We are not like the people of Antisuyu.

Yet they are still alive, the white snow protected them from the white death.

It is cold and dark, and we are still alive.

Snow is new to us. Omai made us from river, fire and wet air.

The white invaders drove us into another white fate.

Antisuyu is white land, but its people are our color.

The invader’s white is stained with the red of our blood.

I can hear their laughter.

I can hear their superiority.

I can hear their power spoken through the name of a god who never spoke to us, whose language we do not understand.

They came with disease and the kiss of death.

A death that does not transcends, a death that does not walk with our ancestors.

A death that sends us to a place their god believes we deserve, because we do not claim his name as our own.

Cold, like their souls.

White, like their skin.

Dark, like their intentions toward our land and our people.

Cold, white and dark words, that took my family from my arms, my rivers from my eyes, and my food from my mouth.

Napepe wamakini are getting closer and closer. I can hear their steps.

They sound like greed, hunger and lust.

Pachamama, they do not belong in your heart.

They do not deserve your kindness.

I do not understand how this went so far.

I do not understand how they stole everything from us.

Let us go back to beginning, when I was not cold, when I was not afraid of the dark, when white did not mean invasion to us.

We are the Yanomami people, we lived in our shabonos, eating cassava, hunting and gathering.

We do not think as one man, we decide by consensus.

Our women cultivate Pachamama`s ground.

Our men provide the fish.

The river Gods give to them.

Every creature, rock, tree and mountain has a spirit.

They can feel the good, and they can feel the bad.

Nature heals us, and nature also makes us ill.

Don’t cry, my child, don’t cry.

Suwa can hear us and hunt us.

Don’t cry, my child, don’t cry, Washoriwe`s steps shake the earth for us.

These were our stories, our monsters, our heroes.

Told long before the white invaders arrived.

Why do you take our tales and call them yours?

Why must every fairy tale pass through white hand to be believed?

White snow.

Snow stories.

Cold.

Harmony only exists when the cold belongs to them.

They come here, to steal, to kill, and still a story is called beautiful only when a white invader tells it.

Our cold is death.

Our snow is silence.

Their cold is coziness.

Their snow is poetry.

Grandmother take me, I know you will disappear… this pain, only pain when a white mouth names it.

This pain called civilized when tribes disappear, when a child is pulled from the ground that made them.

Snow.

White.

Antisuyu`s highest mountain.

Not majestic.

Not sacred.

When the cold is not theirs.

When the white comes from stolen stories, stolen gods, stolen land.

Grandmother take me, before they name this beauty.

Run, run now, the Tepui cannot protect us here.

Cold.

Too cold.

My feet suffer; my hands are frozen.

My heart is broken because my land was taken.

Civilized I do not want to be, I was already a civilization.

White, I do not want to be.

I am proud of my ancestors.

Your god, I do not want to hear him.

He does not know our rivers.

He does not understand our nature.

I start from the beginning; I continue to the end.

Maybe my way of telling stories is not what you expect.

But do you want to learn other ways of telling?

Do you want to listen to cultures that are not yours?

My spirits would never say it was so terribly cold, snow was falling.

My spirits teach how to live in community, how to feel the river, how to feel the earth.

Your god put me on this path of cold, white snow.

To civilize my people.

My language arrives frozen by your ego, your moral superiority, your pride in literature.

My heat, my jungle, are not poetic enough for you.

But my gold was.

My forced labor was.

That, that was perfect for you.

Don’t fall down, my child, their steps are getting closer.

Don’t let the white man take you from us.

Don’t let them steal your Pachamama spirit in the name of cultural evolution.

But let me tell a fairy tale.

Let me be called savage.

Let me be civilized.

Once upon a time, when snow was unknown to my body, when white did not scare me, when my land was mine.

Men from other lands came without being invited, and we accepted them out of curiosity.

Once upon a time they stole our gold.

They raped our women.

They burned our leaders.

Once upon a time they said their god was the true god and ours was evil.

Once upon a time snow mattered more than the red of our blood running through their hands.

Once upon a time they called themselves superior, and named us weak, savage.

Once upon a time a girl with matches was more important than a native girl taken from her family.

The match girl make us sad.

But the Indigenous girl, forced to forget her tongue, her spirit, her rules.

That was called civilization.

Once upon a time it was cold, cold with the double morality of European snow.

Once upon a time a white writer, born in my land, but with a spirit from your white invader ancestors, spoke about our existence.

Because humanity had already forgotten us.

And in the end, white snow, the white man and negligent forgetting, killed us.

But she was cold in a Danish town, and that mattered more.