In a historic moment for the Amazon Indigenous community, Alessandra Korap has awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for her tireless work in protecting the rainforest and its people. Korap, a member of the Munduruku tribe, has spent her life fighting against the destruction of the Amazon and the violation of Indigenous rights.
“Indigenous Munduruku face threat as Amazon city expands”
Alessandra Korap was born in the mid-1980s in an Indigenous village in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. Her village used to be secluded, but as she grew up, the nearby city of Itaituba kept getting closer. Two federal highways brought tens of thousands of settlers, illegal gold miners, and loggers to the region, posing a grave threat to Korap’s Munduruku people.
“Munduruku women defend their land and win Goldman Prize.”
Korap and other Munduruku women took up the responsibility of defending their people, organizing in their communities, and presenting evidence of environmental crime to the authorities. They vehemently opposed illicit agreements and incentives offered to the Munduruku by unscrupulous miners, loggers, corporations, and politicians seeking access to their land. Korap’s defense of her ancestral territory recognized with the Goldman Environmental Prize.
“Indigenous Victory: British mining company abandons plans to mine in Brazil’s Sawre Muybu.”
Sawre Muybu is an area of virgin rainforest along the Tapajos River spanning 178,000 hectares (440,000 acres). Official recognition for the land, or demarcation, began in 2007 but frozen during the far-right presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. The Munduruku people celebrated a victory in 2021 when the British mining company Anglo American gave up trying to mine inside Indigenous territories in Brazil, including Sawre Muybu.
“Indigenous-controlled forests crucial for preserving Amazon”
Studies have shown that Indigenous-controlled forests are the best-preserved in the Brazilian Amazon. Almost half of Brazil’s climate pollution comes from deforestation. The eastern Amazon has ceased to be a carbon sink, according to a study published in 2021.
Korap knows that land rights alone don’t protect the land. In the neighboring Munduruku Indigenous Territory, illegal miners destroyed. And contaminated hundreds of miles of waterways in search of gold, even though it officially recognized in 2004. Brazil’s new government has created the country’s first Ministry of Indigenous Peoples and mounted operations to drive out miners. But Korap remains skeptical of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. She sees his actions as contradictory, noting that while he advocates for forest protection. He also negotiates trade deals with other countries to sell more of the country’s top exports.
