Filmmaker and photographer Denise Zmekhol traveled to the Amazon several times from 1987 through 1990, assisting on several international television documentaries. A curious traveler and a professional visual communicator, she always had her camera by her side. During this three year journey through the Brazilian states of Rondonia, Acre, Pará, and Mato Grosso, Ms. Zmekhol had the opportunity to visit many tribal communities: the Kaiapo, Surui, Arara, Negarote and Kaxinawa and interpret these encounters through her photographs. Ms. Zmekhol also had the opportunity to interview and photograph the union leader and environmental activist Chico Mendes with his family, in Nov. 1988, one month before his untimely assassination.

Years later, Denise Zmekhol realized that among the many photographs of daily life; fishing, cooking, ceremonies, songs, and river bathing, were a significant number of photographs of children. These images, from different indigenous and rubber tapper communities, were exhibited in July 2001 at CIIS, California Institute of Integral Studies, in San Francisco. In February 2002 another showing was at the 14th Annual Solo Mujeres Exhibit at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, in San Francisco. Ms Zmekhol has also shown her photos at the Stanford University in April 2002, and exhibited them at the Center for Latin American Studies, U.C. Berkeley, until December 2002. The children director Denise Zmekhol photographed in the Amazon rainforest 15 years ago have now grown and many have children of their own. But in the short span of a generation much has changed in the lush green garden these indigenous people call home.

In the process of revisiting her Amazon experiences through preparing these images for exhibit, Ms. Zmekhol wondered what had become of her (once) young subjects. And so she decided to find out. The photo exhibit, "Children of the Amazon," has became a film project, focusing on the lives of the children whose playfulness, curiosity and connection with the forest captured the photographer's heart 15 years ago.  


Amazon Rainforest  Background

The Amazon, which contains about a third of the Earth's remaining tropical forests, is a biological factory that transforms carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into oxygen, which beyond sustaining life has also significantly helped stem the effects of "global warming." Profoundly abundant in botanical resources, a single hectare (2.47 acres) of Amazonian moist forest contains more plant species than all of Europe. Seventy percent of the 3000 plants identified by the U.S. National Cancer Institute as having potential anti-cancer properties are endemic to the rainforest. Two thousand Amazon fish species have been identified -- ten times more than in Europe -- and there are no doubt thousands of species still to be discovered.

The Amazon is also home to 60 percent of Brazil’s indigenous population, which numbered about five million people when Europeans arrived in 1500. For centuries, the Amazon acted as a natural barrier, protecting the jungle inhabitants from European colonizers. Today there are 210 nations, with different levels of contact, speaking 170 languages and known dialects. They add up to a total population of about 300,000 and are scattered over thousands of villages throughout Brazil.  In the year 2002, there are still at least 50 indigenous tribes in the Brazilian Amazon that have not come into contact with outsiders. However, as Brazil has accelerated its exploitation of the wealth of the Amazon, the historical conflict between indigenous people and European settlers has come to a head.

Tragically, while 12% of the country’s territory is reserved for indigenous peoples, this protection exists only in theory.  Brazilian Indians are considered minors by law, and no tribe is allowed to own land. As a result of this inequity,70% of indigenous areas are violated by settlers, gold miners and loggers.  And with government programs to relocate Brazil’s poor into the Amazon frontier in full swing, these violations are destined to continue.  

As they come in contact with Brazil’s European population, the lives of indigenous people and communities are being transformed.  Some tribes have lived harmoniously for generations with Brazilian rubber tappers, whose livelihood is based on protecting the forest.  In most cases, however,  indigenous people have come into conflict with Brazilian settlers, whose efforts to log, farm and ranch have wreaked environmental havoc on the environment.

The scope of the destruction is nearly incomprehensible. As a result of vulnerability to new diseases and ongoing violence associated with European occupation, the Amazon Indians have been reduced to an estimated 350,000. In the 20th century, one tribe was wiped out every two years, drastically reducing the number of tribes from around 1000 in the year 1500 to an estimated 215 today. Deforestation due to logging and cattle ranching has destroyed the Amazon ecosystem at the rate of 13,000 acres a day, about eight football fields a minute, during the past decade. And this rate of devastation is accelerating.


Rubber Tappers & Chico Mendes

"Today, the destruction of Amazonia not only threatens the lives of rubber tappers and Indians, it threatens also the lives of all of the people who live on this planet. It is the young people who must take this fight forward and keep alive this resistance movement in defense of Amazonia until the end."
- Chico Mendes. 1988


At the end of the 19th century, the first wave of immigrants came to the Brazilian Amazon, in response to the North American and European demand for rubber. Over the course of the next 100 years, as the rubber price rose and fell in the world market, the rubber tappers, employed on the rubber plantations, eked out a living extracting latex from rubber trees. In the 1970s, in order to help establish huge cattle ranches in the Amazon, the government canceled state credits to support the rubber companies and suddenly huge areas of rain forest that once were rubber plantations were up for sale at very low prices. Between 1978 and 1991 more than two million acres of forest were destroyed for pasture land in the state of Acre. Homeless rubber tappers drifted to the cities to become part of the urban poor.

In 1985, the rubber tappers founded their own National Council and, led by Chico Mendes, originated the idea of government-owned extractive reserves, devoted to sustainable use of the rain forest by rubber tappers and indigenous people. The cattle ranchers were adamantly opposed to the rubber tappers’ negotiations with the government, and two of them assassinated Mendes in his home in 1988. Several months later the President of Brazil created the first extractive reserve and named it after Mendes. Ten years after his death, 21 reserves covering nine million acres had been established.


Negarote Tribe Background

In 1960, a highway was bulldozed through the homeland of the Nambiqwara, the mother tribe of the Nagarote. Thousands of settlers invaded and cleared much of the land for cattle pasture. The Nambiqwara were removed by force to a tiny, barren reserve. There, the Indians were infected with malaria and influenza. Those who survived set off on a 200-mile walk back to their homelands, but 30 percent of the tribe died along the road. Others wandered for years, homeless and weakened by disease. By 1975, only 530 Nambiqwara Indians remained. In the 1980s the World Bank funded highway improvements, and thousands more loggers, miners, and settlers poured into the Indian lands. Today, the Indians are defending their lands against big farmers, timber merchants and gold miners armed with machine guns.

Down the highway in Vilhena, members of the Negarote tribe have sold logging rights on their land. Now they live in cement houses and dress in boots, hat and jeans just like other loggers around the world. At least fifteen trucks of wood a day leave a remote logging site deep inside the reservation, often free from tribal supervision. The Negarote youth in the pictures, Jose, Henrique and Marcelo believe that they can control how much wood is being taken from their reservation, even though they live four hours from the logging camp. They believe school will help them learn mathematics in order to deal more fairly with loggers and the non indigenous society in general. But not everyone in the village agrees with the logging sale. One of the girls in a photo, Iara, was poisoned by juice offered to her father (who was opposed to the sales) by a logger. She died before arriving at the city´s hospital. Unrestricted logging continues to be problematic for the Negarote, though they seem not to be aware of the extent of the problem. The Negarote insist they will stop logging next month.
 

Surui Tribe Background

In the year 2002, there are still at least 50 indigenous tribes in the Brazilian Amazon that have not come into contact with outsiders. The Surui tribe was first contacted in 1969. Until that time, 1500 Surui indians lived in long houses in the forest hunting, fishing, and harvesting small gardens. After 10 years of fighting smallpox, influenza, and small farmers who invaded their land, the Suruí finally got their land demarcated by the Brazilian government, which meant that this semi-nomadic people were forced to become sedentary. They began to live in wood houses with tin roofs. They harvested coffee left on their land by the farmers. Today, 700 Surui people are struggling against extinction.

One of the subjects of "Children of the Amazon," Arildo Surui, moved from his village to a small town, Riozinho, 50 kilometers away. He is studying and preparing to become a leader of the tribe. Arildo faces such difficulties as a lack of financial support, and emotional longing for his family, still living in the village. Arildo is caught between two worlds, the modern and the ancient. Arildo and the other forest people in the film "Children of the Amazon" demonstrate unique and highly personal responses to the pressures of Brazilian expansion into the Amazon.