Dams

Tuira Kayapo is an indigenous Elder Mama Warrior who showed the world what happens when Women take charge of their Power. She walked into the 1989 Altamira Gathering in Brasil against the construction of Dams in the Xingu, in her war paint, naked and carrying a large machete. She then walked up to the President of Brasil’s Light holding Company Petrobras and running the blade of her machete three times over his cheeks, proclaimed his act on her people and on the entire Amazon as an act of war. She then stated in Kayapo “You are a liar - We do not need electricity. Electricity is not going to give us our food. We need our rivers to flow freely: our future depends on it. We need our jungles for hunting and gathering. We do not need your dam.” Everyone stood in absolute awe at her audacity, especially the President of Petrobras who looked quite afraid…

“Hatcheries not only failed to boost the number of fish but also actually harmed the salmon by mining billions of eggs from wild populations. The fish hatcheries were designed to collect and incubate the maximum number of eggs with the greatest efficiency. In many cases, that meant all the eggs in the entire salmon run into a tributary were collected and brought into the hatchery. A rack or weir placed across a river blocked the migration and concentrated all the salmon trying to reach their spawning grounds. Adult fish held below a rack were easily captured and artificially spawned… ...