Waimiri-Atroari

The Waimiri-Atroari call themselves Kinja, 'true people'. They are a Carib-speaking people of the Jauaperi and Camanaú river basins, between northern Amazonas state and southern Roraima. Their villages, called mydy taha, organize life around hunting, fishing, swidden agriculture, and gathering, with a clear division of labor by gender and a preference for cross-cousin marriage.

Their recent history is one of survival against extraordinary pressure. The construction of the BR-174 highway through their territory in the 1970s, mining interests that carved into their reserve in 1981, and the Balbina hydroelectric dam, which flooded some 30,000 hectares of their land, reduced the population to a few hundred people by the late 1980s. Since then the Kinja have staged one of Amazonia's most striking demographic recoveries, growing steadily to well over two thousand people today.

The Waimiri Atroari Program, funded as compensation for the dam, supports health, education, and territorial surveillance, and the community now runs its own school system. The people remain vigilant against renewed proposals for power lines and mining within their demarcated territory.