Help Kayapo
Donation protected
Can you imagine how hard it is for a tribe that lived for years without a generator finally enjoying the comfort and convenience of having one – to suddenly see that it got broken?
This is precisely what happened at Ladera Tribe, who are now without power at all. Their generator needs to be fixed, which means they need the $3500 it takes to get it working perfectly again.
Would you make a contribution to help raise the funds needed to get Tribe generator up and running again?
This #crowdfunding campaign wants to keep the #rainforest and an #indigenous culture protected:
Thank you!
Oz Arie.
Alice kohler .
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Stop the Kayapo and the Amazon Destruction
Help the indigenous Kayapo tribe in Brazil to protect their culture and the Amazon, the natural rainforest treasure that we all depend on.
The Short Story That We Urgently Need to Tell You:
There’s a tribe in the Brazilian Amazon that has been fighting the highly destructive threats that the world’s most important rainforest is facing – and this tribe needs your help.
Up until thirty years ago, the Kayapo tribe had been living their life peacefully and discretely, deep in the Amazon, in Brazil. However, three decades ago, the threats of urban progress arrived and questioned not only the Kayapo’s way of life, but their natural home as well – the Amazon.
The land that belongs to the Kayapo under the very Brazilian law suddenly stopped being a safe ground, with loggers, ranchers and miners, as well as planned infrastructure building, coming in and bringing deforestation and other threats to the rainforest along with them.
Since that moment onwards, the Kayapo had to stop living an isolated life and had to start working to expose these threats, their implications not only for their livelihood and culture, but also for the Amazon itself, considering the dramatic way that this could impact the lives of every person in the planet.
Currently, as they keep on fighting, the Kayapo are at a stage in which they need financial help to:
mark the boundaries of their territory, so to better defend it
have access to better and more efficient agriculture and solar power resources so that they can produce more and better food for their people
have the means to provide better education for their children, who need to learn more than just Kayapo’s traditional teachings, since they need to learn how the developed society works, so that they can understand the way it works and how they can come to work within its rules to protect their tribe’s culture, land and traditions.
That is why we are calling you to support the Kayapo tribe and their work in defense of the Amazon by:
Making a donation today, of whatever amount – since every dollar helps, to help the Kayapo have access to the funds that they need to protect and preserve the natural and cultural treasures that they have guarded for centuries.
Sharing this crowdfunding campaign with your friends, family members and other connections who may also want to help the Kayapo be better equipped to overcome the extremely heavy challenges that they have before them.
Thank you so much, and we hope to be soon reporting to you on how far your donated funds have gone to help the Kayapo protect their unique culture, and the Amazon, which is the most fundamental respiratory valve the planet – without which we would all be dramatically and perilously poorer.
The Long Story That We Would Like You To Learn About:
When I was in my 20’s, I was living my dream as an airbrush artist working every day in beachwear, along Florida’s coasts. I didn’t care much about too many things, but always lived by a motto that was central to my life: "do good and good things will come back to you".
As I grew up, after 7 years of air brushing and realizing that my bank account just couldn’t rise in any way if I kept doing what I did, I decided to find a better way to make a living, but one that could still be in line with my ethical concerns.
So I mixed my creativity with my curiosity and decided to explore the work of doing temporary tattoos using Jagua, a fruit from the Amazon region, which was a fully natural, safe and chemical-free ingredient that I could use to tattoo my clients and make them happy. That was how I became a pioneer in the US, having been the first to offer safe, beautiful and realistic temporary tattoos made with Jagua.
I also decided that I wanted to learn more about this natural ingredient’s roots, namely about how it was used by the Amazon tribes, and that was how I first learned about the Kayapo, and the way they adorned their bodies with striking tattoos and glass bead bracelets, chains and ear rings.
The aesthetics of it left me hooked, so I immediately fell in love with what little I knew back then about the Kayapo culture.
In 2014, while running my tattoo booth in the art walk in Wynwood, Miami, I met Alice Kohler, a professional photographer who hosted a beautiful exhibition of her award-winning pictures of the indigenous people of the Amazon – namely of the Kayapo.
As we met, we realized that we were kindred spirits in so many ways. Alice had been in contact with the Kayapo for many years, not only as a photographer, but also as a philanthropist. She collected donations from people around the world to help the Kayapo people, so I immediately offered a donation from my Fresh-Jagua tattoo company to her praiseworthy cause.
In 2015, as I heard about the World Indigenous Games, I felt that the time had come for me to visit Brazil to hook up with Alice, and meet the Kayapo. I cannot tell you how amazed I was by what I found. The Kayapo were very friendly and welcoming, and i was able to establish a relationship with many of the Kayapo representatives. it was because of their invitation to visis their village in the state of Para, that i made the journey in 2016 with Alice.
I saw their beautiful tattoo art, which is a fundamental tradition that goes back to their old history, and I was impressed with the beauty of their glass bead jewelry, which they were selling. At the time, I came back to the USA full of ideas, truly inspired, and having left a promise behind me that I knew I had to keep: that of going back and help them to use their glass bead art to generate a much needed income for the Kayapo people’s needs.
And, in 2016, I lived up to what I had promised them. Together with Alice, I arranged a visit to a few Kayapo villages so that we could get a new business opportunity taking off, so to help them generate resources from their art. To be honest with you, I donate them loose beads raw material and bought over 33 pounds of fine, beautiful, intricate designs of bracelets, neck chains and other Kayapo jewelry to sell on a dedicated shop named Kayapo art www.KayapoArt.com
Still, my main goal was to fundamentally help them. You see, the Kayapo are very proudly and charmingly primitive, in a way that is true to their roots. They live in perfect balance with nature. That’s why they don’t expect that many visitors from the outside world. However, the outside world has been forcing itself upon them – and in a very aggressive way.
I can tell you that I became fascinated about their culture and traditions, as much as I became deeply concerned about the threats that they are facing.
You see, on the one hand, the Kayapo have an extremely simple way of life. Men hunt and do some cooking. Women, on the other hand, take care of raising the children and educate them according to the tribe’s traditions, which includes painting their bodies with the tribe’s traditional symbols (a cultural practice that is widely spread throughout the Amazon and that changed the way I worked as an artist). On their spare time, women also craft this beautiful jewelry from glass beads that people donate to them – they literally turn otherwise uninteresting beads into stunning pieces of impressive indigenous jewelry.
Together, as a people, the Kayapo are a living testament to the purest way of living in the Amazon. That’s also why, on the other hand, they need to fight for their land and their way of life, namely against the threat of loggers, ranchers and miners, and of planned infrastructure buildings that may forever disrupt their right to live according to their heritage.
That made me realize that simply helping them to sell their glass bead jewelry wasn’t enough, so we told them that Alice and I would start an initiative to raise funds in order to support them. This was what led us to start this crowdfunding initiative. As strong and resilient as they are, the Kayapo know nothing about crowdfunding – which is why they need friends like us to help them access the funds that a campaign like this can generate. After all, they need financial help for solid education programs, and to gain access to better agricultural and solar power resources to help them produce better and more plentiful food.
That is why we are now calling you to take a stand for the true guardians of the precious rainforest that everyone else so desperately needs to see kept alive and well preserved. For the last 30 years, the Kayapo have been on the front line, defending the rainforest, and stating that progress, as much as it is important, cannot step over the world’s most precious ecosystem.
You see, the Kayapo have only recently, in the last few decades, began to open to the outside world – precisely so that they could defend their special world from the outside threats that they began to face. This means that they do not really master the sophisticated ways of negotiating in a fast-changing reality that plays to the tune of our capitalist society.
Let’s help them protect their land and way of life against the invasions of loggers, ranchers and miners. You can do so by:
Making a donation today, of whatever amount – since every dollar helps, to help the Kayapo have access to the funds that they need to protect and preserve the natural and cultural treasures that they have guarded for centuries.
Sharing this crowdfunding campaign with your friends, family members and other connections who may also want to help the Kayapo be better equipped to overcome the extremely heavy challenges that they have before them.
Remember: our only interest is in directly helping the Kayapo to enjoy the rights that should never be negated to them. That’s why we did not create any wasteful administrative structure for this project – precisely so that you know for sure that every donated dollar will go directly to the Kayapo, to be used by them, for the sake of their highly important cultural and ecological mission.
Thank you so much, and we hope to be soon reporting to you on how far your donated funds have gone to help the Kayapo protect their unique culture, and the Amazon, a unique piece of the planet without which we would all be dramatically and perilously poorer.
http://www.helpkayapo.org/
Organizer
Oz Arie
Organizer
Hollywood, FL
