Brazil continues to lose an entire generation of Indigenous leaders to COVID-19
▻https://news.mongabay.com/2021/06/brazil-continues-to-lose-an-entire-generation-of-indigenous-leaders-t
There have been 54,622 confirmed COVID-19 cases among Indigenous people in Brazil, according to monitoring by the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), a Brazilian NGO that advocates for Indigenous and environmental rights. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 1,087 Indigenous people have died from the virus and 163 native groups have been affected, according to the ISA platform. There were nearly 818,000 Indigenous people in Brazil in 2010, according to the national census that year. There haven’t been any updates in the decade since, with the next census set for 2022.
Meanwhile, data from the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), the country’s biggest Indigenous organization, reported that in December of last year the mortality rate among Indigenous people was 16% higher than among non-Indigenous Brazilians. In its report, “#COVID-19 and Indigenous Peoples,” APIB said that “We have lost our elders who kept and shared the memories of our ancestry, the guardians of our knowledge, of our songs, our prayers, and our spirituality.”