The first turbine Hydro electric plant 5km wide dam – world’s fourth biggest -will be commissioned in the next few months at the Xingu river in Brazil at one of the cutting edge of world’s bio diversity hotspots.
The community have marched for three decades, lobbied, seized hostages, burned buses and taken to their canoes to try to stop the project. But they have failed.
The native Juruna Indians known for their Canoeing skills, who live in the islands and peninsulas Parque do Xingu and state of Mato Grosso around the Xingu River in southern Amazon, Brazil. These indigenous small tribes with a population of about 400, resemble Andean natives of the Alti Plano of Peru and Bolivia, are experts in the art of textile weaving and cover their lower body with straight-cut cloth and practice communal cooking. “The Juruna, suffered the entire onslaught of the advance of rubber tappers. Especially the people from Coronel Tancredo Martins Jorge, at the mouth of the Rio Fresco, commited massacre, until they revolted and fled, headed by their Chief Máma, to the other side of the border of Mato Grosso, where they settled down on an island above the Martius Falls.
The Juruna tribal leaders after failing to stop the development, now admit that they are fighting for compensation for their loss of traditional way of life in the river banks of Xingu.
Juruna mythological creature Sinaa, an ancient cat-like ancestral god whose father was a black jaguar who married an mortal woman. Sinna Rejuvenated everytime he took a bath pulling his skin off over his head. According sinna the end of the world will come when he removed the forked stick that holds up the sky.