Comments by OSFR historian Jim Tatum.
jim.tatum@oursantaferiver.org
– A river is like a life: once taken,
it cannot be brought back © Jim Tatum
The river & its relationship to the people inhabiting its banks are under threat
The Komi Memem River, also known as Laje River in non-Indigenous maps, has been granted personhood status under a groundbreaking law proposed by an Indigenous councilman. Meaning, the river and its tributaries are entitled to rights including maintaining their natural flow to having the forest around them protected.
The law granting rights to nourish, and be nourished, and to coexist with humans and their spiritual, recreational, and cultural practices was passed in the city council of Guajará-Mirim, a municipality in Brazil….
In the meanwhile, representatives of eight South American governments gather in Brazil to discuss ways to preserve the Amazon rainforest to mitigate climate change and protect its Indigenous peoples.
Komi Memem or Laje River, is a tributary of a larger river that’s unprotected and also the first among hundreds of rivers in the Brazilian Amazon to be given rights as a human. “We are further organizing ourselves to fend off invaders,” Councilman Francisco Oro Waram, the law’s proponent, told The Associated Press. “We can’t fight with arrows; we have to use the laws,” he added.
The Guajar-Mirim State Park, a former Wari’ territory, has been extensively invaded and deforested by land-robbers in the past few years. The State Governor Marcos Rocha, instead of evicting them, signed a law in 2021 reducing the park’s boundaries to legalize the land-grabbing. Invasion and deforestation continue, despite a judicial order overruling the law.