Since 2017, Indigenous peoples in the Upper Rio Negro region of the Amazon have used a novel tool to defend their territory: the news.
From its headquarters in São Gabriel da Cachoeira--the most Indigenous municipality in Brazil--news outlet Rede Wayuri broadcasts information in several native languages to the 23 different Indigenous peoples scattered across 750 communities in the region. Wayuri, whose name means “collective work” in the indigenous language nheengatu, has shared life-saving information about preventing the spread of COVID-19 and reported on the catastrophic impact of climate change across Indigenous territories. But more than anything, by producing news from Indigenous territories about Indigenous peoples and for Indigenous audiences, Wayuri has mobilized Indigenous communities in protection of their own rights and territory.
When Wayuri was established in 2017, Indigenous peoples in the region were being inundated with disinformation campaigns on social media encouraging them to open up their protected territories to mining, said Ray Baniwa, one of the outlet’s founders. The campaigns, which promoted the idea that tribes of the region would become wealthy with the arrival of mining, were effective within Indigenous territories. They sewed widespread distrust of community leaders and the region’s principal Indigenous rights group, the Federation of Indigenous Organizations of the Rio Negro, Baniwa said.
“Many people fell for that discourse, those speeches that excite and stir people up because they believe it's the truth,” Baniwa said. “That weakening, that crisis we were going through at the time, led tribe leader to ask FOIRN to find a way to respond, to fight the disinformation that was circulating in the territory, to create a counter-narrative.”
Wayuri has established a remarkably widespread audience throughout the Upper Rio Negro and in doing so, has been able to rebuild support for the Indigenous movement among the region’s Indigenous comunities. In São Gabriel da Cachoeira, many of the taxi drivers can be heard listening to Wayuri in their cars, while Juliana Radler, another founder of Wayuri, estimates that 70% of the 45,000-person Indigenous population in the region has access to and is familiar with the outlet.
The news outlet, which relies on a partnership with the NGO Instituto Socioambiental and financial support from benefactors including the European Union, has a wide-ranging network of correspondents from Indigenous communities across the Upper Rio Negro region. They report from their respective territories, sending news back to the centralized editorial staff in São Gabriel da Cachoeira, who compile the information in the form of audio bulletins or radio shows. That information is then distributed throughout the region via WhatsApp, radio or bluetooth.
Many of the correspondents are young people, who receive training in news-gathering through periodic workshops in São Gabriel da Cachoeira. Through their work with Rede Wayuri, they have become actively involved in protecting Indigenous rights.
“The Indigenous movement has been somewhat distant from the youth — a youth that was no longer as connected to the generation that had fought for land demarcation,” Radler said. “So the group of communicators stayed closely united and kept exchanging information, and that really helped spread awareness about the fight and also renew FOIRN’s image in the territory.”
Wayuri’s coverage has included breaking down the region’s PTGA--a crucial document guiding the sustainable management and protection of each Indigenous territory in Brazil--highlighting local Indigenous culture, providing updates on how state and federal legislation affects Indigenous rights and interviewing candidates for local elections.
But perhaps Wayuri’s most critical reporting has been on public health. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which wreaked havoc in the Amazonas state, Rede Wayuri increased their publication frequency, sending out critical social-distancing instructions and recording interviews with public health experts.
The scientific and medical language surrounding the pandemic was difficult for people to understand, said Claudia Wanano, an editor at Wayuri, so sharing the information in familiar terms for listeners was critical. The title of one audio bulletin, for example, told listeners to stay the length of a pirarucu, a giant Amazonian fish, away from others. Wayuri also broadcast the information in various Indigenous languages. “By sharing this information in people's own languages, I saw that it became much clearer,” Wanano said.
Unlike previous Indigenous communication initiatives in Brazil, which have mostly focused on informing the non-Indigenous public about Indigenous culture and rights, Wayuri provides information explicitly for Indigenous audiences. That mission has become critical in recent years given the arrival of the Internet--largely through Starlink--to Indigenous territories and with it, a deluge of fake news.
“We want to strengthen our narrative within our own territory, through the voices from this territory,” Baniwa said. “We faced the last administration [of former-President Jair Bolsonaro], when fake news was coming in every day, so we kind of became a barrier to try to contain and combat that information.”
For Gave Cabral, president of Manaus-based media education organization Abaré, which runs workshops with Wayuri, the Indigenous outlet is a “dose of hope” for journalism. Cabral said the media environment in the Amazon is incredibly concentrated in the large cities and there is very little coverage of rural areas, where narratives are typically dominated by local politicians. “When an initiative like Rede Wayuri emerges, I think it’s a breath of fresh air, and it makes you say, ‘Wow, not everything is lost yet. There’s still hope that it’s possible to operate communication initiatives in the interior of Amazonas, despite all these economic, logistical, and political difficulties.’”
While much of traditional journalism appears to be in crisis, Wayuri represents the kind of grassroots communication that is growing, Cabral said. “That’s not what we’re talking about when we speak of a crisis. There is no crisis for popular journalism, for community journalism. They are, in fact, the solution for journalism.”
Part of Wayuri’s success comes from the fact that the journalists themselves are members of the Upper Rio Negro’s Indigenous communities. “It’s important that we ourselves share the information — we Indigenous people — because there have been outside journalists who come and take away information they don’t understand,” Wanano said. “It ends up harming the image of our peoples and our region.”
Wayuri’s journalists, given their personal understanding of the Indigenous communities of the region, also know how to best communicate with their audience. “We always speak this more local, regional language, the language of the Indigenous peoples,” Wanano said. “We try to bring this information while preserving the cultural aspect, the way of speaking, narrating and telling.”
Speaking to their audience in familiar terms and maternal languages, Wayuri has quickly established the trust among the region’s communities that is needed to effectively combat fake news and disseminate life-saving information. It has also inspired the creation of a number of other Indigenous communication organizations and collectives in the Amazon, becoming a model for using information to defend Indigenous sovereignty and territory.
“The mission of the network of communicators is this: to really combat the issue of lies, fake news, to try to clarify, but doing it in our own way of communicating,” Wanano said.
Reporting the Understory