The forest doctor

Note: This feature was originally published in May 2022.

The vision of the Juma Center appeared to her in a dream. Juma dreamed that she would build a hospital in the forest.

"As a medical student, I often hear ‘there is no treatment for this’. But we have treatment in the forest. That's how I got the idea for a forest hospital that blends traditional knowledge with medical science. I want to bring together people of all generations to work on transferring knowledge. The health center shouldn't just be for Indigenous people, but for everyone. It will be a safe haven for women fleeing violence. A haven for young people. I want to give young people access to the internet, but at the same time have a shaman there who can heal," she says.

Juma's timing is spot on; The value of Indigenous knowledge is increasingly appreciated in international negotiations on climate and biodiversity. During the COP26 climate summit in the fall of 2021, she met Leonardo DiCaprio, who promised to support the Juma Center.

Juma Xipaia emphasizes the danger of international negotiations only adorning themselves with Indigenous peoples as symbolic tokens.

“The rainforest contributes to the entire world's climate, and the only reason it's still standing is because people live there. People who defend it with their lives. I expect respect and that those who defend the forest are allowed to participate in discussions about how to preserve it," she says.

Juma against the dam

During a public hearing in 2011, Juma, then 21, spoke out against government and business interests. Crying and eight months pregnant, she vowed to fight the dam to protect the future of her unborn child. She lost, and five years later, construction was underway. In November 2019, President Bolsonaro marked the installation of the last and 18th turbine. Despite massive protests from Indigenous people and civil society, the giant structure was completed in record time.

By then, Juma had moved to Altamira to study and was in the middle of the battle against the dam. She exposed corruption at Belo Monte and spoke out about the consequences of the damming of the river and the dam itself. The people asked her to become a cacica, a female leader, and at 24, Juma Xipaia became the first female leader of the Xipaia people.

Juma had at that time been receiving various threats for a long time but tried not to be intimidated. Armed men in a white van started hanging around outside her house. One day, the car she was driving, with children in the back, was hit so hard by a white van that it spun around three times. It was a miracle that no one was hurt. She reported the incident, but the police dropped the case.

"I didn't want to let them scare me, but when they threatened to kidnap my son, I felt a pain I had never felt before. He wasn't even a year old. It was the first time I was scared," says Juma.

She realized that what she was being subjected to were outright murder attempts to silence her protests, but there was no protection available.

“You can shut up, or you can die. We can't guarantee your safety," the prosecutor reportedly said.

Juma stopped speaking out. She stopped serving the people and kept a low profile. She swapped her law studies for medicine and mostly stayed at home or at university.

Then she started to feel unwell, had difficulty breathing and struggled to walk. The doctors thought it was a psychological reaction until she collapsed at university. It turned out that she had been poisoned.

"I thought that stopping protesting would solve my problems, but it did not. That's when I realized I must keep fighting for the change we want," says Juma.