Read Text I and answer the question that follows.
Text I
‘It’s dangerous work’: new generation of Indigenous
activists battle to save the Amazon
The medicine man flashed a mischievous grin as he dabbed
his warriors’ eyeballs with a feather soaked in malagueta pepper
and watched them grimace in pain. “They’re going into battle and
this will protect them,” José Delfonso Pereira said as he advanced
on his next target with a jam jar of his chilli potion.
“It hurts and it burns,” the Macuxi shaman admitted. “But it
will help them see more clearly and stop them falling ill.”
It was a crisp August morning and a dozen members of an
Indigenous self-defence team had assembled in the hillside
village of Tabatinga to receive Pereira’s blessing before launching
their latest mission into one of the Amazon’s most secluded
corners, near Brazil’s border with Guyana and Venezuela.
Some of the men clutched bloodwood truncheons as they
prepared to journey down the Maú River in search of illegal
miners; others held bows and arrows adorned with the black
feathers of curassow birds. Marco Antônio Silva Batista carried a
drone.
“If I die, it will be for a good cause – ensuring our territory is
preserved for future generations,” said the 20-year-old activistjournalist, whose ability to spy on environmental criminals from
above has made him a key member of GPVTI, an Indigenous
patrol group in the Brazilian state of Roraima.
Batista, who belongs to South America’s Macuxi people, is
part of a new generation of Indigenous journalists helping
chronicle an age-old battle against outside aggression. For
centuries, non-Indigenous writers and reporters have flocked to
the rainforest region to tell their version of that ancestral fight for
survival. Now, a growing cohort of Indigenous communicators are
telling their own stories, providing first-hand dispatches from
some of the Amazon’s most inaccessible and under-reported
corners.
“It’s dangerous work and we suffer a lot when we’re out in
the field,” said Batista, one of about 26,000 inhabitants of Raposa
Serra do Sol, Brazil’s second most populous Indigenous territory.
“But it really gives me strength because I’m showing the reality of
our lives to the world.” (…)
(Adapted from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/03/its-
dangerous-work-new-generation-of-indigenous-activists-battle-to-save-the-amazon)