What You Won't Do For Love by David Suzuki

Author:David Suzuki
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coach House Books

It’s like I’d gone through a portal to a different world, really.

Yeah, it changed my life.

SCENE 4

THE AMAZON

DAVID/TARA: Itadakimasu.

MIRIAM: What does that mean?

DAVID: It means, ‘I am going to receive the lives of animals and plants for my own life.’ Saying this phrase before eating is a way to express your understanding of how much was sacrificed to make the meal possible as well as to express appreciation for Mother Nature.

MIRIAM: That’s beautiful.

TARA: And now we add, ‘Thank you, fish, for giving us your life.’

STURLA: Mm, this looks so good. So, David, you were starting to tell us about Paiakan.

DAVID: What was I saying about him?

STURLA: You were just telling us how you met.

DAVID: Oh, right. Well, meeting him changed my life. I met him when I was filming The Nature of Things in the Amazon in the late eighties.

TARA: This is when people realized that the Amazon was the lungs of the planet, and the fact that it was burning made a lot of people upset.

DAVID: Yeah, so we’re down there filming this special, and when Paiakan and I meet, it’s this magical moment. It was like we had met before – we had an instant connection.

TARA: Yeah, he really took to you. It was like he recognized you.

DAVID: I learned later that when he was a boy, in his village way in the forest, the village used to be visited by a Japanese-Brazilian doctor who would come to treat the people. And it turns out his name was Davi, which is Portuguese for David.

TARA: And that doctor, Davi, became a kind of mentor to Paiakan – he told him, ‘You learn to protect your people, the white people are coming’. And when the village, called Gorotiri, finally got a road into it, sure enough, Paiakan saw alcohol, white bread, and candy coming into the community and he said, ‘This is no good, we have to leave.’ So he led a group of people further into the forest, where there was no road, and founded a village called Aucre.

DAVID: And when he saw that I was Japanese, then heard my name was David, it was a kind of reunion.

TARA: They really had a special connection.

DAVID: In a very short time, we became quite close. And he confided in me that he was shocked to find out from an Oxford anthropologist –

DAVID/TARA: Darrell Posey –

DAVID: That the Brazilian government was planning to build a dam that would flood Kayapo territory and they weren’t even told about it!

TARA: That doesn’t just happen in developing countries. That’s exactly what happened in BC when the Bennett Dam was built: the Indigenous people weren’t told about it, and the first thing they noticed was the water was rising in the river and beginning to flood their graveyards. And the caskets began to float down the river!

DAVID: The same thing in Quebec: by chance, Phil Awashish was in Montreal, picked up a paper, and found out that Hydro Quebec was going to flood Cree territory. So when Paiakan said to me, ‘I need help’, I knew exactly what he meant.

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