Every year, the arrival of the rainy season and the swelling of the Anauá River indicate it’s time for the Wai Wai Indigenous people to go upriver to collect Brazil nuts. They spend the next few weeks in campsites in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest, wandering through the nut groves and filling thousands of bags with the so-called hedgehogs, the woody fruit pods that hold the nuts. Brazil nuts, known locally as castanha, are popular worldwide, where they’re often marketed as Amazon nuts or Pará nuts. They’re the main source of income for around 60,000 Amazonian people living in Indigenous and riverine communities. In the Wai Wai territory, in Brazil’s Roraima state, the nuts are also a crucial part of the diet, blended with cassava flour to eat, or made into broth, juice or oil. However, bringing the nuts back to the villages from the depths of the rainforest, and from there selling them on to traders, is an adventure. Once the collection is over, the Indigenous people fill their boats with heavy bags of nuts and go down the winding river, where they run a gauntlet of rocky rapids and waterfalls. This often forces the Wai Wai to step out of their boats and tow them. One of the waterfalls, known as Conceição, is often impossible to cross, forcing the group to finish the route on foot. “We have to pull the canoe up to the waterfall,” Levi José da Silva, the leader of the Anauá community, told1…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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