YURA LETTER · 01
Originally sent October 12, 2026. The October 18 online gathering invitation has passed; dates and availability in this letter reflect the time it was sent.
Bom dia, família Yura! ❤️
Ariê here, writing you our first letter. I’ve been wanting to open this space for a while, to share a little of what we’re living, the cultures, people and encounters that gave life to YURA, the music inspiring us and the readings expanding our horizons.
Before you begin, put on Obatalá, by Metá Metá (https://open.spotify.com/track/5dyAuEQrX4T8VVleze0CRG). If you feel like it, light a candle, make yourself some tea, and settle in. I’d like to invite you to spend a little time together, however far apart we may be.
I’ll write every other Monday, sharing stories, invitations, and some albums and books along the way. This first letter will be a little longer than the next ones, so I can tell you how we got here. Towards the end, you’ll find our first recommendations.
Before YURA had a name
I was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest selva de pedras, a concrete jungle. And by luck or chance, it was right there, among buildings and asphalt, that the forest began entering my life through people.
An hour after I decided to take ayahuasca for the first time, a Huni Kuin pajé arrived unannounced at the house where I was living. To me, it felt like a cosmic alignment, and that was where my journey began.
A few months later, that path opened even further through my sister, Alice Haibara. Her deep work with Pano-speaking Indigenous peoples, particularly the Huni Kuin, brought me into relationships that gradually became my own. She completed her master’s in Social Anthropology at the University of São Paulo in 2016, with the dissertation “Já me transformei”: modos de circulação e transformação de pessoas e saberes entre os Huni Kuin (Kaxinawá), which I’m sharing here for anyone who would like to explore her work.
My father, Antônio Maurício Fonseca de Oliveira, has worked alongside Indigenous peoples for more than fifty years, including through FUNAI, Brazil’s federal agency for Indigenous affairs, and through cultural and educational projects. So these encounters were already close to home, before I understood where they would take me.
Maybe being surrounded by concrete made me want to meet people whose relationships with the forest, with each other and with their own histories were different from what I knew.
Alongside the Indigenous communities rooted in São Paulo, people arriving from different territories made the city a living circuit of encounters. We could share, learn, organise. A gathering could become a friendship, a friendship could become a movement defending the right to remain on ancestral lands. So the trees could keep breathing, and cultures could keep echoing through generations, in the 295 Indigenous languages recorded by Brazil’s 2022 Census.
My background is in education and artistic production, and I was active in the student movement for better public education in Brazil. There, I began learning how a desire for change could become something we organised our lives around.
Living in São Paulo, I saw people fighting every day for the right to study, to have a home, to live without hiding who they were. That search for social justice was urgent then, and still is. These struggles, and my growing connections with Indigenous peoples and Afro-Brazilian traditions, were becoming part of the same work.
Before YURA had a name, there were people finding one another, and a growing desire to give those encounters somewhere to happen. From the forest to a shared home
From the forest to a shared home
During my first spiritual diet with pajé Hushahu, from the Yawanawá village of Mutum, I felt a strong calling to dedicate more of my life to this work.
There in the Amazon, I felt that what we were beginning could become part of the many efforts to care for the Earth, the forests and the animals, and to regenerate our own thinking about how we live together.
We began imagining YURA in 2018 and launched it in 2022. Many people were part of those beginnings, and together we organised cultural gatherings, retreats, workshops, concerts, Indigenous arts and crafts exhibitions, and journeys to the forest.
For me, building a bridge between worlds meant spending time together and learning that being welcomed also meant showing up, keeping in touch, and caring for those relationships.
Meanwhile, further north, in Tulum, Gabriela was creating a space for people to gather. We didn’t know each other yet.
She spent four months with the Yawanawá in Mutum Village, in the Amazon, through Water Now, a project where she and her group installed water filters and bathrooms in the village.
Afterwards, she came to my home in São Paulo to say goodbye to friends from the forest who were travelling on a tour I was organising. That was how we met.
We began building a family, and before long we moved to Tulum, to the space Gabriela had built two years earlier with other investors in the Maya jungle. There, we welcomed Indigenous families, musicians, teachers and visitors from different parts of the world.
The most important thing we built there was the community.
Even without our permanent space, it’s still a close, creative, vibrant family, gathering, making things happen and supporting each other. That’s what stays with me most from those years.
Earlier this year, with invitations coming from other places and new possibilities opening, we felt it was time to follow those paths too.
Seguimos caminhando, creating gatherings, retreats and cultural exchanges, with this family continuing to grow across different places.
Come meet Wãnu and Dua
As we prepare for the Huni Yawa tour in Tulum, we wanted those of you who are far away to meet Wãnu Yawanawá and Dua Ninawa Huni Kuin too.
They’ll share songs and talk about how their work together brings Huni Kuin and Yawanawá traditions into conversation.
We will be hosting a 4-Day Immersion with them in Tulum on February 12–15th. More information: https://www.yuratulum.com/huni-yawa-retreat
Para ouvir
Come listen to the contemporary sounds of the forest’s txanas, the singers whose music we’ll be sharing in our gathering.
Dua Ninawa & Tuin Kaya — Ni Yuxibu Rewe (O Canto da Floresta)
https://open.spotify.com/album/2XnOQDWCx0s7htdf2Lmu6V
Iniã — Nay Unua Rewe: Inspirações do Astral
https://open.spotify.com/album/5esu2wUlpXHdlIPtwroAek
Para ler
Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo — Ailton Krenak Ideas to Postpone the End of the World
For our first reading, I wanted to bring Krenak into the conversation.
How did we come to think of ourselves as separate from nature? What disappears when we treat forests as resources and different ways of living as obstacles to progress?
These questions are close to what brought me to this work. Here’s an invitation to spend some time with them together.
Explore the book: https://www.companhiadasletras.com.br/9788535933581-ideias-para-adiar-o-fim-do-mundo--nova-edicao--4056/p
I’ve shared a little of my story. Now tell me: how did YURA become part of yours?
Write to me at arie@yuratulum.com.
Thank you for being here. I’m happy we’re starting this.
Um abraço grande, con cariño, Ariê
