By Tom Phillips in Roraima state, Brazil.
February 19, 2008

"They died from malaria, the illnesses of the gold miners," he adds.

The Brazilian authorities too are beginning to admit the partial return of gold miners to the Yanomami's lands. At the end of last year the Sunday Herald flew over the region with the Brazilian Air Force, who are tasked with locating the illegal miners, hidden deep in the jungle and operating with the help of secretive runways carved into the rainforest.

During one of the flights the mission's commander, Colonel Jose Hugo Volkmer, a 49-year-old former fighter pilot, discovered one such mine. Volkmer spotted the mine - known as the Pista do Helio or Helio's Runway, after the miner who built it - to the left of his Cessna aircraft.

Volkmer's flying map of the region is scattered with dozens of red felt pen dots, representing illegal runways mainly used by illegal miners. Several are located in the Yanomami territory.

The prospect of a new gold rush has left those who have fought to protect the Yanomami Indians, such as Sister Alessia Pereira Leite, fearing for their future. The 71-year-old Brazilian nun first came to the region in 1988 as part of a Catholic humanitarian mission called SOS Yanomami. The mission had a simple goal: saving the Indians from extinction.

Leite never returned to her home, thousands of miles south in Minas Gerais. Instead she set up a medical centre that now offers treatment to hundreds of Yanomami families spread across around 30 local malocas, the communal wood houses where they live.

Since the last gold rush ended relief workers such as Leite have battled to rid the Yanomami territories of illnesses such as malaria. Now she fears that a new influx of miners could undo all her team's work to protect this ancient people.

"They the Yanomami are very scared of the farmers, of the loggers and principally of the gold miners," she says, sitting on a small concrete step outside the cramped wooden clinic she runs for the Yanomami. "They already know the consequences."

But the impoverished and nomadic hordes of Brazilian garimpeiros - who spend their lives scouring the rainforests of Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela for gold - are not the only concern in Yanomami villages such as Xitei.

Indian rights groups are also showing increasing fears over the possibility of a government-backed invasion of indigenous lands, such as those of the Yanomami. A government bill, by which multinational mining companies would be allowed to operate in indigenous areas, currently illegal under Brazilian law, is being discussed by politicians in the country's capital, Brasilia.

"Brazil is about to witness a new gold rush," the business pages of one major Brazilian newspaper warned last year. "This time in indigenous lands."

The Yanomami lands, believed to be on top of one of the world's largest untapped mineral reserves, are expected to be at the centre of this gold rush.

"The most desired mineral resources are located inside these indigenous areas, principally gold," warns Pierlangela Nascimento Wapichana, an outspoken representative of Brazil's National Indigenous Commission and herself an Indian from the state of Roraima.