The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (37 page)

 

The Last Frontier

 

Back from our walk in the forest, we stop in the village. Several of the women are sitting in their hammocks, beading bracelets and necklaces. The village is really squalid, with discarded rags, decomposing garbage, and bones of old meals strewn all over the place. The Awá are not used to living in fixed settlements and haven't learned basic hygiene like sweeping the compound every morning. A number of infant wild animals, orphans of those shot by their husbands that the women have adopted almost as surrogate children—to the point of suckling them—are lashed to posts: two adorable golden-brown
quatis,
ring-tailed coatimundis; a bug-eyed little night monkey; and a mangy, deranged-looking black-bearded saki monkey.

The Awá are getting used to my being here. Takwaré, a teenager, gives me their Neymar-style haircut, cutting the sides close and leaving the hair on top and in the back. (The kids must have seen Neymar, Brazil's reigning soccer god, playing on television on a trip to the health clinic in Santa Inês, halfway between here and São Luís.) Every time I see him after that, he asks,
“Quem corto seu cabelo?”
—Who cut your hair?—and I shout, “Takwaré!” and he convulses with laughter. Awá humor is based on repetition. They're already being sucked in, subverted.

I visit Pirahá, who has a dozen arrows tucked under his
babaçu
-frond roof, each of which he spent days on and is a work of art. They are meticulously crafted of strong, dark brown bamboo called
tenkara
and have two kinds of points. One is like a spearpoint, but made of wood, with razor-sharp edges, and is for the big game—tapirs, peccaries, deer—while the other has a barbed point for monkeys, agouti, and birds. The young men are no longer hunting with bows, and in another generation the art of arrow making will be gone. The young Awá in the three other villages are 10 to 20 years farther down the road to “progress.” So there's a sense of futility that I pick up after a while in some of the FUNAI people who are with us. “What are we doing here? What can we really do for these people?” one confides. “Why are we risking our lives when they're going to lose their culture anyway? Whenever I leave this place, I weep.” On the porch there are three rifles and a stack of loaded clips in case
madeireiros
or
pistoleiros
decide to pay a surprise visit. The Amazon frontier is still very Wild West.

One afternoon, as I sit in my room at the post, Takwarenchia, one of the elders, appears at the window with a big grin. I show him the catalogue of a show on tribal people called
No Strangers
that was at the Annenberg Space for Photography, in Los Angeles, earlier this year, and Takwarenchia lets out an appreciative “Ahhh!” each time I turn the page to a new picture. Then we start teaching each other our languages. I point to my nose and say “Nose,” and he watches how my mouth moves and says “Nose.” Then he points to his nose and says
“Epiora.”
In short order, Takwarenchia and I have 50 words in common.

 

I am not getting a particularly mystical or spiritual vibe from any of the Awá. This is another Western fantasy, like the noble savage and the idea that tribal people are great conservationists. Iuwí, Piraí's son, who spoke so movingly at our welcome and shot the howler monkey, has started to ask me for my Swiss Army knife, contradicting his father's statement that the Awá are not interested in anything we have. Every time I see him he asks, or rather states, “You are giving me that knife.” This is only natural. You see these amazing things the
kanai
have, and you want them. But giving things to tribal people can create discord and a culture of dependence. It is one of the first things Carlos Travassos went over with us before we arrived. We were not even to share any of our food with the people at Juriti. I know all about this problem. Thirty years ago I went into a rain forest in Madagascar with a local young man who knew all the birds cold, which he had taught himself from their calls and glimpses of them in trees, and even knew their Latin names, while the people in his village farmed and rarely went into the forest. He was a natural-born naturalist and a sterling young man. When I was leaving I gave him my little Nikon binoculars. Years later I read that he had been killed by the villagers, who were envious that he was getting so many things from the tourists.

 

Cosmic Famine

 

Pigs have been found. Wild pigs—
queixada.
The village takes to the forest. Uirá Garcia, a 36-year-old anthropologist at the University of Campinas, who speaks Awá and spent 13 months here researching their hunting, kinship, and cosmology, has flown up to help us understand them. Uirá is a light-skinned black man from Rio. The Awá classify him as “another kind of
branco
[white person].” He and I join two men, two women, and three of their pet
quatis,
whom they have unleashed from the posts. They're the size of large kittens but have no trouble keeping up with us on our daylong, eight-mile slog through the forest. We cross a log bridge over the 20-foot-wide Rio Carú, which runs below the post and the village. A huge morpho butterfly, flashing creamy white and blowtorch blue, melts into the dappled shadows ahead of us. “The forest is alive for the Awá,” Uirá explains. “They know exactly where they are at all times. Everywhere there is a story. ‘This is where I killed a
paca
.' ‘This is the tree I found honey in.'” He shows me a map of their trails that he made with some of the hunters. There are dozens of trails, each with a different purpose. Some are only used seasonally. One goes to a place two days away where there are many
copaçu
trees. They take it only when the
copaçu
is in fruit.

We sit on a log, the first resting place, where they always stop, 45 minutes out. The men have gone on ahead to find the pigs, while the women are amusing themselves with the little
quatis,
who have boundless curiosity and nervous energy. One has poked its long snout and its entire body except for its elevated, excitedly twitching tail into my backpack. The women keep flinging the
quatis
into the forest with peals of laughter, and they keep coming back for more. “The
quati
is most intelligent,” Uirá says. “If you let it go days from the village, it finds its way back. It follows the human scent. When it gets big, it becomes too aggressive to keep and goes back to the forest and joins a band. The hunters recognize the ones that are former pets and don't kill them.”

One of the women imitates the call of a
macaco prego,
a capuchin monkey, which she hears in the distance: the same note seven times. But it is not a monkey—it's her husband, trying to locate her. Uirá starts to explain the Awá's extraordinary take on their forest universe, the intricate web of correspondences and reciprocities they have with the plants and animals. “Every Awá is named for a plant or animal,” he explains, “with whom he has a special relationship for the rest of his life. Every species of tree has an animal that is its owner. The
araras,
parrots, are owners of the araucaria trees. The
guaribas,
the howlers, are the owners of the
uwariwa
trees. The other animals that eat the fruits of these trees have to ask permission of the parrots and the howlers, and the whole forest is structured this way [
a floresta é todo demarcado deste jeito
]. There is an underworld of ex-humans—ancestors of their enemies, the Guajajara, who fell through since-covered holes and are still living—and a heaven with magnificent beings called the Karawara, who come down to earth to hunt and get water and honey. With the game disappearing, there will be a cosmic famine, because it won't be the end of just the Awá but the Karawara, too. The end of the forest will be the end of the cosmos. There will be a famine on earth and in heaven.”

We hit the trail, which becomes fainter until finally, after a couple of miles, we are bushwhacking, slashing through
mata de cipò
—vine-infested jungle—with machetes. The men appear. They have shot one of the capuchins and a
quati,
which they leave with the women, and they go off again to keep looking for the pigs. We reach a beautiful spot on a little stream and stretch out on its banks. One of the women bathes, sitting in the water with her curvy back turned to us, like a Gauguin. There really is an emerald forest, and we are in it. But as we are basking in what is left of the afternoon, Uirá is stung by four wasps, and one gets me on my left thumb, which quickly swells. A hundred different things can get you in the emerald forest. The Awá are most afraid of the ghosts of the dead—the bad part of you that doesn't go to heaven, the anger that you have to have to be able to hunt and kill your brothers and sisters the animals—who are drifting around in the forest and making otherwise unexplainable noises and are responsible for all illness, misfortune, and death.

 

Muito Irritados

 

I want to visit Tiracambu and Awá, two of the other, more acculturated Awá villages, but the already barely negotiable road through the invaded part of the TI is washed out, so I take a skiff with a two-horsepower engine down the Rio Carú, the skiff that brought Augustin do Violão to spell Patriolino as
chefe de posto
last night. Another reason I want to go to Tiracambu is to meet Karapiru, the most famous Awá, the poster boy of Survival International's campaign. His family was attacked by some ranchers in 1991. His wife and son were killed, another son captured, and he was shot in the lower back but managed to escape and spent the next 10 years alone on the run, until a farmer found him in Bahia, 400 miles south. An interpreter was brought in to persuade him that he would be better off letting FUNAI take care of him—he would eat much better, and his health needs would be taken care of—and the interpreter turned out to be his son, who had survived the assault and recognized his father from the bullet scar in his back. Travassos says Karapiru is a stand-up guy,
uma ótima pessôa,
supercalm and unassuming. Now in his 60s, he still hunts every day, with his bow.

 

The river snakes east, describing the border of TI Awá, on the left, and TI Carú, on the right, another reserve, created primarily for the Guajajara, more than 8,000 of whom live there, but also several hundred Awá, including one of the uncontacted bands. The milky river is full of stingrays, caimans, anacondas, and piranhas. TI Awá ends, and the left bank becomes the domain of the
caboclos,
the mestizo river people who live on the Amazon's thousands of tributaries. My driver, 20-year-old Jessel, is a
caboclo,
but he looks completely Indian. I ask him which tribe he is descended from, and he says, defensively,
“Sou Brasileiro”
—I'm Brazilian. He tells me that the
caboclos
have nothing to do with the Guajajara, who are good-for-nothing
malandros.
They have big plantations of marijuana, which came from escaped slaves in the 18th century, and smoke it ritually, to make contact with the spirits.

After two more hours Jessel pulls up to a dock, and we say hello to Jessel's aunt, whom we find in the kitchen of her mud
babaçu-
thatch hut. It's a cozy scene; apart from kerosene lamps and flashlights, a jug for filtering water, and a radio, a step away from the Indians, like a sod-roofed homestead on the American plains 150 years ago. The aunt serves us
cafezinhos,
little cups of sweet black coffee, and delicious little pink bananas. She radiates the kindness and unflappable calm of the
gente humilde,
Brazil's poor people. It is the country's transcendent quality. You find it even in the urban slums.

Back on the river, every 500 yards there is a stack of
maçaranduba
—Brazilian redwood—on the
caboclo
side, waiting to be picked up and taken to the buyers downstream. After three more hours we pass, on the Guajajara side, a dozen long, freshly milled and squared pieces of wood, roughly 20 feet by 30 inches by 30 inches. These must be destined for a more high-end customer, maybe in the States. The trafficking of Maranhão's timber is going on right in the open, and nothing is being done about it. This is the reality. Logging is the mainstay here, and no one has come up with an economic alternative. The majority of the mayors of the state's municipalities are
madeireiros,
and the only trees that are left are in the TIs. This is why the expulsion of the
invasores
from TI Awá has been taking so long. There is no political will to carry it out.

A few minutes later, we reach São João do Carú, the municipal seat and regional trading center, which is only 19 years old. Before that it was the
hakwa,
or hunting territory, of one of the Awá's clans. The settlement of this region was very rapid. Teenagers cruise the main drag on dirt bikes.

I spend the night at a flophouse for ranch hands, and in the morning Cicero Sousa, who runs people and supplies to FUNAI's posts around the state, shows up in the same spanking-new silver Mitsubishi with unreal off-road capabilities that he drove me down from São Luís in, and we set off for Tiracambu with João Operador, the third of Juriti's rotating
chefes de posto,
who is coming along to replace a broken grindstone. After hours of nothing but pasture and cows—and Cicero at one point saving our lives with a last-minute swerve that avoids a head-on collision with a huge truck barreling around a blind curve on the single-lane paved road—we reach the Rio Pindaré, which describes the southern border of TI Carú. The 550-mile railroad to the Carajás iron mines runs along it through what was Awá land. Survival International prevailed on the World Bank and the European Union, which were lending more than $1 billion to Vale do Rio Doce, the company that was building the railroad and developing the mines, to make it a condition that all indigenous tribes' land in the Carajás railway corridor be demarcated. This resulted in the creation in the early 1980s of the half-million-acre TI Carú and the million-and-a-half-acre TI Alto Turiaçu, to the northwest, which some 50 Awá share with the Ka'apor and the Tembe. Carú and Alto Turiaçu were not contiguous. Between them was what eventually, in 2005, became TI Awá, whose creation was fought every step of the way and dragged on for 20 years. It was at various times going to be about 500,000 acres, then around 130,000, and finally ended up being about 289,000, by which time much of it was devastated.