The Last Speakers (11 page)

Despite their outward appearance of complete acculturation (driving a pickup truck and talking on a cell phone), Australian Aboriginals like Neil have managed to hang onto at least some of their wealth of ancient knowledge. Knowledge of the medicinal properties of plants, he explained, was commonplace: “This is a vine. You can see it grow here, coming from the ground, so it's using this as a host. It's a parasitic vine. And it grows this little seed, or bead. Common name, they call it crab's eye bead.”

As he pointed out more and more plants to us, we began to understand how sophisticated Rubibi survival technology was. What appeared to our eyes as a rough and inhospitable landscape was to Neil and his people more like a grocery store, pharmacy, and living room all in one.

“In the early days, when they were surviving in the bush, they moved around a lot, following food,” Neil explained. “Because when they went to one waterhole, the animals would move to another waterhole, so they had to follow the animals from waterhole to waterhole. And sometimes, there's always droughts, and times are real lean, not a lot of food around. If they were carrying a baby, or a fetus, and they knew that they would not be able to get enough nourishment for themself or the baby, they would use this in a way where they would crush it up and make a concoction out of it. But only people who have an idea how to make this concoction of preventing the birth, we would abort the unborn fetus of the child. The mother would live on and be able to survive in drought. So this is like, um, an abortion pill. And today, the colonists came and they made rosary beads out of them, the missionaries. Little did they know, 'cause they're Catholic, you know, they're against abortion, they were wearing these around their necks, with rosary beads. The powder in them, there's enough toxin in there, if it's not prepared properly, but the powder in this is the toxicity level, can kill a frog or a dog, from that one bead, or seed here.”

As Neil chuckled at the irony of rosaries made of abortion pills, he told us one reason why the knowledge needed to be kept secret: “They don't use it anymore because a lot of the people that didn't know how to make a drink out of this, or a concoction to abort the unborn fetus, actually killed the mother, too. So they no longer use it anymore, because it was too, um, dangerous a method of doing things like that. But before that, in nomadic life, they used to use this to abort the unborn fetus.”

A hundred yards away, within view of the pebbly beach, Neil stopped and pulled up by the roots a six-foot canelike plant. “You know we never fished?” he said. “We speared a lot of fish, with spears, but we never used the fishing line. We'd go out in the rocky pools, and the fish traps had so much water in the bottom there.” He gestured to his knee to show the depth of water in a tidal pool, where fish would be trapped when the tide receded. “We'd take this plant out here, pull the bottom, get these roots and crush them up with a stone, and break it off, mash it up, mix it with the sand, walk in the pools…. A couple of minutes later, you see the fish come up, upside down.” We marveled at the power of a plant root that could kill fish, and I asked if it was harmful to humans. “It's actually not a poison,” he continued. “It gives off a little bit of a milky sap and it coats the gills and stops the oxygen coming in from the water into the gills so they float upside down and to the surface.” He made a satisfied motion, as if scooping up fish. “Big fish, that big”—he spread his hands a foot apart—“and little ones. Yeah, you wouldn't starve, 'cause the tide comes in every six hours!”

Neil paused to pick and eat a snow pea–like pod he called “green bird.” “When this tree dies, we know there's something at the bottom there that's eating the roots, 'cause it's killed the tree. And we look and see a burrow and you see a worm that's in there. And this worm is like a witchetty grub and tastes very much like macadamia nuts. And you can eat it. We call that one
bein
. I think it's a moth that lays eggs, a particular moth. That's what damaged those roots, back there.”

A bit farther on, Neil pointed out Dreamtime's main waterhole. Standing over it, all we saw was sand in a shallow pit. Neil jumped down into the hole and began digging, and sure enough, within a foot he struck water. This waterhole is called
Bugarigara,
which means “the Making” or “Dreamtime.”

“By making the waterhole, singing songs to the waterhole, our ancestral spiritual being caused that we came to exist in this country. We come from the ocean onto the land; some people come from waterholes, and the rivers. When they'd sing the song, to the waterhole, they'd use boomerangs, and they'd beat them together. The men are the dreamers, in this country. They're the story keepers. But because the women are more influential now, they seem to keep a lot of it themselves and pass it on. The men are more likely to be susceptible to alcohol than the women. They keep all the stories of their uncles and their grandfathers alive, if nobody else wants to take it on.”

As Neil painted a picture of forgetting and cultural decline, he also revealed powerful connections that still kept everything in place. “The Dreamtime, it ties in with everything, the language and the culture here. You'll go back now, and you'll dream about all this. It'll come to you, take you off in another, sort of, dimension.”

Despite the odds, Neil and the Rubibi people are actively working to revitalize their language. We were still shaking the outback dust from our boots when we were invited into a serene, air-conditioned classroom at the local primary school. Accompanied by Neil, we were allowed to observe and film a Yawuru language lesson conducted by an elder for students at Cable Beach Primary School. Doris Edgar, an elder of uncertain age in her 80s (births were not recorded when she was born), sat calm and dignified, holding forth to a circle of rapt fifth graders. Beside Doris was a table with dozens of plant specimens arranged into neat bundles, including many we had seen in our outback walk with Neil. The room was full of objects labeled in the language: a papier-mâché shark, for example, and a stuffed wallaby. Bright drawings of jellyfish illustrated Yawuru numbers: one,
waranyjarri;
two,
gujarra;
three,
gurdidi
. After three, the small numbers combined to make larger ones:
gujarra gujarra
(“two-two”) meant “four,”
gujarra gurdidi
(“two-three”) was “five,” and
gurdidi gurdidi
(“three-three”) meant “six.” After six, the number series ended with
manyja,
a borrowed form of the English “many.”

The eagerness and determination on the students' faces gave the lie to arguments that small language death is a natural result of progress and that we should not lament the loss of these tongues. It flatly contradicted the notion that children will not learn an obscure language or cannot be motivated to do so. It was truly inspiring to see children understanding and speaking an ancient tongue. Why did they want to learn Yawuru, we queried, instead of a larger, more useful language? A chubby 10-year-old girl with braids piped up instantly. “It's a dying language,” she said solemnly, “and we want to help it survive.”
14

Australia holds the top-ranked language hotspot, but we had many more we needed to visit. Poring over our maps, we selected Paraguay as an urgent priority and began planning our expedition. It would turn out to have some parallels to Australia, including—among the Chamacoco tribe—elderly speakers who had known a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in their youth and now flew on airplanes and used cell phones.

A MEETING WITH GODS

I crouched in the underbrush, at the edge of a remote Paraguayan village, listening to odd muffled sounds and chants that echoed among the leaves. As usual, my fellow linguist Greg Anderson was just a few steps away. Two steps in front of us ran a small footpath that led to the sacred dancing grounds of this village, Puerto Diana. We wanted to simply observe, not disturb, so we remained camouflaged out of sight. All around, murmurs, chants, and an occasional whistle filtered through the thick underbrush, mingling with the whine of mosquitoes that buzzed in my ears. Suddenly three runners appeared, advancing swiftly in single file through the bushes. They looked like nothing I had ever seen. Their heads were completely covered with heavy sacks woven of fibrous vines and ringed with emu feathers. Their upper bodies were smudged black with charcoal, and their waists were adorned with thick skirts made of emu feathers and twigs. They made odd, chickenlike movements of their heads and uttered strange guttural sounds.

These were the shaman's soldiers, whose role was to appear fearsome while dancing in single file around the sacred tree. They assisted by carrying ritual objects such as bundled sticks and gourd rattles. Assembling first in the hidden men's grove, out of sight of the village's women and children, they adorned their bodies, smoked, and drank a hallucinogenic substance. Then for an hour they chanted, jumped up and down, and swayed side to side to work themselves into a trancelike state. As soon as they heard the shaman's summoning call, they made their running entrance onto the main dance grounds, where the people awaited. None of the hundreds of villagers would have been able to identify them, so well disguised were they. In the beliefs of the Chamacoco people—also called the Ybytoso Ishir—these dancing masked figures, shamans and soldiers, do not merely
represent
the gods, they
are
gods.

The dance site, located at one extreme end of the village, was a flat, round tract of grass with a single, enormous tree in the center. The dirt was packed down from years of use, and no grass grew, but it looked as if had been unused of late.

With the permission of local leader Kafote, our National Geographic team had come to observe a reenactment of a ceremony that had not been performed in half a generation, very nearly stamped out by the efforts of missionaries.
15
A ritual of vital importance to the Chamacoco people, this was just one small part of their complex religious beliefs, connecting sky to earth, past to present, and the sacred to the profane. The main dancers, believed to become gods during the ritual, maintained strict anonymity. They wore full face and body masks, some with only blackened feet protruding. The feet stomped ominously in a circular pattern. Chris Rainier, our intrepid photographer, was in the thick of it, jogging backward to keep up with the shamans' rapid circumambulations.

Surprisingly, even the small children who had not seen this ritual before did not seem alarmed. One boy about ten years old stepped boldly forward into the circle, offering his infant brother, who looked to be about a year old, to a masked figure. The god swooped toward them, reached out a hand, and for just a second lifted the infant in under his draped body shawl, bouncing him up and down, before thrusting him back into his brother's outstretched arms. Was this a blessing? An initiation? The infant, hefted by his older brother, kept calm throughout and did not flinch.

A young Chamacoco boy holds his brother up to be blessed by the masked shaman's assistant.

Agna Peralta, a lady of about 60, stood at the edge of the sacred circle, which women were not permitted to enter. Yet she was clearly a participant, supporting the chants with her own strong, deep voice and insistent rattling of her feather-decorated gourd. She had seen this ritual many times before in her younger years, but most of the bystanders, children and young people under age 16, had never seen it performed.

The entire Chamacoco religion, so brilliantly explored by Ticio Escobar in his book
The Curse of Nemur,
rests upon oppositions and rendings. Power is stolen from the heavens by men who dare to climb a sacred tree to copulate with a female goddess. Nourishment is stolen by men who clandestinely gather honey, the most prized food, then conceal it from the women. Images of bodily fluids pervade their mythology: sperm, saliva, and excrement all figure prominently as either hindering access to the gods or humbling poor wretched humans who live in the mud. The gods can be either beneficent or malevolent, but they must be appeased.

Back in the concealed grove, where only male participants of the ceremony could go, the shamans rested and conversed. The blind shaman Mario rocked back and forth on the ground in a trance, singing the same sounds over and over. Wearing a pair of yellow shorts adorned with feathers, and a high feather headdress, his entire body smudged with black coal dust, he had been in this state already for several hours. He held a gourd rattle and shook it persistently. No one paid him any special attention, yet everyone seemed to feed off his energy.

A few yards away, the two senior shamans sat huddled together. The first, painted black, began to retch and cough, a fit that lasted for at least ten minutes, until he suddenly reached two fingers deep into his throat and brought out a dangling worm. He “fed” the worm carefully into the mouth of the second shaman, who swallowed it. Moments later, emerging from their collective trance state, they smoked a cigarette and laughed at a joke someone was telling. Soon they would leave the grove to return to the ceremonial circle, where they would conclude the ritual.