The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (36 page)

Survival International reached out to the photographer Sebastião Salgado, and he invited me to join him on this expedition, whose purpose is to shine a global spotlight on the plight of the Awá and to persuade Brazil's Ministry of Justice to evict the
invasores
so the Awá and the forest they depend on can be left in peace. There is no time to lose. All the bureaucratic hoops seem to have been jumped, a process that began in the 1970s. In 2009, an expulsion decree was handed down by a federal judge in São Luís—who described the situation as “a real genocide”—but that was overturned. In 2011, Judge Jirair Aram Meguerian ruled that the Brazilian government had to evict the illegal loggers. But they are still there, an anarchic collection of families, some of them rich
fazendeiros,
or ranchers, with satellite dishes and solar panels on their roofs, but most of them
posseiros,
dirt-poor, landless, illiterate squatters living in mud huts with roofs of
babaçu
-palm fronds. The Ministry of Justice has to give the order for the eviction operation, which will be a joint endeavor involving police, army, FUNAI, and the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources. The ministry is understandably reluctant to carry it out, because things could turn violent, and because many of the
invasores
are among the millions of homeless, jobless Brazilians, the very people the ruling Workers' Party is committed to improving the lot of. In addition, much of the land in Maranhão is owned by a small oligarchy of extremely wealthy ranchers who have their hands in much of the logging and are not sympathetic to the Indians.

It's been 10 years since TI Awá was demarcated, and 8 since it was officially deeded to the tribe, and 2 since the expulsion decree, and nothing has happened except that more
invasores
have arrived and more trees have been cut. There's already a 12-mile slice that's been taken out on the TI's southeastern border—I drove through it, and hardly a tree has been left standing—and it's going to be very hard to get the
invasores
out of there.

Carlos Travassos, FUNAI's chief of general coordination with uncontacted and recently contacted Indians, who is with us, tells me that of Brazil's roughly 239 tribes, the Awá
isolados
are one of only three who are still nomadic. They hunt with bows and arrows and gather fruit, nuts, and honey in the forest. They don't have villages or grow anything, and they don't want anything to do with the outside world, which they are aware of—their family members having been killed by its guns and diseases—but not to the extent that they know that they are living in a country called Brazil, or what a country is, or that they share a planet with 7 billion of us
kanai,
the Awá word for everyone who is not one of them.

 

Where the Isolados Roam

 

There are 66 uncontacted tribal groups in the Brazilian Amazon, according to FUNAI, and another 30 or so unconfirmed ones—more than anywhere else in the world—and Carlos Travassos is certain others will come to light as the last fastnesses of the rain forest are penetrated. FUNAI's
sertanistas
—backlands experts, as they were called—used to do the delicate and dangerous job of making contact with them, but its policy since 1987 has been to not initiate contact, to have nothing to do with the
isolados
unless absolutely necessary, and to intervene only if the tribespeople's well-being and ability to live their way of life are affected. Travassos, who is from São Paulo and did his first fieldwork in one of its favelas, or slums, is only 33 and full of energy, and he cares passionately about these people. From 2007 to 2009 he was stationed in the Javari Valley of Brazil and Peru, which has the greatest concentration of
isolados,
perhaps as many as 16 different peoples. He has a video on his laptop of some Korubo shouting from a riverbank in 2009. Four hundred Korubo, in three groups in the Javari Valley, are still uncontacted. The men are extremely muscular. Their weapon of choice is a seven-foot club. They have clubbed 7 FUNAI employees and 100 loggers and other
invasores
to death.

The Awá have killed a few invaders, most recently a logger they found on an illegal trail three miles from Juriti in 2008, but they are a gentle, unaggressive people, Travassos tells me. We talk about how
uncontacted
doesn't really convey the reality. Most of the uncontacted villages spotted from the air have banana plantations, and the banana was brought to the New World by the Portuguese, so there must have been some contact somewhere along the line.
Autonomous
and
stateless
have been suggested as alternatives, but there are millions of people in those categories who are at least marginally in the modern world, so those terms don't really work either.

Salgado and I agree that this is not only about the Awá. It is time for all the people in their situation—the Indians in Brazil's 688 Terras Indígenas, the 370 million indigenous people in the world, 40 percent of whom are tribal, who have been treated abominably for centuries on every continent by the Europeans who came, saw, and conquered—to be valued and cared about. This is their moment, and one hopes we can help, and the moment seems to have arrived in Brazil just as I did. In the days leading up to our trip, Terena Indians clashed with ranchers in Mato Grosso do Sul, south of Amazonia (the reason being that the Ministry of Justice took the land from the ranchers and gave it to the Indians, to whom it rightfully belonged, then gave it back to the ranchers), and some Terena set several of the ranchers' compounds on fire. The Federal Police were sent in and one of the Terena was shot dead. Simultaneously but unrelatedly, 30 Kaingang Indians, the demarcation of whose
terras
in the southern state of Paraná has been getting nowhere, took over the Workers' Party's headquarters, in Curitiba, and Kayapo and other tribespeople have occupied the site of the Belo Monte dam, on the Xingu River, an ill-conceived boondoggle that will put much of their homelands underwater. Recently, more than 100 Mundurucú Indians took over FUNAI's headquarters, in Brasília, Brazil's capital, where we met with its president two days earlier.

The minister of justice, José Eduardo Cardoza, says the Força Nacional will contain or put down these Indian revolts, and the ministry oversees the agency—FUNAI—that is supposed to be looking out for them. As Antônio Carlos Jobim put it, Brazil is not for beginners. A large segment of the population thinks the Indians are
malandros
—lazy good-for-nothings—who don't contribute anything to the society. Why should they, only 0.4 percent of the population, have 13 percent of Brazil's land surface when millions of Brazilians have no land at all? The
ruralistas,
the conservative ranchers, have a powerful lobby in the Congress in Brasília, and the mining and timber companies are dying to get onto the Indians' land. There is a bill to open the TIs to mining and logging “in consultation” with their Indian occupants but not giving them veto power, and another to take the responsibility for demarcating future TIs away from FUNAI and give it to Congress, and the
ruralistas
are pushing for the existing TIs to be re-demarcated and reduced.

To see what the Indians' lands would look like if the
ruralistas
get their way, we only had to look outside our pickup truck's window on the journey to Juriti. The Amazon rain forest used to cover the western half of Maranhão, but now 71 percent of that is gone, according to the latest satellite images, and more than half of what remains is in the TIs, which are altogether 13 percent deforested (TI Awá itself is more than 30 percent deforested). All day long we drove through thick, lush pasture, dotted with white, humped Nelore zebu cattle, grazing in what was once thick, lush rain forest.

 

Never Stand Under a Howling Guariba

 

During my 10-day stay in Juriti, I get into a routine of going out into the forest each morning with Patriolino Garreto, one of FUNAI's three rotating
chefes de posto,
and whatever Awá he can round up who are interested in joining us, which is only the teenagers. Patriolino is a local 58-year-old country boy who has been working at the Juriti post since 1994. He doesn't speak Awá or know much about their culture.
“Os mitos deles só eles que sabem,”
he tells me as we climb up to the ridge above the village—they are the only ones who know their myths.

“Paca, anta, queixada, veado, guariba”
—Patriolino reels off the names of the Awá's main prey: agouti, tapir, peccary, deer, howler monkey. “Our forest in Maranhão is full of delicious meat,” he says, “but so much of it is gone.” Loud drilling directs us to a huge black woodpecker with a red crest and white cheeks tearing into a dead tree. We stop to watch a procession of 30 leaf-cutter ants, each carrying a vertical flake of leaf many times its size—mulch for their fungus gardens—enter one of the tunnels into their subterranean colony under a five-foot-square dome of bare earth. Soon afterward we find ourselves in a space maybe 100 yards square in which eight or so male pihas are screaming their hearts out, hoping to entice nearby females who are looking for partners. These competitive-display gatherings are known as “leks.” None of the pihas, small gray birds in the continga family, are visible in the dense jungle foliage, but the collective din of their piercing whistles is earsplitting. The pihas own the soundscape of the Amazon rain forest. One of the Awá boys does a perfect imitation of their two-note shrieks, which sound like greatly amplified catcalls. Even the birds are fooled, and thinking a new male has joined their lek, they answer him excitedly and even more shrilly.

The Awá are masterful mimics of the birds and the monkeys. This is an essential skill for people making their living in a rain forest. Patriolino says that when you hear a piha it means water is nearby, and, sure enough, we come to a
brejo,
a little swamp of
açai
palms, whose dark blue berries have antioxidant properties and are a big item in health food stores around the world. On the midslopes above the swamp, thick columns of magnificent, towering angelim trees—andira, one of the species the loggers are after—shoot up every couple of hundred feet, and on the ridge we find one that has been marked for cutting, probably by Guajajara working for the
madeireiros.
The barbarians are unquestionably at the gate.

The boys climb a vine way up into a flaring-buttressed sapopema tree, which is how they get honey, but we come to another towering sapopema in the middle of the forest that has been felled with a chainsaw. Patriolino explains that some of the Awá borrowed FUNAI's chainsaw and dropped the tree to get the honey in its crown so they wouldn't have to climb it. I ask Patriolino if an Awá hunter saw a mother tapir—a relative of the horse with a short, prehensile snout; it's the largest land mammal in the neotropics—and her calf, would they think, with the game getting so scarce, now that they are hunting with shotguns and the
madeireiros
are, too, maybe they should let them go? Do they have any concept of wildlife management? Patriolino says, “No. They don't think that way.” A tapir feeds the entire village for a week.

A shotgun pops in the distance. Iuwí has shot a
guariba,
a howler monkey, the Awá's main source of protein. The boys also find the honey of some
tiuba
bees in the hole of an
inari
tree, scoop it out, wrap it up in one of the broad green leaves of the arums proliferating on the forest floor, cut a strip of
pauari
bark, which they use as a cord to tie the bundle up with, and one of them slings it over his shoulder. “The forest gives the Awá everything,” Patriolino says.

Iuwí emerges from the forest with the carcass of the howler. Howlers are so important to the Awá that they give them a special classification, closer to humans than other monkeys are. Their howling bouts at dawn and the end of the day sound like wind rushing out of the portals of Hades. Patriolino says you never stand under a howling
guariba,
because it will shit on you.

 

Bands on the Run

 

The Awá were originally from Pará, the next state west, part of a wave of Tupí-Guaraní hunter-gatherers who came from south-central Amazonia sometime in the mists of prehistory and settled in the lower Tocantins Valley. When the Portuguese arrived on the scene, 500 years ago, the Awá had villages and plantations and were in a more or less constant state of war with their neighbors the Ka'apor. The Portuguese enslaved them and gave them smallpox, and perhaps fleeing a revolt on their subjugators' plantations between 1835 and 1840 called the Rebelião da Cabanagem, which took 20,000 to 30,000 lives, they fled east to Maranhão. Having learned how vulnerable they were as sedentary agriculturists, they became hunter-gatherers, who could break camp and take off in minutes. The first documentation of their presence in Maranhão was in 1853. By 1900 they had moved into the traditional space of the local people, the Guajajara, who are the largest tribe in Brazil, more than 20,000 strong, and have been in contact the longest, since some French came upon them in 1615. Being much less numerous, the Awá had to keep a low profile and melt into the forest. It was impossible for them to secure and defend land for growing crops. By the time the first Awá were contacted, in 1973, they had lost all their farming skills and interest in farming, and even the knowledge of how to make fire. But this was not cultural devolution, as has often been written about the peoples who had sophisticated cultures on the Amazon River itself and fled up to the headwaters of its tributaries and became hunter-gatherers. It was adaptation. And now the Awá are going to have to adapt again—to the modern world. The contacted ones already are.

In the 1940s, cotton became Maranhão's new crop, and a wave of colonists flooded the interior. The Guajajara, Tembe, and Ka'apor—some of whom were indigenous, others of whom fled east when the Awá did—entered into relations with them, but the Awá stayed hidden from the national society. Many Awá died between 1960 and 1980, particularly after Brazil's military dictatorship took over, in 1964, and instituted a policy of “assimilating” the indigenous people that included exterminating the recalcitrant ones, those standing in the way of “progress” and national unification. The government dropped bombs on them and fed them sugar laced with arsenic. Many of the atrocities were exposed in the 7,000-page Figueiredo report, in 1967, which led to the dissolution of the Indian Protection Service, whose employees had committed many of them, and the founding of FUNAI as well as Survival International, which was started in 1969 by a group of Brits horrified by a story in the London
Sunday Times Magazine
about the genocide in the Brazilian Amazon. There are stories about Awá being massacred over the years: during the construction of two highways across the state in the '70s; by builders of the 550-mile-long railroad to the iron-ore mines in the Serra dos Carajás, in Pará, in the early '80s, and the settlers who poured in in its wake; by refugees from the drought in Piauí; by the
pistoleiros
of ranchers; and by loggers. Most recently, in 2011, an eight-year-old Awá girl from one of the
isolado
bands in another TI reportedly wandered into a logging camp and was tied to a tree and burned alive as an example to the others. But more Awá, according to Travassos, have died of colds and at the hands of their traditional enemies, the Ka'apor.