The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (38 page)

Every couple of miles there is a little
povoado,
a town along a railroad that sprang up as people who worked on the tracks brought their families, and then others came, too. A lot of Awá were killed by these settlers. Now the
povoados
have streets and houses and stores with electricity and running water. We stop at one so I can buy ammo for the Awá of Tiracambu, which I have to do because Cicero and João Operador can't. This is one criticism I have of FUNAI. It converts the Indians from bows to guns, which makes hunting much easier, but then the game gets depleted, and after a few years the hunters have to make, in the case of the Awá of Juriti, a day's lope from the village before they can find a tapir or a peccary. Equally insidiously—and in the long run of dubious benefit—the conversion forces them into the cash economy, because they have to have ammo. FUNAI provided the Indians with ammo until last year, when, perhaps fearing their increasing militancy, or to save money, the Brazilian legislature enacted the Indigenous Peoples Disarmament Act. The Indians can keep their guns, but they have to buy their own ammo, and the only way they can do this is by selling their trees to the
madeireiros,
in the process selling themselves down the river. Putting the Indians in this situation does not seem to have been very well thought out, or humane, or in the best interests of the people FUNAI is supposed to be there for. It brings them into the economy, which they were doing fine—even better—without, then it leaves them high and dry. This is why I have to spring for the ammo, a prerequisite for any visitor. I had to buy some for the Juriti Awá, too, so they can kill more animals and continue to upset the equilibrium they had with their ecosystem when they used bows. But to ask the Awá to go back to bows is no more realistic than asking people in the modern world to give up their cell phones.

A few settlements later, Cicero turns onto a path that goes through the bush down to the river. Tiracambu's
chefe de posto,
José Ribamar Silva Rocha, is waiting on a sandbar with a skiff to pole us across. We walk up a ways to the
posto,
which has electricity from a line across the river. The modern world is right on the other side: every hour on the hour, 24 hours a day, a two-mile-long train whose cars are heaped with iron ore destined for Europe and China passes. It is a terrible, grating noise. The Awá call it “the Train of Fear” because it has scared all the animals away.

 

José has an old-time European face and in his black Wellingtons and with his hair in a little ponytail he looks like a character in a Thomas Hardy novel. He tells us that for three years two brothers, Aoréh and Aoráh, lived up the hill. Nobody knew what tribe they belonged to. They spoke
uma lingua desconhecida
—an unknown language. Maybe they were
isolados
from around Paragominas. There were several groups until the ranchers wiped out all the forest. Aoréh died in São Luís of cancer of the stomach, and Aoráh is up in Awá Guajá, the Awá village in TI Alto Turiaçu.

After dinner Tiracambu's leadership, half a dozen young men and a few girls in their late teens and early 20s, come from the village, and Cicero tells them why we are here. I am a journalist from a place very far away called America—it would take at least two years to walk there—and would like to meet Karapiru. And João Operador has brought a new grindstone for the rice huller, the machine that takes the chaff off the grains of dry rice these Awá grow.

Several of the young leaders have three horizontal black lines from the juice of the genipap tree painted on their cheeks, Guajajara warrior lines, which many of the young Brazilians who have taken to the streets are wearing, except that they are green. These slashes apparently migrated from the Guajajara to the national society and have been the insignia of Brazilian protests since 1992.

 

In the morning, João Operador tries to change the grindstone and discovers it's the wrong size. The young leadership comes from the village with the answer to our petition. We gather on the porch of the
posto,
and one of them, who is wearing a monkey-claw necklace over his T-shirt, says no visiting
brancos
will be allowed into their village or to talk to Karapiru until we talk to Soteiro. Hélio Soteiro, who also came with us to Juriti, is the FUNAI officer in charge of the four Awá settlements and the three
isolado
groups. He answers to Travassos—he's Cicero's boss—and is based in São Luís. Cicero says he has conjunctivitis, which is very contagious to the Indians, so he can't come to see them until it clears up. Plus he is in charge of the operation to expel the
invasores
from TI Awá—his main preoccupation at the moment.

“We are going to sell our rifles,” the leader tells us. “What good are they? Because we don't have ammunition and we don't want to sell our trees like the Guajajara are doing.” I show them the three boxes of shotgun shells I have brought for them. They are the wrong caliber. These Awá have 12-gauge shotguns, and the Juriti hunters have 20-gauge ones. So my offering does not sway them. The leader continues to enumerate their grievances. They don't have gas for their chainsaw and generator, and there are six more things. So that's that. “They were
muito irritados,
” Cicero says as we head out in the truck.

These Awá boys have been learning about militancy and activism from the Guajajara. FUNAI's popularity in Tiracambu is clearly not high at the moment. Already the young leadership has thrown out the Catholic missionaries of CIMI, the Indigenous Missionary Council, after deciding that their presence was, all in all, not good for the Awá—the services its missionaries were providing had a hidden agenda, to get them to renounce their animism and their own big guy in the sky, Maira, and to come to the Lord and be saved from eternal hellfire.

FUNAI's popularity is even lower in the other village, Awá. The young leadership there is even more
irritado.
A few days ago a woman in the village died of visceral leishmaniasis, which is fatal unless treated promptly and properly, and it wasn't. So they have taken one of FUNAI's vehicles as compensation for her preventable death. Cicero thinks there's no point in schlepping over to Awá, because it would be like walking into a hornets' nest. According to Uirá Garcia, the village's 150 inhabitants are divided into the progressives, who are militant and fighting for their rights, and the traditionalists, who are even more traditional than the Awá of Juriti. They go off into the forest for two or three months at a time.

While we are pondering our next step, Cicero gets a call from Soteiro and announces that the mission is aborted. We have to return to the
posto de vigilância
immediately. The
posto de vigilância
was built six months ago at the entrance to TI Awá and is where the expulsion operation, if it ever happens, will be run out of. Things are heating up. Four truckloads of
invasores
have gone to São Luís to protest to their
deputado
about their impending eviction. They're asking that 8 of the 12 miles they've invaded be given to them—there's nothing left of the forest, so what good would they be to the Indians?—claiming that where they are isn't in the TI anyway, and demanding that the whole thing be resurveyed. This is what happened in 2011 when the government issued the decree to dismantle their houses, fences, roads, and other works: the
invasores
made a lot of noise and threatened violence, and the government backed off. We have to go back because there are only two people at the
posto,
and Cicero has to supervise the repairing of the road so Salgado—who is on a tight schedule and can't take the river—can get out.

I was hoping to interview some of the
invasores,
but Cicero doesn't think this is the moment. It could be dangerous because they are
superirritados.
It sounds like I've reached the point of diminishing returns, and another Amazon adventure has concluded. Cicero drops me off at a place where I catch a van to São Luís, and from there I fly down to Rio, my 10 days among the Awá already seeming like a dream—but an unforgettable one.

 

Cult of Progress

 

My thoughts keep returning to the
isolados.
How unified are they in their resolve to have nothing to do with the modern world? Do they have arguments about what to do? Their conversations, their campfire stories, must be very interesting.

In March, a FUNAI team went up the Igarapé Mão de Onça to check on the
isolados
there for the first time since 1997, when there were nine of them, and found evidence—a recent fire and a lean-to with fresh
babaçu
fronds—suggesting they were still there. In June, the team went back and could find no sign of them, but discovered new logging trails only a few miles away. Leonardo Lenin, the leader of the FUNAI team, fears the worst.

Back in Brasília, there are encouraging signs that Justice Minister Cardozo may enforce the expulsion decree. In June, 300 soldiers and 46 vehicles were brought in to shut down the
madeireiros
in TI Alto Turiaçu. Seven illegal sawmills were decommissioned, and thousands of logs were destroyed. Cardozo says the soldiers will next be moved to TI Awá and reinforced with the troops who carried out the long-delayed and only partially successful expulsion of the
invasores
from the Xavante's territory last year. Operation Awá, the eviction of the 1,500 families, will be carried out by the end of the year.

I hope so. I would love to come back and learn more about the Awá's amazing cosmology and record the birds and the monkeys and their flawless imitations of them. Brazil can't afford to lose the Awá. Mankind can't let any of these last tribal people who live off the bounty of their forest, reef, or desert and are an integral part of their ecosystems, along with all the other species, disappear. These last 350 Awá are precious. As Octavio Paz observed, “The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life.”

FROM
Travel + Leisure

 

I
T'S
5:41
A.M.
and I'm headed from the airport into the city formerly known as Bombay. In the next two weeks I will hear its current name, Mumbai, spoken exactly zero times, so I'm going to stick to Bombay. Bleary-eyed and tired after 15 hours aboard Kuwait's intriguing and completely dry national airline, I am staring at the ramshackle temple by the side of the road with these beguiling words stretched across its façade:
Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known god.

What the hell does that mean?

We are puttering down a series of dying streets and highways in a tiny, ancient Fiat that would have made an East German Trabant look sturdy, dodging an obstacle course of mopeds, fellow Fiats, and the occasional resigned-looking bullock. Suddenly I am feeling spiritual. My usual liberal arts agnosticism is difficult at a time like this. I want to trust in a
known god
for the duration of my stay in the city. In short order, we pass by the Status Refine Gourmet, the Palais Royale skyscraper, and the Happy Home & School for the Blind. A sign instructing the reader of
THE SYMPTOMS OF MALNUTRITION
(“If your child complains of constant lethargy perhaps malnutrition is to blame”) hangs next to a gleaming Porsche dealership. I am silent, and a little stunned. My driver is honking every other second, as is everyone around him. But it feels less like a plea to get out of the way than an affirmation of one's existence. The honking says
I'm here!
Which is what everyone in this impossible, ridiculous, and addictive city wants you to know. They're here! And they're coming right at you.

I've come to Bombay because of a book written by a friend. Ounce for ounce, Suketu Mehta's
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
is, in my opinion, not just the best book on Bombay, but the best book on anywhere in the world right now.
Maximum City,
a Pulitzer Prize finalist, has been rightly compared to Dickens's and Balzac's 19th-century treatments of London and Paris, and it gives Bombay the same immortal sense of flowing, unabated, tragicomic life. You close Suketu's book thinking that Bombay is not just a snapshot of the world, it is the world. Or at least the entry level to the world. It's where you get off the train from your village and join the path that leads eventually to London or Palo Alto or, as I see from the grimy window of my Fiat, to a gated community in the suburbs built exclusively
FOR ARISTOCRATS
.

I forgot to mention that it's also a very funny book. And Bombay is a very funny city. At one point during this trip, as Suketu's taxi idles at a red light, a 14-year-old kid tries to sell him a pirated paperback copy of
Maximum City.
Suketu asks him what the book is about.

“Oh, all of Bombay is in this book!” the young street salesman says.

“Well, how much do you want?” Suketu asks.

“Six hundred rupees!” the kid says—about $9.

“Six hundred? Do you know I've written it?”

“Fine,” the kid shrugs. “If you've written it, you can have it for four hundred.”

Which is to say, if you want to trust your unknown future to a known god in Bombay, he might as well be Suketu.

 

What's it like to be a lonely person in Bombay? I guess I'll never find out. People talk to me even when it's clear that I don't understand Marathi, Gujarati, or Hindi. To not talk to someone here, to keep your opinions to yourself, is seen as mildly offensive. I meet Suketu at the best place for talking, the Press Club. Suketu's journalist buddies are gathered on the club's rooftop, which overlooks the cricket field of the Azad Maidan. This is part of the greenbelt in the center of South Bombay that leads to the Victorian Gothic skyline of the famous Oval Maidan (the Rajabai Clock Tower is a fearsome answer to Big Ben). We munch pappadum and deep-fried tapioca balls, smoothing their crunchy passage with a combination of Thums Up, a beloved local Coca-Cola impostor, and Old Monk, a beloved local rum impostor. After the worldwide coverage of the horrific rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi, I get the immediate sense that the country is wounded. One of the journalists says, “They'll talk about rape for now, the way they used to talk about corruption, and then nothing will change.” It's hard to argue with this brain trust, most of whom seem to have written at least one book about their country. But I take note that on our busy rooftop, there are only three women in a sea of men, and all of them are at our table. One of them is a young journalist named Nishita Jha who covers gender violence and pop culture for
Tehelka,
“India's most fearless weekly.” Everyone chimes in to tell me that Bombay is far more cosmopolitan than Delhi and far safer for women. (After the recent gang rape of a female photojournalist in Bombay, I'm not as sure about the second part.)