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.
Kafote, the young, dynamic leader of the community, sat down to talk to us about the future of his culture. What changes had he witnessed over the past 20 years? He turned immediately to the topic of the traditional religion: “The culture is weak now.
Twenty years ago shamans were still curing; the culture was strong. Veneto is the last strong shaman with powers. He cures by biting the patient and drawing out the sickness in his hand, shows it to the people, then gets rid of it.”
Though not a shaman himself, Kafote described different types of shamans: There are “big fish, rain, earth, and forest [shamans]. Some are more powerful than others. Some shamans live on earth and others live underground or in the sky. To be a shaman, one must dream of the invisible gods. When the shaman sleeps, he goes up to the god’s world and obtains their powers. There are different types of gods and powers. When the shaman dreams and sings, the gods give him more power. The most powerful shaman lives in the area of Puerto Leda. We cannot talk to him because he is a god, and invisible.”
Turning to the issue of subsistence, Kafote asked, “Why do we have to eat noodles now? Because we no longer have gods who help us. We have to work to get some kind of money and buy something. But before, the gods gave it all. You just had to sing, for example, to call a fish, and the fish would fall before you. Before, you could sing and call for the wild pigs, and they would come and we ate them. Now it’s more difficult.”
Thinking of all the fishermen we had seen on the river, we wondered if they still used songs to call fish, if they still practiced the religious rituals to ensure bounty. “Yes, people still use them, but we cannot get into Puerto Leda and visit the most powerful god, who would give power to our people. It is now prohibited to go on the land that was once ours. The government sold it to the Moonies. Now we can only work, so our way of life is degrading. In 20 more years, we will no longer have anything.”
Concluding the interview, we asked Kafote what he would like the world to know about his people. Looking directly into the camera, he began an impassioned and tearful speech: “Our lands are so small,” he began to weep as he said it, “muy pequeñas, and we are crowded in from all sides, with people taking our forests and poisoning our rivers. We have mercury in the fish, and a dry well in the village. We get nothing from the logging and mineral extracting companies. The toxins they use seep into our river and contaminate our water. We want to buy back some of our traditional lands, where there are still animals, but it’s too expensive now.”
LANGUAGES OF A SECRET LAND
The indigenous people of Paraguay remain a secret within an enigma. Many live in the inhospitable backcountry, the Chaco, accessible only by air, boat, or seasonally impassable dirt roads. In Asunción, the modern capital city, people expressed surprise at our destination: “There are languages out in the Chaco?”
While poor in some respects, Paraguay is indeed rich in languages, forming part of the central South America language hotspot. In addition to Spanish, Paraguayan peoples speak at least 18 languages, grouped into 6 distinct language families. To calculate the linguistic diversity index for Paraguay, we divide the number of families (6) by the number of languages (18), yielding an index of .33. This astonishing level of diversity triples that of Europe, which, with its 18 language families and around 164 languages, yields a diversity index of just .11. How did so many languages evolve in such a remote place, and among such a small (less than 200,000 total) population? Part of the answer lies in geography. The Chaco is burning hot and dust-filled in the summer, besieged by mosquitoes and impassible in the wet season, and filled with thorny plants and poisonous snakes. It defies even the barest level of subsistence living. And yet these small tribes have managed to thrive here.
Survival dictated mobility. No one place could support people year-round, and so the Chaco peoples fished at the riverbank for half the year, then trekked into the dry interior to forage for the other half. Conditions forced local tribes to continually fissure into smaller groups that could support themselves off the land and prevented the consolidation of peoples into larger settlements. Despite the ferocity of the land, richly imaginative cultures sprang up here, with fantastic mythologies, feather-dancing rituals, and discoveries about the medicinal uses of local plants. What remains of this knowledge in these survivor cultures?
Elders still alive today, like Baaso, who gave his age as 100, recall the precontact era. Baaso recounted to us how, during his early years, his people—the Ishir—wore no clothing besides animal skins, had no knowledge of metal, glass, or guns, and had no source of nutrition besides the fish they caught, small animals they shot with bow and arrow, and berries and honey they foraged from the forest. Dividing their time between temporary encampments along the river and foraging sites in the dry interior, Baaso’s people had not at that time seen outsiders, airplanes, or any other modern technology. Once contact happened, the world came crashing in on the Chamacoco, and they were exposed to warfare, weapons, subjugation, and sedentarization. In Baaso’s own centenarian lifetime, we can trace the arc of an isolated, precontact people from living as hunter-gatherers in a stone-age subsistence pattern to living in villages in sight of a mobile phone tower and an airstrip, granting interviews to visiting scientists, and sending out their stories and reminiscences to a global audience over the Internet.
Baaso’s grandson, Alvin Paja, listened with a bemused expression as his grandfather talked about hunting with bow and arrow. Alvin likes to fish, but he uses motorboats and is conversant in text messaging and the latest Argentine telenovelas. He can only imagine the world his grandfather inhabited, and yet he is connected to it through the stories, the words, and the Chamacoco language.
Baaso, with grandson Alvin at his side, related all this with a sly sense of humor and a desire to tell his own story. He may have been pulling our leg just a bit, since an elder in another village insisted that Baaso was not 100, but only 85. Either way, his mind was clear, and his experiences, both pre-and postcontact, rang true. They are the Ishir people’s collective fate. Having been plunged from the deep past into the dizzying present, fast-forwarding centuries of technology in the span of a single lifetime, Baaso’s perspective is utterly unique and remarkable.
Baaso, a Chamacoco elder, with his grandson, Alvin Paja Balbuena, in Puerto Diana, Paraguay.
Across the village from Baaso’s place, elder Agna Peralta, wearing a bright red dress, took out her dried gourd rattle, stood purposefully in front of her house, and burst into song. The deep overtones coming from her small and seemingly frail body took us by surprise, a loud and potent mix of chant, rhythm, and incantation. The rhythm of the gourd shaker slowed down, then picked up speed again: “Ekewo dashiyo lato ehuwo….” I jotted down syllables in my notebook, making a rough transcription but not comprehending. Agna later told us the lyrics were repeated variations on “Come, fish, come to my house.” She learned this song from her father, a shaman, and its purpose was to beckon the river creatures to provide sustenance.
No fish were summoned by Agna’s powerful voice on this occasion, but children from all over the village made a beeline to her house. They looked in bewilderment at us, the National Geographic team with our cameras, recording devices, and notebooks, as we sat listening with rapt attention to Agna’s song. The song itself was a rare occurrence, and the fact that a team of scientists had come from afar to hear it sung made quite an impression. I wondered if the children were paying attention to the lyrics, in a language they are increasingly filtering out in favor of Spanish. At last, Agna stopped singing and set down her rattle. “Maybe tomorrow I can sing again,” she told us. “Now, I’m tired.”
At the nearby school, a brother and sister aged eight and ten said, yes, of course, they still know songs in Chamacoco, and they dutifully sang a song at the prompting of their teacher, Señora Teresa. Though we saw joy in their faces, it seemed very much like an effort and a performance. Clearly they were more comfortable chatting among themselves in Spanish, and this schoolyard habit may have already determined the future fate of Chamacoco, at least in Puerto Diana. Señora Teresa said the children knew some Chamacoco, but it was “a language at risk of extinction.” She showed us a first-grade textbook in the language, compiled by her and her fel
low teachers. She asked her student, eight-year-old Pedro, to read from the book. Haltingly, he attempted to sound out the syllables. Señora Teresa corrected him and then translated for us into Spanish, from what sounded like a primer for cultural assimilation: “Here we are in the white people’s school. They are teaching how to eat.” “Eating on the ground is unclean.” “On our desks we will do beautiful things.”16
Departing Puerto Diana, we set off downstream in a couple of rickety canoes to visit one of the very smallest villages in all of Paraguay, tiny Karcha Bahlut, which in the Chamacoco tongue means “Big Shell, Little Shell.” Fewer than 100 souls, plus a few itinerant fishermen, perch on a high escarpment that overlooks the river. The precipice is a midden composed of millions and millions of shells. Some archaeologists assume these were deposited by humans and are thus a sign of ancient habitation. An opposing view was explained to us by Jota Escobar, Paraguay’s leading ornithologist, who thinks the shells were deposited by birds, and that humans happened along later to partake in the feast and add to the pile. Either way, the shell midden is massive and solid. Atop it stand rickety huts with hammocks and small fenced enclosures for pigs.
With some frustration, I shook my GPS, restarted it, and moved it to another spot so it could detect the satellites. It was hard to believe, but we appeared to be in a satellite black hole and could not get a fix on the location of the Chamacoco villages. I later confirmed with cartographers at National Geographic that there are indeed gaps in GPS satellite coverage, with its bias toward the Northern Hemisphere. The Chamacoco people exist in one of those gaps. Their lands can, however, be viewed from Google Earth or an airplane, where a sobering picture of rampant deforestation and river pollution emerges.
The Last Speakers Page 10
