The Best American Travel Writing 2014

by Paul Theroux

  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.

  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.”