The Last Tribal Battle--Uncontacted Indians in Brazil
10/31/99
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Title: The Last Tribal Battle
Source: New York Times Magazine
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: October 31, 1999
Byline: DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

In the remote reaches of the Brazilian rain forest, isolated Indians
carry on as they have for thousands of years. Should they be fenced
off from the modern world?

First Contact For months, Sydney Possuelo tried to lure the Korubu
from their forest camouflage by leaving peace offerings of saucepans,
machetes and sacks of manioc at various sites. When those efforts
failed, he trekked several days into the jungle, setting up camp near
a communal dwelling, also to no avail. But just as the 26-member
expedition was dejectedly breaking camp, its patience was rewarded.

Two years ago in September, he ventured out from the Brazilian rubber
plantation where he lived to go fishing. With his two daughters and
three of their friends, he pushed deep into the western Amazon,
following a winding tributary of the IgarapE River. Hidden in the
thick surrounding forest, de Souza had long been told, were naked
Indians who still set their lives to the forest's rhythms, just as
they had for thousands of years: eating what the forest grew, hunting
by bow and arrow. But for the 33-year-old rubber tapper, these
Indians were an invisible presence, felt more than seen. Until that
day, when they stepped out from the trees.

"Papa, there are people coming," yelled de Souza's 14-year-old
daughter, Francisca. According to Francisca's later account, five
Indians ran toward them, one dressed in shorts, the others naked.
They carried bows and arrows, and were already reaching for them.

"Run, my girl, they'll kill you," de Souza cried as the arrows flew.
One hit his left side. Another pierced his back. Turning around,
Francisca saw the Indians closing in on her father. As she later
reported, she knew right then she would never see him alive again.

An hour later, a posse of rubber tappers headed out to the spot. They
found de Souza's body and saw that arrows were only part of the
ordeal that had ended his life. Gashes covered his legs, chest and
head; all that remained of his eyes were the dark, bloody pools of
their sockets. His scalp had been sliced from his skull. The Indians
that Francisca and the other children described had vanished, as if
soaked back into the forest. But who could they be? Were the killers
really indios bravos - "wild Indians" - as the locals called isolated
tribesmen? Or had the children's imaginations spun out of control?
The rain forest grows rumors along with species, and stories
multiplied.

These stories eventually reached the ears of Sydney Possuelo, the
Brazilian Government's leading authority on isolated Indians.
Possuelo soon traveled to the area where the murder occurred, in the
far western state of Acre - but not to solve the crime. For one
thing, he was no police detective. What's more, Possuelo had little
sympathy for ambushed pioneers; he knew that from Brazil's first days
white settlers had ruthlessly slaughtered Indians, burning their
villages and abducting their children to work as slaves. The reason
he went to Acre was this: a murder by unclothed Indians has often
been the first sign of a previously uncontacted Amazon tribe. If
isolated people were indeed hiding nearby in the forest, Possuelo
wanted to find them - but not to punish them. He wanted to offer the
tribe protection, for as long as possible, from the modern world.

A nthropologists believe the Amazon shelters the world's largest
number of still-isolated Indians. (The Pacific island of New
Guinea is a distant second.) Since the 1970's, Brazil's Government
has counted 50 sites that reveal signs of indigenous settlement -
many spotted by canvassing the rain forest from the air - though no
known tribes are thought to inhabit those particular areas. Possuelo
says that these traces were left by approximately 15 tribes of the
rain forest that have never been studied or, in some instances, even
named by scholars.

By definition, little is known about isolated Indians. Their relics
surface in the most remote stretches of the Amazon, hundreds of miles
from the nearest roads. It is not known whether the tribes fled to
these regions as Brazilians claimed more of the countryside or
whether they were always there. Some tribes, like the IgarapE
UmerE, in the state of RondUnia, have turned up like the straggling
survivors of a shipwreck, with only a handful of members left. By
contrast, the Korubu of the Javari Valley reach into the hundreds.

As a Funai director, the Possuelo must first find the isolated Indian
tribes it is his mission to protect. He has been indomitable in
his battle against white development of regions occupied by
indigenous peoples.

Possuelo, 59, who has pinpointed seven new tribes in his 40 years as
the peculiarly Brazilian occupation of Indian tracker. He can look at
a footprint in the forest and tell instantly whether it belongs to a
forest Indian or a Brazilian settler by the gap between the first two
toes: Indians always walk barefoot, so the big and middle toes splay
from repeatedly gripping the earth. Over the years, his own foot has
come to resemble those of the Indians. But if Possuelo is the world's
link to the mysterious tribes of the rain forest, he is also the most
formidable obstacle to the rest of the planet's ever knowing them.

As director of the Indian protection agency's department of isolated
Indians, Possuelo has almost single-handedly redefined his agency's
traditional role. In the past, the agency, known as Funai,
aggressively paved the way for white development of regions occupied
by indigenous peoples. But Possuelo argues that virtually every tribe
touched by Brazilian society has been destroyed as a result. Rather
than flourishing from the medical and technological advances
civilization could offer, they have withered from disease, slavery,
alcohol consumption and the greed of Brazilians. The numbers bear
Possuelo out: the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro's landmark book,
"Indians and Civilization," concluded that 100 Indian nations
disappeared in Brazil between 1900 and 1970, the year his book was
published. When Europeans first reached Brazil about 500 years ago,
estimates of the Indian population ran from one to six million. It is
now 300,000.

An irascible idealist, Possuelo clashes frequently with Brazil's
entrenched economic and political interests. Sometimes, the
sertanista's outrage at corruption within his own agency is so
frank that it seems as if he parachuted into Brazil from another
galaxy and will soon be blasted back. Possuelo's last boss tried to
fire him in 1996, calling him insubordinate. But Possuelo's standing
was so high - particularly among foreign environmentalists and
Indian rights advocates - that his boss backed down. As President of
Funai in the early 1990's, it was Possuelo who demarcated the largest
Indian reservation in the world, 20.5 million square acres, for
23,000 Yanomami Indians, at least temporarily stemming an onslaught
by gold miners against the world's largest surviving Stone Age tribe.

Possuelo argues that much as endangered turtles and jaguars deserve
Government protection, Brazil's Indians also need sanctuaries where
they can rebuild their numbers and protect their cultures. Ranged
against him is a chorus of powerful voices coming from those coveting
Indian lands and resources, and their allies in the Brazilian
Government. "It won't do to have Indians in the 21st century," a
former Government Minister, Helio Jaguaribe, has said. "The idea of
freezing man in the first stage of his evolution is, in truth, cruel
and hypocritical."

Others claim that Funai hypes the numbers of hidden tribes to prevent
Brazilians from exploiting the country's wealth of natural resources.
Critics also note that Brazil's Indians represent less than 0.25
percent of the population and yet claim 11 percent of the national
territory. Then there are the missionaries, who covet the primitive
soul. Don Pederson, who is in charge of research and planning for New
Tribes Mission, a Florida-based group, argues that uncontacted tribes
are plagued by malaria and dental problems, troubles for which the
non-Indian world has ready solutions. "Would you say that you should
leave people in dire straits in the ghetto because that's their area,
and to go in and provide economic or health assistance is wrong
because it would change their lifestyle?" asked Pederson, who has
lived with the Yanomami and other tribes.

Still others are knocking on the Amazon's door. The state petroleum
company, Petrobras, has made tentative explorations for oil in the
Javari Valley. Pharmaceutical companies are hankering to patent
genetic materials and forest-based cures. And linguists and other
scholars want to track the languages of these unknown peoples.

But it's not only academics and industrialists who are interested in
the tribes of the Amazon. At his apartment in Brasilia, Possuelo
recently got a letter from a Swedish child, Karin Bark. The girl
revealed that she had learned in school about the Korubu tribe, whom
Possuelo first contacted in October 1996, and had grown curious about
these newly discovered members of the human family.

"Do they eat insects?" she asked. "How many are they? How old can
they become? Please answer my questions and tell me other things
about the Korubu Indians.

"I want to know."

I too, wanted to know. and so this past July, I joined Possuelo on a
journey into the depths of western Brazil's rain forest. Once there,
we would fly over the canopy in search of the tribe that may have
violently announced its existence in Acre. Then Possuelo would lead
us by boat into the jungle, where he would establish contact
once again with the elusive Korubu.

Getting to the Amazon was complicated. We first found ourselves in
the outpost town of Jordao, a listless place of high unemployment 120
miles by river from the Peruvian border. Jordao is so remote that it
takes eight days by boat to reach the nearest Brazilian city, Rio
Branco. The night we arrived, I visited the home of Otavio da Rocha
Mello - the owner of the plantation where Domingo de Souza had
worked. Like most of the houses near the riverbanks, Mello's tiny
house was built on stilts. Inside, candles provided weak light.

Mello described de Souza's murder as part of a silent war by Indians
to push whites out. After the killing, he claimed, naked Indians
showed up at the local schoolhouse, terrifying the children. People
stopped going to the river to bathe in the evening. The tappers,
whose work involves trekking through the forest each day, began
staying close to home. After 23 years as the local master of the
forest, Mello found his jungle fiefdom collapsing.

"It didn't used to be like this," Mello complained. "If the Indians
killed a white person, there used to be people who would go after
them!"

The next morning, I headed with Possuelo to Jordao's airport, a
ribbon of dirt running through the center of town, to make our flight
over the treetops. It seemed as if everybody in town had come out to
watch us wait for the skies to clear. Possuelo sat on the wheel of a
single-engine plane and listened as jobless locals complained about
being driven out of the forest by indios bravos.

Luis Pinheiro de Lima, a 78-year-old Kaxinawa Indian reared by rubber
tappers, spoke even more brutally than the whites. He said the
Government should go back to its old policy of dominating Indians,
casualties be damned. De Lima called isolated Indians bichos, or
"beasts," and recalled how tappers used to be able to send out
mercenaries to hunt down Indians with dogs. But now, he said darkly,
Funai "says you mustn't kill them."

Possuelo did not interrupt as de Lima mocked the forest Indians for
eating only what they find in the forest, "everything roasted." But
then he looked at de Lima and spoke in a voice that sounded almost
sad. The practice of "civilizing" Indians killed a lot of your
cousins, Possuelo told the old man. "There are still women with the
names of the rubber plantations that enslaved them tattooed on their
arms. You know them."

From the same crumbling airstrip at Jordao, Possuelo hired a single-
engine plane to fly him over the rain forest surrounding the rubber
plantation in Acre. He was looking for a sign, however small, of
human life.

As far as Possuelo could see from his plane, there was only forest,
thick and impenetrable. Finally, after 20 hours scouring just this
piece of the Amazon, he saw something. Barely visible through the
forest canopy, he spied a clearing in the jungle, with long, narrow
Indian huts covered with leaves. A few miles away, he saw another
group of huts, similarly built, and a clearing for crops. As his
plane flew over, he glimpsed unclothed Indians running into the
forest.

With the power of Funai behind him, Possuelo quickly set about
cordoning off the area, demarcating a 580-square-mile zone settlers
could not legally enter. On a later trip, he found yet a third group
of dwellings nearby, less than six feet tall, which suggested a tribe
that did not sleep in hammocks. During the ensuing year, he told me,
he heard through deputies that one tribe had built more houses and
planted more crops. He wondered if relatives had migrated, creating
yet more clearings in the canopy.

Possuelo argues that virtually every tribe touched by Brazilian
society has been destroyed as a result, yet he must sometimes
touch what he wants to save.

With the sky half-clear, our small plane trundled in and out of the
clouds like a growling, airborne dinosaur, passing over miles of
uninterrupted treetops. Flying low because of the weather, we could
survey only a small area at a time. Normally, Possuelo's work is
painstaking, like combing the ocean floor for buried treasure.
Indeed, to my eyes the rain forest seemed like an ocean of trees,
stretching green as far as we could see in every direction.
This time out, however, Possuelo knew where to look.

About 15 minutes after taking off from Jordao, I glimpsed the sight
that so thrilled the sertanista last June. Through an opening that
was little more than a keyhole in the forest canopy, I saw a group of
long huts, with pitched brown rooftops like upturned canoes. They
appeared to be about 50 feet long, 20 feet wide and 10feet tall - big
enough for several families. We saw no crops planted nearby. The
clouds were maddening, like a camera shutter allowing us only brief
glimpses of the panorama below. Suddenly, my eyes were drawn to a
young naked girl running out of a hut. I wondered if she was fleeing
her home because of the sound of our plane. The girl did not look up
or behind her, but disappeared quickly into the forest, as if it were
a blanket she could pull over herself.

Though I burned to pass over again for another look, Possuelo would
not hear of it. He does not even like to fly over hidden tribes once,
suspecting that airplanes frighten the tribespeople and sometimes
cause them to pack up and move. Indeed, Possuelo has never actually
looked into the eyes of these Indians he risks his life to protect.
He has never heard their voices or shaken their hands - and probably
never will.

Back in Jordao, JosE Carlos Mireilles, the grizzled chief of
Funai for the state of Acre, told me that he sometimes questioned his
boss's efforts to protect Indians. Isn't conquest a natural part of
human history? Quite apart from the whites, aren't the tribes
perennially raiding and killing one another?

Mireilles lived for eight years with Acre's recently assimilated
Jaminawa tribe, believed to be closely related to the unnamed tribe
Possuelo and I had just flown over. He is not blind to the harsh
edges of Indian cultures. Jaminawa youth experiment with sex even
before puberty, and girls who become pregnant before marriage undergo
painful abortions performed by kneading the abdomen. Sometimes,
Mireilles said, the abortion does not work, and the baby is born. In
those cases, the unwanted babies are buried alive.

Thirteen years ago, the Jaminawa summoned Mireille's wife, a medic
named Teresa, to deliver the baby of an unmarried teen-ager.
She trekked through the rain, working until morning. But upon the
baby's birth, the tribe lay the newborn in a small grave that had
already been dug. Teresa Mireilles was horrified. "No way," she said.
She took the boy from his grave, wiping the dirt from his nose.
Mireilles and his wife consider the boy their son.

But if Mireilles does not hold a romantic vision of Stone Age life,
neither does he bear illusions about the wonders Brazilian society
has to offer. Throughout the century, even well-meaning whites have
destroyed tribe after tribe, usually by introducing germs and
diseases against which the Indians have no defenses: chickenpox,
malaria, tuberculosis, the common cold. Other times, Funai has either
connived, or unwittingly aided, in the systematic plunder of Indian
lands and resources.

"If I could give them 10 or 20 years more without anybody bothering
them, I think it's worth it," Mireilles said. "The day the Indians
would come out of the forest, I'd tell them: 'Go back to the forest.
There's nothing for you here."'

From Jordao we flew north to Tabatinga, a ramshackle town located
at the point where Peru, Colombia and Brazil converge. There, we
began our boat journey to visit the Korubu. For Possuelo, this was a
homecoming of sorts. He had been away from the Amazon for nearly a
year, following a near-fatal car crash that split open his skull,
broke his legs and knocked out an eye. Throughout the trip, as he ran
into friends he hadn't seen, Possuelo doffed his cap and dropped his
head, to show stitches running like expressways over his shiny crown,
as if he still could not get over having survived.

After floating southwest for nine hours down the Javari River, we
reached the sullen frontier town of Atalaia do Norte. Possuelo's boat
pulled in to dock, but he did not stretch his legs on dry ground.
Instead, he stayed on board the Waika, the boat that is his home for
most of the year. With the area's 13 sawmills silent these days,
Possuelo had become the enemy - and he knew it.

The Indian lands upriver brim with timber and freshwater turtles and
fish. It would all be there for the taking, were it not for Possuelo.
When Funai first planted its flag at the Javari Valley reservation,
roughly the size of Florida, it was the Mayor of Atalaia himself who
yanked it from the ground in protest. In the streets of the town,
residents glared at us. Motor scooters came threateningly close, then
made another pass so there was no mistaking their enmity. At the
suggestion of the local police, the Waika pulled out in a hurry.

It was three years ago that Possuelo established the first peaceful
contact with a fragment of Korubu Indians living in the Javari
Valley. Having somehow separated from their tribe about 60 miles
north, these Korubu were being ambushed and hunted down by local
settlers. A fierce people, the Korubu were nicknamed the caceteiros,
or "head bashers," for the way they killed enemies. They had already
clashed with local Brazilians, once murdering two workers from the
Petrobas oil company as hundreds of colleagues watched in
astonishment. They had no history of peaceful contact.

On our trip, Possuelo had with him six Indians from tribes whose
languages he guessed the Korubu might understand, headed by Bina, a
Matis Indian whose face was tattooed to resemble a leopard's, with 10
black lines running like whiskers over his cheeks. Bina's mother was
Korubu, abducted as a child during a Matis massacre of the Korubu
more than 40 years before. Bina's own tribe had only made contact
with Brazilian society when he was a boy.

Possuelo made four forays into the jungle in 1996, each lasting about
10 days, before a small group of Korubu emerged from the leaves to
meet him. They were naked and painted with rust-colored patterns on
their faces and chests. Short and sturdy, the Korubu walked with
their legs wide apart, as if to frighten off animals, and they
appeared robust and confident, masters of their small universe. "How
beautiful," Possuelo had whispered to himself.

We floated toward the Javari Valley frontier all day. Possuelo
reveled in sudden problems, like a broken searchlight and engine
trouble, that only his expertise could fix. There was a malaria
epidemic sweeping the region, and Possuelo, who had already had
malaria 36 times, was headed for bout 37 - yet he was cheerful. Along
the way, blue-and-silver dolphins turned cartwheels alongside the
boat. Possuelo smiled. "Nature seems to want me back," he said.

The Waika chugged up to a Government outpost, our final destination,
an hour after midnight, 19 hours after we began. With lights finally
out and the motor silent, I caught the first movements of the local
symphony. Bats fluttered overhead, locusts rattled like maracas and
owls sang a haunting chorus. From far away came calls I could not
identify. Yet they sounded as if they were being repeated and perhaps
answered, in the morse code of the jungle.

Could that be the Korubu?

At daybreak, sounds came from across the river. Emerging from our
hammocks into the sunlight, we saw six Korubu, square shouldered and
tan, with babies resting on mothers' hips. One man wore a polo shirt,
but the rest were naked. "Bina! Bina!" a man's voice called over the
water, steady and insistent. Our translator had returned to the
Government outpost since the initial contact and the Korubu
remembered him.

The Korubu called to Bina, who translated for us: "We're hungry. Go
hunting for us."

A group of Korubu, many of them suffering from malaria, had been
camped across the river for days, far from their crops, and had had
little to eat. Bina decided to help. He hopped into a speedboat
docked next to the outpost and disappeared into the Indian areas with
a hunting party. He returned a few hours later with wild boars and
crocodiles, blood splattered on the seats.

With two of the animals lying on the speedboat floor, Possuelo
crossed over to the Korubu, who swarmed to the boat and surrounded
him in bursts of sound. Their voices were loud; to my ears, their
language sounded bold, even harsh. I watched from a few feet away, in
a separate speedboat. The Korubu men wore only a string that was
fastened around their hips and looped around their penises; they
stood with their chests out and shoulders thrown back. Two Korubu
women slid down the riverbank, splashing water over their children to
cool down. As the group took us in, they seemed almost angry. "Pawa!
Pawa!" some declared. Suddenly, one member of our group unzipped a
fanny pack and produced a soup spoon. The anger dissolved into wide
smiles.

The following day, we returned to the outpost. There we found Xikxu,
the patriarch, who looked about 35. He called for the women, who
emerged from the forest. One carried a child over one shoulder and a
monkey over the other. "Pawa, pawa," two of the Korubu women said,
checking my pockets for spoons.

The women carried empty pots and bowls, showing them to me in a
wordless version of a shopping list. This time, I understood: the
Korubu live in a pre-metal age, and 8,000 years is long enough to
wait for a damned spoon. Through Bina, I promised not to show up
again empty-handed.

A young mother, baby perched on her hip and nursing, approached me
slowly and touched my curly brown hair. Her own straight black hair
was elaborately cut, shaved short in a band across the top of her
head and trimmed one length across her temple and at the nape.
Tugging the front of my shirt, she gestured for me to open it. She
took out my breasts, showing the others that I was built like them.
Then she looked down my pants, just to make sure. As direct as she
was in her actions, the young mother, who appeared to be no more than
18, smiled gently.

"Maya Washeman," she said, pointing to herself. She pointed to
another Korubu woman with a scar across her cheek. "Maya Mona," she
said. She gestured at the sad-eyed woman sitting away from us, whose
face I recognized from pictures taken of Posseulo's first contact
back in 1996. "Maya Doni," she said. Then she pointed at me.

"Maya Diana," I told her.

I wasn't quite sure what "Maya" meant, but it seemed appropriate. But
then I was introduced to Washeman's mother. Her name was Maya.
Perhaps daughters identified themselves through their mothers' names.
Bina couldn't say for certain.

With Bina's help, Washeman asked if I have children of my own. I said
no. Then she handed me her own infant son to hold. This remarkable
ambassador, I discovered, was the casus belli of her entire tribe.

Sitting on the ground, the Indians, through Bina, told a long story.
They said they fled from their home tribe when Washeman reached
puberty and a Korubu boy wanted to marry her. Maya, however, did not
want the boy for her daughter and so fled with her clan. The boy ran
after Washeman, kidnapping her. Undaunted, the family turned around
and kidnapped her back. They said they ran for months, eventually
carving a small canoe to cross the ItuI River. They ran until
reaching Ladario, the closest white settlement, where they found
bananas growing and stole some for the tribe. By way of introduction,
they said, the townsfolk of Ladario chased the Indians and killed two
of them.

Since then, the rest of the tribe had secretly been watching Ladario,
and - incredible as it seemed, given the gulf in languages and the
fear they must have had to overcome - they could identify the killers
by name. "Otavio," Xikxu told Bina. Hearing the name chilled me;
visiting Ladario the day before, I met the head of the settlement,
Otavio Oliveira. He said he was a great friend to the Indians.

On the third day, Possuelo and I paid the Korubu one last visit, this
time with some medicine for those suffering through malaria. It was
cool under the trees, and quiet. Washeman touched the nape of her
son's neck, putting my hand there so I could feel his fever. A few
feet away, Maya, the matriarch of the clan, whimpered quietly. She,
too, was burning up.

Xikxu scraped a rope-thick vine back and forth over a grater. A
liquid the color of worn leaves trickled down. The grater was a
wooden club like a miniature baseball bat, flattened on one side,
with the chewing end of monkeys' teeth sticking out of the wood.

"Sometimes they drink hallucinogens before they kill somebody or go
to war," Possuelo told me quietly in Portuguese, passing the drink. I
took a sip, not knowing whether we were drinking the aperitif for war
or death. It had the sour, very green taste of something unripe,
something that had not found its natural flavor yet. After a few
minutes, Possuelo quietly asked Bina about the juice. Bina revealed
that the drink was just a social one. In the back of Possuelo's mind,
and mine, was the story of the last station chief, Sobral, who
angered the Korubu by taking back a tarpaulin one of Sobral's workers
had given them. Two Korubu clubbed the Government agent to death as
his colleagues looked in horror from across the river.

Talking to Possuelo, the Korubu laughed over their first meeting with
him and remembered hiding when his small plane flew overhead looking
for them. Xikxu asked Possuelo why he smoked cigarettes and Possuelo
said it was something Brazilians do socially. As they listened, the
Korubu said "mmm," in the same way Americans say "uh-huh." Seemingly
apropos of nothing, Washeman asked Bina a startlingly frank question:
"How do you have sex?" The question took us all aback.

"We do it at night," Bina responded.

Sitting there in the jungle, I began to wonder if the Korubu could
truly fathom the difference between our world and theirs. And if
history proved any guide, I thought, that knowledge, when it came,
would shatter them.

In Darcy Ribeiro's book, the son of a sertanista describes the first
exposure of KaingŁng Indians to S"o Paulo, which he witnessed as a
child. The tribe had encountered Brazilians only two years earlier,
when Funai began offering the KaingŁng gifts, like pots and machetes.
The Indians saw the gifts as a tribute, and reckoned that they must
be far more powerful than this small tribe of Brazilians visiting
them in the forest. "Don't worry - we'll protect you," the KaingŁng
chief told the Government agents. But then one day the sertanista
wanted officials in S"o Paulo to see the isolated Indians for
themselves, so he took two of them to the big city.

"They entered the car and took their seats, and appeared talkative
and happy as they crossed the forest," Ribeiro writes. "At the first
station, as they watched the comings and goings of passengers
boarding and disembarking, the Indians exchanged remarks. The
stations went by, each one more full of people, because they were
already crossing more densely populated regions. A sadness and a
humiliation set in among the Indians; they stopped chatting and
no longer even answered the Government agent's questions. Astonished,
they got off in S"o Paulo." After being shuttled around the city, the
chiefs returned to the jungle, disillusioned. They explained to their
people how insignificant they were compared with the modern world. As
Ribeiro notes, "Afterward, the prestige they attributed to the whites
was of such an order that no tribal value could survive."

At the riverbank, the Korubu showed us a reed they call nypuk. The
Indians peel the nypuk's sides until it looks like a blade of grass;
its long, sharp edge functions as a razor. Wetting her toddler's hair
with water, Washeman scraped a precise line across the boy's temple.
"Maya is really good at this," she said, looking over at her mother.

"How many thousands of years," Possuelo asked, holding up the reed,
"do you think it took them to develop this?"

By the water's edge, Maya whimpered from the malaria. We gave her
quinine-based pills in water to drink each day. Next to her, Doni was
sad-eyed and quiet. Recently, her baby died minutes after its birth.

A month after I left, Possuelo reported in a phone call, the Korubus
watched an anaconda pull one of their children, a 3-year-old girl,
underwater. Though they searched frantically, she never surfaced. The
17 remaining tribespeople wept for her in the place she died, day
after day.

And so lingering in my mind after my trip to the Javari rain forest
was a question: Why preserve a life of hardship? But like gears in a
machine, one question triggers the next. What kind of life would the
modern world give them?

Possuelo, loving a good debate, argued that he was not defying
destiny at all by trying to preserve the Indian way of life. There is
nothing inevitable about Brazilian society swallowing up these hidden
tribes, just as there was nothing preordained about humans landing on
the moon, he said. Staking a nation's flag on a new frontier -
whether on another planet or in the wilderness within your own
borders - happens through deliberate policies that governments and
people pursue.

But Possuelo could not have got this far on idealism alone. He is not
naive. As our journey neared its end, Possuelo acknowledged that
however contact comes, the time that isolated tribes have left can
probably be measured in decades. And time was precious, he said: not
so much to prepare the Indians for contact, as to prepare the whites.

"Right now, the only door to our society that's open to the Indians
is through the cellar," Possuelo said. Listen to the language of the
settlers, he said, who call Indian lands "uninhabited," as if the
natives did not exist. In nearly every case in which whites entered
their lands, the Indians were reduced to scrounging for crumbs, as
stores of fish, game and timber vanished. Now, drug traffickers are
trying to make inroads by building airstrips on their land. Funai's
demarcation lines are designed not so much to keep the Indians
confined to their ancient lands as to place a limit on white
expansion, Possuelo said.

On the deck of the Waika, Possuelo traced the shape of the Javari
Valley with his finger, much as the evening before he conjured
figures as he gazed up at the clouds. It is true, he said, that the
Javari is a rich, unspoiled area that could be developed.

"But why shouldn't the Indians be the ones to exploit it for
themselves?" he asked. "Why shouldn't they be the ones selling their
fish and game commercially?" It is a revolutionary thought in Brazil,
where Indians have been virtually trained into dependence from their
first moments of contact.

"I want to send Indians from here to school, have them steer our
boats along the rivers," Possuelo said excitedly. Up and down the
waterways, settlers are suffering through the malaria epidemic.
He wanted to set up floating health stations for the river dwellers,
run by the Indians. "Let the Indians be the ones drawing their blood,
looking at it under the microscope, giving out the medications. Let
the whites get used to seeing the Indians in positions of respect."

And that is the heart of Possuelo's dream, which more and more is
coming to look like a plan: to turn the dark ecosystem of contact
upside down, so that Indians may finally join Brazilian society
standing tall. It is a vision he has peddled diligently, inviting
small groups of reporters along on his expeditions to win public
support, particularly overseas. Recently, the European Parliament
awarded $1 million for a project Possuelo drew up to build health
posts and provide education to Javari Valley tribes that had already
been contacted by Funai officials. Idealist or not, Possuelo was
sophisticated enough to apply for the grant through a private
foundation - to prevent the money from getting siphoned into the
Government's general coffers, or winding up in some politician's
pocket.

And his last expedition, for the Discovery Channel, carried a price:
a 40-foot radio tower for the remote Javari Valley outpost.

But for all his savvy, Possuelo stands practically alone, in his own
way isolated as much as the Indians he tracks. He, too, belongs to a
vanishing breed. There are fewer than a dozen sertanistas in all of
Brazil worthy of the name, he said, who did not get their titles as
political rewards. And many of them would just as soon see his
project disappear.

Indeed, it is impossible to imagine Possuelo's vision without
Possuelo. What would have happened to the Government policy on
isolated tribes if that car accident had ended his life or if his
last boss had succeeded in firing him? Possuelo knows that his
critics include not only industrialists, politicians, generals and
academics but also fellow sertanistas. Like that of the
anthropologists, their glory has always grown from presenting new
cultures to the rest of the world, as if they had given birth to
them. Yet as impossible as his quest may seem, Possuelo is determined
to change peoples' minds. "I'm proposing the exact opposite,"
Possuelo said. "I say your glory is in not discovering them."

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