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The dream began to come true 42 years ago, when Possuelo became a sertanistas,
or "backlands expert" drawn, he says, "by my wish to lead expeditions to remote
Indians." A dying breed today, the sertanistas are peculiar to Brazil, Indian
trackers charged by the government with finding tribes in hard to reach
interior lands. Most sertanistas count themselves lucky to have made "first
contact"Äa successful initial nonviolent encounter between a tribe and the
outside worldÄwith one or two Indian tribes, but Possuelo has made first
contact with no fewer than seven. He's also identified 22 sites where
uncontacted Indians live, apparently still unaware of the larger world around
them except for the rare skirmish with a Brazilian logger or fisherman who
sneaks into their sanctuary. At least four of these uncontacted tribes are in
the Javari Valley. "I've spent months at a time in the jungle on expeditions to
make first contact with a tribe, and I've been attacked many, many times," he
says. "Colleagues have fallen at my feet, pierced by Indian arrows." Since the
1970s, in fact, 120 FUNAI workers have been killed in the Amazon jungles.
Now we're on the way to visit a Korubo clan he first made contact with in 1996.
For Possuelo it's one of his regular check-in visits, to see how they're
faring; for me it's a chance to be one of the few journalists ever to spend
several days with this group of people who know nothing about bricks, or
electricity, or roads or violins or penicillin or Cervantes or tap water or
China or almost anything else you can think of.
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Our boat passes a river town named Benjamin Constant, dominated by a cathedral
and timber mill. Possuelo glares at both. "The church and loggers are my
biggest enemies," he tells me. "The church wants to convert the Indians to
Christianity, destroying their traditional ways of life, and the loggers want
to cut down their trees, ruining their forests. It's my destiny to protect
them."
At the time the portuguese explorer Pedro Cabral strode ashore in a.d. 1500 to
claim Brazil's coast and vast inland for his king, perhaps as many as ten
million Indians lived in the rain forests and deltas of the world's second-
longest river. During the following centuries, sertanistas led white settlers
into the wilderness to seize Indian lands and enslave and kill countless tribes
people. Hundreds of tribes were wiped out as rubber tappers, gold miners,
loggers, cattle ranchers and fishermen swarmed over the pristine jungles. And
millions of Indians died from strange new diseases, like the flu and measles,
for which they had no immunity.
When he first became a sertanista, Possuelo himself was seduced by the thrill
of the dangerous chase, leading hundreds of search parties into Indian
territoryÄno longer to kill the Natives, but to bring them out of their
traditional ways and into Western civilization (while opening up their lands,
of course, to outside ownership). By the early 1980s, though, he had concluded
that the clash of cultures was destroying the tribes. Like Australia's
Aborigines and Alaska's Inuit, the Indians of the Amazon Basin were drawn
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to the fringes of the towns that sprang up in their territory, where they fell
prey to alcoholism, disease, prostitution and the destruction of their cultural
identity. Now, only an estimated 350,000 Amazon Indians remain, more than half
in or near towns. "They've largely lost their tribal ways," Possuelo says. The
cultural survival of isolated tribes like the Korubo, he adds, depends on "our
protecting them from the outside world."
In 1986, Possuelo created the Department for Isolated Indians andÄin an about-
face from his previous workÄchampioned, against fierce opposition, a policy of
discouraging contact with remote Indians. Eleven years later he defied powerful
politicians and forced all non-Indians to leave the Javari Valley, effectively
quarantining the tribes that remained. "I expelled the loggers and fishermen
who were killing the Indians," he boasts.
Most of the outsiders were from AtalaiaÄat 50 miles downriver, the nearest town
to the exclusion zone. As we pass the town, where a marketplace and huts spill
down the riverbank, Possuelo tells a story. "Three years ago, more than 300 men
armed with guns and Molotov cocktails" -angry at being denied access to the
valley's plentiful timber and bountiful fishingÄ "came up to the valley from
Atalaia planning to attack my base," he says. He radioed the federal police,
who quickly arrived in helicopters, and after an uneasy standoff, the raiders
turned back. And now? "They'd still like to destroy the base, and they've
threatened to kill me."
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For decades, violent clashes have punctuated the longrunning frontier war
between the isolated Indian tribes and "whites"Äthe name that Brazilian Indians
and non-Indians alike use to describe non-Indians, even though in multiracial
Brazil many of them are black or of mixed raceÄseeking to profit from the rain
forests. More than 40 whites have been massacred in the Javari Valley, and
whites have shot dead hundreds of Indians over the past century.
But Possuelo has been a target of settler wrath only since the late 1990s, when
he led a successful campaign to double the size of the exclusion zones; the
restricted territories now take up 11 percent of Brazil's huge landmass. That's
drawn the attention of businessmen who wouldn't normally care much about
whether a bunch of Indians ever leaves the forest, because in an effort to
shield the Indians from life in the modern age, Possuelo has also safeguarded a
massive slab of the earth's species-rich rain forests. "We've ensured that
millions of hectares of virgin jungle are shielded from the developers," he
says, smiling. And not everyone is as happy about that as he is.
About four hours into our journey from Tabatinga, Possuelo turns the speedboat
into the mouth of the coffeehued Itacuai River and follows that to the Itui
River. We reach the entrance to the Javari Valley's Indian zone soon afterward.
Large signs on the riverbank announce that outsiders are prohibited from
venturing farther.
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A Brazilian flag flies over Possuelo's base, a wooden bungalow perched on poles
overlooking the river and a pontoon containing a medical post. We're greeted by
a nurse, Maria da Graca Nobre, nicknamed Magna, and two fearsome-looking,
tattooed Matis Indians, Jumi and Jemi, who work as trackers and guards for
Possuelo's expeditions. Because the Matis speak a language similar to the
lilting, high-pitched Korubo tongue, Jumi and Jemi will also act as our
interpreters.
In his spartan bedroom, Possuelo swiftly exchanges his bureaucrat's
uniformÄcrisp slacks, shoes and a black shirt bearing a FUNAI logoÄfor his
jungle gear: bare feet, ragged shorts and a torn, unbuttoned khaki shirt. In a
final flourish, he flings on a necklace hung with a bullet-size cylinder of
antimalarial medicine, a reminder that he's had 39 bouts with the disease.
The next day, we head up the Itui in an outboard-rigged canoe for the land of
the Korubo. Caimans doze on the banks while rainbow-hued parrots fly overhead.
After half an hour, a pair of dugouts on the riverbank tell us the Korubo are
near, and we disembark to begin our trek along the muddy jungle track.
When at last we come face to face with the Korubo in the sun-dappled clearing,
about the size of two football fields and scattered with fallen trees, Jumi and
Jemi grasp their rifles, warily watching the men with their war clubs. The
Korubo stand outside a maloca, a communal straw hut built on a tall framework
of poles and about 20 feet wide, 15 feet high and 30 feet long.
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The semi-nomadic clan moves between four or five widely dispersed huts as their
maize and manioc crops come into season, and it had taken Possuelo four lengthy
expeditions over several months to catch up to them the first time. "I wanted
to leave them alone," he says, "but loggers and fishermen had located them and
were trying to wipe them out. So I stepped in to protect them."
They weren't particularly grateful. Ten months later, after intermittent
contact with Possuelo and other FUNAI fieldworkers, the clan's most powerful
warrior, Ta'van, killed an experienced FUNAI sertanista, Possuelo's close
friend Raimundo Batista Magalhaes, crushing his skull with a war club. The clan
fled into the jungle, returning to the maloca only after several months.
Now Possuelo points out Ta'vanÄtaller than the others, with a wolfish face and
glowering eyes. Ta'van never relaxes his grip on his sturdy war club, which is
longer than he is and stained red. When I lock eyes with him, he glares back
defiantly. Turning to Possuelo, I ask how it feels to come face to face with
his friend's killer. He shrugs. "We whites have been killing them for decades,"
he says. Of course, it's not the first time that Possuelo has seen Ta'van since
Magalhaes' death. But only recently has Ta'van offered a reason for the
killing, saying simply, "We didn't know you then."
While the men wield the clubs, Possuelo says that "the women are often
stronger," so it doesn't surprise me to see that the person who seems to direct
the Korubo goings-on is a woman in her mid-40s, named Maya. She has a matronly
face and speaks in a girlish voice, but hard dark eyes suggest an
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unyielding nature. "Maya," Possuelo tells me, smiling, "makes all the
decisions." By her side is Washman, her eldest daughter, grim-faced and in her
early 20s. Washman has "the same bossy manner as Maya,Ä Possuelo adds with
another smile.
Their bossiness may extend to ordering murders. Two years ago three warriors
led by Ta'van and armed with their clubsÄother Indian tribes in the Javari
Valley use bows and arrows in war, but the Korubo use clubsÄpaddled their
dugout down the river until they came upon three white men just beyond the
exclusion zone, cutting down trees. The warriors smashed the whites' heads to
pulp and gutted them. Possuelo, who was in Atalaia when the attack occurred,
rushed upriver to where the mutilated bodies lay, finding the murdered men's
canoe "full of blood and pieces of skull."
Grisly as the scene was, Possuelo was not displeased when news of the killing
spread quickly in Atalaia and other riverside settlements. "I prefer them to be
violent," he says, "because it frightens off intruders." Ta'van and the others
have not been charged, a decision Possuelo supports: the isolated Indians from
the Javari Valley, he says, "have no knowledge of our law and so can't be
prosecuted for any crime."
After Possuelo speaks quietly with Maya and the others for half an hour in the
clearing, she invites him into the maloca. Jemi, Magna and most of the clan
follow, leaving me outside with Jumi and a pair of children, naked like their
parents, who exchange shy smiles with me. A young spider monkey, a family pet,
clings to one little girl's neck. Maya's youngest child, Manis, sits beside me,
cradling a baby sloth, also a pet.
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Even with Jumi nearby, I glance about warily, not trusting the head bashers.
About an hour later, Possuelo emerges from the maloca. At Tabatinga I'd told
him I could do a haka, a fierce Maori war dance like the one made famous by the
New Zealand national rugby team, which performs it before each international
match to intimidate its opponents. "If you do a haka for the Korubo, it'll help
them accept you," he says to me now.
Led by Maya, the Korubo line up outside the maloca with puzzled expressions as
I explain that I'm about to challenge one of their warriors to a fightÄbut, I
stress, just in fun. After Possuelo tells them this is a far-off tribe's ritual
before battle, Shishu, Maya's husband, steps forward to accept the challenge. I
gulp nervously and then punch my chest and stamp my feet while screaming a
bellicose chant in Maori. Jumi translates the words. "I die, I die, I live, I
live." I stomp to within a few inches of Shishu, poke out my tongue Maoristyle,
and twist my features into a grotesque mask. He stares hard at me and stands
his ground, refusing to be bullied. As I shout louder and punch my chest and
thighs harder, my emotions are in a tangle. I want to impress the warriors with
my ferocity but can't help fearing that if I stir them up, they'll attack me
with their clubs.
I end my haka by jumping in the air and shouting, "Hee!" To my relief, the
Korubo smile widely, apparently too practiced in real warfare to feel
threatened by an unarmed outsider shouting and pounding his flabby chest.
Possuelo puts an arm around my shoulder. "We'd better leave now," he says.
"It's best not to stay too long on the first visit."
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The next morning we return to the maloca, where Ta'van and other warriors have
painted their bodies scarlet and flaunt head and armbands made from raffia
streamers. Possuelo is astonished, never having seen them in such finery
before. "They've done it to honor your haka," he says with a grin.
Shishu summons me inside the maloca. Jumi, rifle at the ready, follows. The low
narrow entranceÄa precaution against a surprise attackÄforces me to double
over. As my eyes adjust to the dim light, I see the Korubo sprawled in vine
hammocks strung low between poles holding up the roof or squatting by small
fires. Stacked overhead on poles running the length of the hut are long slender
blowpipes; axes and woven-leaf baskets lean against the walls. Holes dug into
the dirt floor hold war clubs upright, at the ready. There are six small
fireplaces, one for each family. Magna bustles about the hut, performing
rudimentary medical checks and taking blood samples to test for malaria.
Maya, the hut's dominant presence, sits by a fireplace husking corn, which
she'll soon begin grinding into mash. She hands me a grilled cob; delicious.
Even the warriors are cooking and cleaning: muscular Teun sweeps the hut's
earthen floor with a switch of tree leaves while Washman supervises. Tatchipan,
a 17-year-old warrior who took part in the massacre of the white men, squats
over a pot cooking the skinned carcass of a monkey. Ta'van helps his wife,
Monan, boil a string of fish he'd caught in the river.
"The Korubo eat very well, with very little fat or sugar," says Magna. "Fish,
wild pig, monkeys, birds and plenty of fruit, manioc and maize. They work hard
and have a healthier diet than most Brazilians, so they have long lives and
very good skin." Apart from battle wounds, the most serious illness they
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suffer is malaria, brought to the Amazon by outsiders long ago.
The men squat in a circle and wolf down the fish, monkey and corn. Ta'van
breaks off one of the monkey's arms complete with tiny hand and gives it to
Tatchipan, who gnaws the skimpy meat from the bone. Even as they eat, I remain
tense, worried they could erupt into violence at any moment. When I mention my
concerns to Magna, whose monthly medical visits have given her a peek into the
clan members' lives unprecedented for an outsider, she draws attention to their
gentleness, saying, "I've never seen them quarrel or hit their children."
But they do practice one chilling custom: like other Amazon Indians, they
sometimes kill their babies. "We've never seen it happen, but they've told us
they do it," Magna says. "I know of one case where they killed the baby two
weeks after birth. We don't know why."
Once past infancy, children face other dangers. Several years ago, Maya and her
5-year-old daughter, Nwaribo, were bathing in the river when a massive anaconda
seized the child, dragging her underwater. She was never seen again. The clan
built a hut at the spot, and several of them cried day and night for seven
days.
After the warriors finish eating, Shishu suddenly grips my arm, causing my
heart to thump in terror. "You are nowa, a white man," he says. "Some nowa are
good, but most are bad." I glance anxiously at Ta'van, who stares at me without
expression while cradling his war club. I pray that he considers me one of the
good guys.
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Shishu grabs a handful of red urucu berries and crushes them between his palms,
then spits into them and slathers the bloody-looking liquid on my face and
arms. Hunching over a wooden slab studded with monkey teeth, he grinds a dry
root into powder, mixes it with water, squeezes the juice into a coconut shell
and invites me to drink. Could it be poison? I decide not to risk angering him
by refusing it, and smile my thanks. The muddy liquid turns out to have an
herbal taste, and I share several cups with Shishu. Once I'm sure it won't kill
me, I half expect it to be a narcotic like kava, the South Seas concoction that
also looks like grubby water. But it has no noticeable effect.
Other Korubo potions are not as benign. Later in the day Tatchipan places on a
small fire by the hut's entrance a bowl brimming with curare, a black syrup
that he makes by pulping and boiling a woody vine. After stirring the bubbling
liquid, he dips the tips of dozens of slender blowpipe darts into it. The
curare, Shishu tells me, is used to hunt small prey like monkeys and birds;
it's not used on humans. He points to his war club, nestled against his thigh,
and then his head. I get the message.
As the sun goes down, we return to Possuelo's base; even Possuelo, who the clan
trusts more than any other white man, considers it too dangerous to stay
overnight in the maloca. Early the next morning we're back, and they ask for
the Maori war dance again. I comply, this time flashing my bare bottom at the
end as custom demands. It may be the first time they've ever seen a white man's
bum, and they roar with laughter at the sight. Still chuckling, the women
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head for the nearby maize and manioc fields. Shishu, meanwhile, hoists a 12-
foot-long blowpipe on his shoulder and strings a bamboo quiver, containing
dozens of curare darts, around his neck. We leave the clearing together, and I
struggle to keep up with him as he lopes through the shadowy jungle, alert for
prey.
Hour slips into hour. Suddenly, he stops and shades his eyes while peering up
into the canopy. I don't see anything except tangled leaves and branches, but
Shishu has spotted a monkey. He takes a dab of a gooey red ocher from a holder
attached to his quiver and shapes it around the back of the dart as a
counterweight. Then he takes the petals of a white flower and packs them around
the ocher to smooth the dart's path through the blowpipe.
He raises the pipe to his mouth and, aiming at the monkey, puffs his cheeks and
blows, seemingly with little effort. The dart hits the monkey square in the
chest. The curare, a muscle relaxant that causes death by asphyxiation, does
its work, and within several minutes the monkey, unable to breathe, tumbles to
the forest floor. Shishu swiftly fashions a jungle basket from leaves and vine,
and slings the monkey over a shoulder.
By the end of the morning, he'll kill another monkey and a large black-
feathered bird. His day's hunting done, Shishu heads back to the maloca,
stopping briefly at a stream to wash away the mud from his body before entering
the hut.
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Magna is sitting on a log outside the maloca when we return. It's a favorite
spot for socializing: "The men and women work hard for about four or five hours
a day and then relax around the maloca, eating, chatting and sometimes
singing," she says. "It'd be an enviable life except for the constant tension
they feel, alert for a surprise attack even though their enemies live far
away."
I see what she means later that afternoon, as I relax inside the maloca with
Shishu, Maya, Ta'van and Monan, the clan's friendliest woman. Their voices
tinkle like music as we men sip the herbal drink and the women weave baskets.
Suddenly Shishu shouts a warning and leaps to his feet. He's heard a noise in
the forest, so he and Ta'van grab their war clubs and race outside. Jumi and I
follow. From the forest we hear the familiar password, "Eh-heh," and moments
later Tatchipan and another clan member, Marebo, stride into the clearing.
False alarm.
Next morning, after I've performed the haka yet again, Maya hushes the noisy
warriors and sends them out to fish in dugouts. Along the river they pull into
a sandy riverbank and begin to move along it, prodding the sand with their bare
feet. Ta'van laughs with delight when he uncovers a buried cache of tortoise
eggs, which he scoops up to take to the hut. Back on the river, the warriors
cast vine nets and quickly haul up about 20 struggling fish, some shaded green
with stumpy tails, others silvery with razor sharp teeth: piranha. The
nutritious fish with the bloodthirsty reputation is a macabre but
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apt metaphor for the circle of life in this feisty paradise, where hunter and
hunted often must eat and be eaten by each other to survive.
In this jungle haunted by nightmarish predators, animal and human, the Korubo
surely must also need some form of religion or spiritual practice to feed their
souls as well as their bellies. But at the maloca I've seen no religious
carvings, no rain forest altars the Korubo might use to pray for successful
hunts or other godly gifts. Back at the base that night, as Jumi sweeps a
powerful searchlight back and forth across the river looking for intruders from
downriver, Magna tells me that in the two years she's tended to clan members,
she's never seen any evidence of their spiritual practice or beliefs. But we
still know too little about them to be sure.
The mysteries are likely to remain. Possuelo refuses to allow anthropologists
to observe the clan members firsthand Äbecause, he says, it's too dangerous to
live among them. And one day, perhaps soon, the clan will melt back into the
deep jungle to rejoin a larger Korubo group. Maya and her clan broke away a
decade ago, fleeing toward the river after warriors fought over her. But the
clan numbers just 23 people, and some of the children are approaching puberty.
"They've told me they'll have to go back to the main group one day to get
husbands and wives for the young ones," says Magna. "Once that happens, we
won't see them again." Because the larger group, which Possuelo estimates to be
about 150 people, lives deep enough in the jungle's exclusion zone that
settlers pose no threat, he's never tried to make contact with it.
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Possuelo won't bring pictures of the outside world to show the Korubo, because
he's afraid the images will encourage them to try to visit white settlements
down the river. But he does have photographs he's taken from a small airplane
of huts of still uncontacted tribes farther back in the Javari Valley, with as
few as 30 people in a tribe and as many as 400. "We don't know their tribal
names or languages, but I feel content to leave them alone because they're
happy, hunting, fishing, farming, living their own way, with their unique
vision of the world. They don't want to know us."
Is Sydney Possuelo right? Is he doing the isolated tribes of Brazil any favors
by keeping them bottled up as premodern curiosities? Is ignorance really bliss?
Or should Brazil's government throw open the doors of the 21st century to them,
bringing them medical care, modern technology and education? Before I left
Tabatinga to visit the Korubo, the local Pentecostal church's Pastor Antonio,
whose stirring sermons attract hundreds of the local Ticuna Indians, took
Possuelo to task. "Jesus said, 'Go to the world and bring the Gospel to all
peoples,'" Pastor Antonio told me. "The government has no right to stop us from
entering the Javari Valley and saving the Indians' souls."
His view is echoed by many church leaders across Brazil. The resources of the
exclusion zones are coveted by people with more worldly concerns, as well, and
not just by entrepreneurs salivating over the timber and mineral resources,
which are worth billions of dollars. Two years ago more than 5,000 armed
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men from the country's landless workers movement marched into a tribal
exclusion zone southeast of the Javari Valley, demanding to be given the land
and sparking FUNAI officials to fear that they would massacre the Indians.
FUNAI forced their retreat by threatening to call in the military.
But Possuelo remains unmoved. "People say I'm crazy, unpatriotic, a Don
Quixote," he tells me when my week with the Korubo draws to a close. "Well,
Quixote is my favorite hero because he was constantly trying to transform the
bad things he saw into good." And so far, Brazil's political leaders have
backed Possuelo.
As we get ready to leave, Ta'van punches his chest, imitating the haka, asking
me to perform the dance one last time. Possuelo gives the clan a glimpse of the
outside world by trying to describe an automobile. "They're like small huts
that have legs and run very fast." Maya cocks her head in disbelief.
When I finish the war dance, Ta'van grabs my arm and smiles a farewell. Shishu
remains in the hut and begins to wail, anguished that Possuelo is leaving.
Tatchipan and Marebo, lugging war clubs, escort us down to the river.
The canoe begins its journey back across the millennia, and Possuelo looks back
at the warriors, a wistful expression on his face. "I just want the Korubo and
other isolated Indians to go on being happy," he says. "They have not yet been
born into our world, and I hope they never are."
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