A few things I learned from some of the world’s most isolated people…
In the glaring blast of the equatorial sun, I waited outside an obscure outpost of the Brazilian Bureau of Indian Affairs for my name to be called by the office’s director. I had been in the Amazon for months – evinced by my emaciated frame, heavy beard, and darkly-tanned skin. A week-long voyage in a hammock slung up in a cargo ship – a journey through majestic corridors of towering forest, mysterious waters populated with pink river dolphins, and stretches of river so wide that they appeared as actual seas – had taken me from the Amazonian city of Manaus to the last non-indigenous settlement in Brazil, a military base known as São Gabriel da Cachoeira. Indigenous people consider this region, straddling the tri-border of Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela, the heart of the Amazon Rainforest and the torrential waterfalls that inspired the city’s name (‘cachoeira’ meaning ‘cascade’) as sacred.
Indigenous children in the Upper Amazon
Those waiting with me outside the outpost reflected the dazzling ethnic diversity of this region. Among others, I identified Yanomami, known as the ‘fierce people’ and isolated to the mountains near Venezuela; Tukano, the most populous and dominant tribe in the Upper Amazon; Nadahup, pygmy hunter-gatherers who were considered the ‘Grandfathers of the Forest’; and Quilomberos, descendants of fugitive enslaved Africans who had established colonies in the Amazon during the colonial era. Those waiting with me had likely traveled here from their reservations to renew government documents, and they stared at me with silent curiosity. Finally, as I mentally prepared my pitch to gain permission to visit the protected indigenous communities further up the river, I was summoned by the director’s secretary.
He was Tukano, but his paunch and doughy face betrayed the fact that he had lived outside of the traditional villages for many years. He eyeballed me with suspicion. “So, you’re the gringo who wants to visit the communities?” He asked quickly as he fished for a proposal I had submitted to his office days earlier. The proposal spoke to my religious studies course at Harvard University and my desire to observe traditional rituals among the Upper Amazon’s indigenous groups.
I affirmed that I was the foreigner in question, and he cut me off before I could finish, “You can forget about these plans. I won’t authorize you even a single day in the protected villages. What’s more, if I find out that you go there anyway, I will send the military police after you.”
Despondent, I sat with a local friend later that evening on the bank of the great Amazon. He was also Tukano, and we had become fast friends on the boat ride to São Gabriel da Cachoeira.
He chuckled as he leveled with me. “He wanted a bribe, brother.” Then reassuringly, “Listen, my mother is his cousin, and I will go to the Indian Bureau tomorrow morning to talk to him. Vai dar certo – ‘it will all work out.’” He grinned and added, “ In fact, you’ll get along famously with the Indigenous folks on the reservations – you speak the same funny, broken Portuguese as they do.”
The following day, the surly director summoned me back to his office. When I arrived, he shoved an official document in my hands: “I’ll authorize you one week in the Tukano reservation. Don’t even think about staying even a day more. I’ve radioed their ‘Captain’ and they are expecting you.”
**
That afternoon I trekked to the port in São Gabriel where the cargo ships unloaded their wares and the indigenous people bought supplies to take back to their reservations. By a stroke of luck, I met a man who was from the village where I was going. He agreed to ferry me on his tiny motorized canoe if I purchased the necessary gasoline.
About an hour after departing São Gabriel we diverged from the main trunk of the tea-colored Amazon and skirted up a small, serpentine tributary, so narrow that sunlight could barely reach us through the thick canopy above. We plied several miles up the tributary until we reached a small, almost imperceptible clearing on its bank. As we got closer, I realized that there were earthen steps leading up to the forest above. My guide announced proudly that we had arrived in Comunidade São Jorge.
At the top of the steep riverbank, a large clearing in the forest appeared containing dozens of thatched-roofed huts arranged roughly in a circular formation. The Captain of Sao Jorge, a solemn Tukano man aged about 50, greeted me with several elders. He accepted the gifts I had brought of foodstuffs and tools from São Gabriel and directed me to a communal meeting building, known as a ‘maloca’, where I was to sling up my hammock. As I walked to the maloca, a herd of wide-eyed children followed me, and they shrieked and scrambled to hide whenever I turned to look at them. I had been advised to bring a bag of chocolates for the kids, and as soon as the first treats were distributed, they were glued to me like my own shadow for the rest of my sojourn in São Jorge (one even woke me up on a daily basis to get the first bon-bon of the day). An elderly woman, the mother of the captain, approached me, “Be welcome here in our community. We embrace outsiders, as long as they have something to teach the children.”
That week I rose every day at 5 am to join the community for Mass. Salesian missionaries had established a presence in the Alto Rio Negro several decades prior, and although traditional Tukano beliefs and rituals still existed in Comunidade São Jorge, they were ostensibly Catholic. About mid-morning, I would join the Captain and the other adults in the village for a breakfast of tapioca-starch cakes and fish and then sit in on their daily deliberations, in which they discussed communal issues in Tukano and patiently translated for me into Portuguese.
“snake and jaguar” by Apollo, license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
A particularly vocal participant in the morning meetings was the village medicine man, Seu José. Jose lived in a hut with his family outside of the village, deeper into the forest and relatively cut off from the other families. His hut was the simplest of all, merely a thatched roof upheld with poles and without walls. He had a small garden of chili peppers, tubers, and medicinal herbs, but the totality his family’s possessions could have fit into a backpack. José was in his 40’s, and he had a twinkling, mischievous smile that bloomed from beneath a pile of deep wrinkles and scars. The creases and scars testified to a hard life – he and his kin had been persecuted by the Colombian guerrilla, and he had lost many friends and relatives in conflicts. He had fled Colombia for Brazil, and although he had learned Tukano and Portuguese, his native language and ethnicity were distinct from the others in São Jorge. José loved to tell jokes and stories, and we quickly recognized each other as kindred spirits.
A week after I departed São Jorge, José’s youngest child, a toddler, died tragically when he tipped over a boiling pot of water onto himself. The child might have survived, but they were unable to get him to the hospital in São Gabriel quickly enough. These heart-wrenching events motivated me to return to São Jorge a year later with funds for the community to purchase a reliable motorboat, an acquisition that would allow them to reach São Gabriel in about half the time in the event of another emergency.
The young men in the village about my own age, took me hunting for monkeys and to see sacred sites further up the river. They had a deep knowledge of Tukano mythology and shamanic practices, and we had fascinating religious discussions. They explained that Tukano mythology held that the Great Creator had, in fact, sent a son to teach their distant ancestors. What’s more, they believed that this mythological Son of the Great Creator had, in fact, been Christ incarnated as an Indigenous Amazonian.
The young Tukano were curious about my own land, and they marveled at the pictures of the snow and the ocean that I showed them. They expressed their desire to learn about the wider world, but also their concerns that in the wake of increasing development in the Upper Amazon their indigenous traditions and languages would not survive for their children. They told me of the romances, dramas, and courtships that were unfolding within São Jorge, as well as crushes and longings for certain young ladies in other indigenous villages.
What marveled me most during my days in São Jorge was the amount of common ground that I discovered with its residents. Many of them, especially the older generation, had no conception of a city or even life outside of the Amazon. Some had never seen a person of European ancestry, and light skin and blonde hair shocked them as much as a man with a third eyeball might shock us. Despite our differences, we laughed together constantly and managed to cultivate deep and meaningful conversations in Portuguese, a second language for both them and me. I realized that our deepest concerns and dreams were essentially identical: the well-being of family, the desire to live responsibly and honorably, and yearnings for meaning, love, and beauty. They demonstrated to me, in a similar manner that Brazilians I had met in favelas and rustic fishing villages did, that profound richness of life can be achieved with very few – indeed almost zero—material possessions. Most importantly, what I affirmed in São Jorge is that the human heart is the same across cultures, languages, and ethnicities. Whether one is born deep in the Amazon or in a modern, industrialized city, we all seek the same goals, ask the same questions, and are all created in God’s image.
