Indian tribes fear for way of life

XINGU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil — Children are leaping from mango trees and skinny-dipping in the mild water of the Xingu River without a care.

But up by the grass-roofed longhouses, the village elders fret that their way of life will come to an end soon.

“We’re worried for our children and grandchildren,” said Rea, a Kayabi Indian woman. “Our Xingu is an island, and if the white man enters with his machines, he’ll break it all down in no time.”

Xingu is Brazil’s oldest and probably most successful Indian reservation — a 10,800-square-mile sprawl of pristine rain forest where 14 Indian tribes live much as their people have for thousands of years.

The reserve was established in 1961, just a few years after many tribes in the region had their first contact with white civilization.

It was located in the middle of a vast undeveloped stretch in the state of Mato Grosso — “thick forest” in English. Today, the park is surrounded by fields and pasture in the center of Brazil’s fastest developing agricultural region.

The Indians, whose numbers have nearly doubled to about 5,000 since 1961, say they are feeling the pressure.

“In 20 years, there won’t be enough land for all of us. If you look at the park, it’s just a triangle with a little rectangle on top,” said Awata, the schoolteacher at Capivara, one of several Kayabi villages that line the river.

In the villages, life goes on much as it always has, but there are signs all around of the encroachment of white civilization.

Shiny metal water faucets are now a fixture in most villages, thanks to a well-digging project that aims to protect the Indians from polluted headwaters outside the park. Once-crystalline rivers are muddied from erosion caused by farming and logging upriver.

“We can no longer fish with bows and arrows, so we need to buy fish hooks from the white man,” said Mairawe Kayabi, president of the Xingu Indian Land Association, who like many Indians uses his tribe’s name as a last name.

The sound of Indians stomping and chanting still is heard in the villages, only now it is as likely to emerge from a cheap tape recorder as from a live ceremony.

In the Ngojhwere village, the cooking grill is a bicycle wheel with its spokes hammered down. Three metal car wheels turned onto their sides raise the grill over the wood fire burning on the dirt floor.

Breakfast is piraucu, a big freshly caught river fish.

The Indians stew it in water. When it’s ready, they wrap it in pieces of a big gummy manioc pancake called “beiju,” with hot pepper and store-bought salt for seasoning.

The women now use steel pots instead of clay to fetch water and cook.

Satellite dishes sit outside many of the longhouses, feeding a few Brazilian TV channels to generator-powered television sets.

“All the stuff on the television puts stuff in the young people’s heads,” Mairawe said. “They are attracted to whatever comes from outside. This is a cause for a lot of disagreement among the leadership.”

For ceremonies, the Indians still strip naked and paint their bodies with red powder from ground urucum seeds and the black ink of the jenipapo fruit. But most days they wear Western clothing — the women preferring long cotton dresses, the men shorts and T-shirts.

Kuiussi, chief of the Suya Indians, who wore a skimpy swimsuit during a journalist’s visit, warns visitors not to take pictures of Indians wearing Western clothes.

“If people see the pictures, they’ll say we’re not Indians — that we’re mixed [race] — and that’s not true,” he says. “We are all Indians here.”

Although Kuiussi worries about outside influences, son Wetanti, 25, sees no problem keeping a foot in both worlds. He proudly displays a small album that begins with photos of him naked, painted and feathered and ends with him looking disco-ready in white slacks, a black T-shirt and wraparound sunglasses.

The Suya had their first contact with white men in 1959. Today the village is on the edge of the Xingu reservation — face to face with white civilization.

“Right now, we have to fight to maintain our traditions. The world won’t be the same for our children and grandchildren, so we have to hold on to what we have as long as we can,” said Kuiussi. “Maybe in the future, they’ll want to farm or do something with the land to make money, but not in my lifetime.”

The park owes its existence to the four Villas Boas brothers. During a government expedition to Brazil’s hinterlands in the 1940s, the pioneering Indian defenders saw firsthand the devastating effect of contact with white civilization on Indians and their culture.

The brothers — Orlando, Claudio, Alvaro and Leonardo — lobbied the government to set aside land for the reservation, then persuaded 14 tribes from around the region to move into it.

At the time, wildcat miners, loggers and farmers were starting to make their way into the region.

“We taught [the Indians that] if they wanted to survive, if they wanted their children to survive, not to let anyone in. We told them if anyone came, to fight them,” Orlando Villas Boas, who died last year, said in 1998.

On at least one occasion, Indians took the advice to heart. They killed 11 loggers who refused to leave, Mr. Villas Boas said. “No one even thought of coming here after that.”

Today, the Indians perform joint patrols with the Federal Indian Bureau and Brazil’s environmental protection agency. But when no officials are around, the Indians aren’t afraid to put on war paint and pick up bows, arrows and even hunting rifles to expel invaders.

Problems can arise among the Indians.

Many tribes moved to the park from hundreds of miles away, from places where the terrain was different, and they have had trouble adapting to life in the Xingu.

Kayabi elders complain that the materials needed to make traditional objects are not available in the park.

“The old people didn’t like it when they got here,” said Jywapan Kayabi, one of the chiefs at Capivara. “They couldn’t find the kind of wood they needed to make their bows and arrows, or the kind of grass they used to weave their baskets.”

Communication is another problem. Because each of the 14 tribes has a distinct language, they can communicate with one another only in Portuguese, a language few Indians speak.

The Indians in the northern part of the park still don’t have much contact with tribes in the southern part, even though they share a more compatible culture and occasionally visit one another’s villages for festivals.

“If we see their dances, we might understand some of what they’re singing, but we can’t join in the singing,” said Ionaluka, who is the rare offspring of a mixed marriage between a Suya and a Kayabi.