...The dream began to come true 42 years ago, when Possuelo became a sertanista, 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”—a successful initial nonviolent encounter between a tribe and the outside world—with 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.
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At the time the Portuguese explorer Pedro Cabral strode ashore in AD 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 tribespeople. 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 territory—no 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 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.”
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For decades, violent clashes have punctuated the longrunning frontier war between the isolated Indian tribes and “whites”—the 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 race—seeking 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.
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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.
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“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 suffer is malaria, brought to the Amazon by outsiders long ago.
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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—because, 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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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 5000 armed 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.
