In 1972, I was part of the first group to make contact with the Suruí people of central Brazil. They were bewildered and apprehensive but - as feared warriors - put on a show of cocky bravado. Totally naked, the Suruí would slip unscathed through forests that had whites hacking with machetes at every step, or would race across patches of savannah with deer-like bounds. They had been contacted by Apoena Meirelles, a young man whose tousled hair, black moustache and political intensity made him look like a Californian anti-war radical, but who was one of Brazil's elite sertanistas - Indian experts empowered to lead expeditions to make first contact with unknown peoples. This was achieved by a combination of woodsmanship - locating signs of the target tribe in the endless expanses of tropical rivers and forests; the bait of presents - particularly metal cutting tools that were irresistible in that world of exuberant vegetation; and, finally, patience - waiting for months or years for the Indians to decide on a face to face meeting. The Suruí contact eventually happened at one of their paths, a place where the Brazilian government team built huts and settled down to wait. Once the traumatic meeting had been achieved, it was several weeks before these warriors allowed Meirelles to visit their village and see their women and children.
Soon after my visit the Suruí underwent a hideous baptism into modern society. They were hit by an epidemic of measles, a disease to which these super-fit people had no inherited immunity. So the Suruí died in droves. All tribes are small - as hunter-gatherers they have to keep villages below a thousand people or they exhaust surrounding game, fish and forest resources. But measles and pulmonary diseases killed over half these people in a few months. The elderly were particularly vulnerable, and with them went their understanding of tribal mythology, heritage, shamanism and plant properties. The survivors were grief-stricken by a tragedy that was clearly linked to the contact. On the Brazilian side there was despair at this failure, with bitter recriminations about lack of medical back-up and botched inoculations.
Fast forward to 1985. A delegation of Suruí went to Brasília to lobby their congressman for legal protection of their lands. For me, seeing this pre-stone-age people at the time of first contact was an extraordinary experience; but their transformation in half a generation was even more astounding. With coaching from Meirelles and sympathetic anthropologists, some young Suruí had learned passable Portuguese, acquired clothing, and been introduced to transport, housing, cities and other trappings of modern society. More importantly, they had grasped the concepts of ownership (even of land), of law (the invisible force that could control their primeval forests), and of political power (wielded by strange chiefs in that distant capital city). A mere 13 years since first contact, this represented a staggering learning curve. The delegation performed well, with dignity, and achieved a legally protected reserve for their territory.
The Suruí tribe is one of 218 still functioning in Brazil. Every indigenous people has to undergo the same perilous transition, but each case is different. The process of change varies: some were first encountered in the 16th century while others are, amazingly, still uncontacted. Geography is all-important. Is a group's habitat open savannah, campo cerrado scrubland, forest or riverine (and, if so, exposed near the main Amazon, or isolated far up one of its tributaries)? Location is equally significant. Do the Indians live on the Atlantic seaboard, or near the westward-expanding colonisation frontier, or (like the Suruí) in the path of a "penetration" road, close to modern towns, or deep in rainforests that Europeans find so daunting? Are its lands backwoods sertão, or do they contain something to attract greedy outsiders? In the 19th century, rubber trees were a magnet for adventurers. Another important lure has been minerals - particularly gold, diamonds, iron and cassiterite for tin. The agent of contact is also crucial. Is it a government team like that of Apoena Meirelles, or a group of missionaries (and if so, how fundamentalist?), road-builders, ranchers, poor settlers, wildcat prospectors, skin-hunters, loggers, or other adventurers who tend to shoot first when they see an Indian?
It is easy to romanticise indigenous peoples. They are usually strikingly handsome - partly because any infant with a defect is killed at birth and the survivors are wonderfully fit and eat a dietician's dream menu. After millennia of living in (to us) difficult tropical forests, they understand every animal and plant in the world's richest ecosystem. (Evelyn Waugh once wrote a witty comparison between Amerindians and 1930s Englishmen: both love family and solitude, are dismayed by strangers, adore pets, and are passionate about hunting and fishing.)
Each tribe has its own customs, language and attitudes. These tiny communities would have delighted Jean-Jacques Rousseau as miniature "city states" peopled by un-materialistic "noble savages." They are democratic, in that each family ranks roughly equally and men discuss tribal affairs on the village plaza. But they are deeply conservative in continuing the hunter-gatherers' way of life that has worked for them over centuries. Different tribes naturally make very different decisions about how to confront the traumas of contact.
Fifty years ago, experts predicted that Brazil's Indians would by now be all but extinct. The population had fallen to about 100,000, and they were everywhere losing their land, culture and will to survive. It was thought that they would live on only in romantic literature, exotic place names and native blood that gives some beauties on Ipanema beach high cheekbones, bronzed skin and gleaming black hair. But news of their demise was premature. Indigenous peoples have staged a comeback.
I have been visiting or living with Amazonian Indians sporadically for over 40 years, and have watched tribes struggle with the problems of change. This process was once called "acculturation," and politicians used to hope that it would lead to assimilation in the melting pot of Brazilian society. No longer. Every tribe has shown that it wants to survive as an entity. The more sophisticated will cherry-pick benefits from modern society, but all cling to their way of life, spiritual beliefs, language, and above all, land. Even when young men leave their village to find work, they invariably return to the security, tranquillity and pleasure of living among their kin.
So how have these peoples pulled back from the brink of extinction? The physical rebound has come from health and land. Indians who survive unknown diseases, such as measles or influenza, do seem to acquire some immunity which they then transmit to their young. In the 1950s a vaccine was finally found for measles, and this has gradually been applied.
Once diseases are better controlled, tribal populations can be restored. Traditional practices that kept village numbers low - late marriage, infanticide of babies with any defect and years of breast-feeding that inhibit new pregnancies - are now discouraged. In many villages there is now a relative baby boom.
The catalyst for these improvements is territorial security. You cannot exaggerate the importance of land to indigenous people. It is the cement that binds the community, the source of all sustenance, home to ancestors and the spirit realm, a protective buffer against the encroaching frontier with every river and tree intimately known and loved. As soon as a tribe's land is protected, morale and self-esteem return, and one result is the rising birth rate: tribal populations have quadrupled in recent decades, to over 350,000. In the latest national census, statisticians were surprised when over 700,000 people said that they were Indian. (The surplus may be accounted for by detribalised Indians who have drifted into towns, or rural poor reviving indigenous roots in order to claim better social care.)
Struggles for indigenous land rights have been the great crusade of the past half century. For tribes living in the more open and developed regions of Brazil - the Atlantic seaboard, the cattle country of the south and northeast, or navigable parts of the Amazon and its great tributaries - this was almost a lost cause. Recent successes have been in Amazonia, which still has 60 per cent of the world's dwindling repository of tropical rainforest. These jungles were a fearsome wilderness to Europeans until the mid-20th century. Chainsaws and earth-moving equipment changed that. They subjected majestic forests to destruction - for airstrips, roads that admitted waves of settlers, logging, mineral prospecting, and clearance for cattle pasture or soya agribusiness.
At first, land struggles were waged by white sympathisers, but recently Indians have been fighting for themselves. A pioneer was Cândido Rondon, a morally upright, physically tough army engineer, who changed national attitudes to Indians at the start of the 20th century. He ordered his men - if contact with an isolated tribe went wrong and they were greeted by arrows - "Die if you must, but never kill." (This provided the title for my recent book, Die If You Must: Brazilian Indians in the Twentieth Century.) Rondon created a government Indian protection service, which began idealistically but by the 1960s had degenerated into corrupt inefficiency.
This was the time when I first met the remarkable Villas Boas brothers, the next champions of the indigenous cause. Sons of a failed coffee-planter from São Paulo, the three brothers left humdrum jobs to enlist on a five-year expedition to cut a trail and open airstrips across the unexplored heart of Brazil. When in 1945 the brothers reached the headwaters of the Xingu, one of the great southern tributaries of the Amazon, they found themselves in an environmental paradise with a dozen tribes which had scarcely changed since their first contact 60 years previously. One Villas Boas brother died young, but the other two - extrovert Orlando and the more reserved Cláudio, a self-taught Marxist philosopher - devoted their lives to the upper-Xingu peoples. The brothers lived for 30 years among the Xinguanos, getting to know each as an individual, treating them as absolute equals, understanding subtleties of tribal politics, and giving Indians some western goods and control of their isolated habitat.
The Villas Boases were true explorers, penetrating unknown rivers to contact isolated peoples. I have been on expeditions with them, up rivers and rapids in aluminium canoes, then on machete-cut trails. They travelled light, since the Indians provided them with food. Apart from basics - manioc, rice, salt, sugar - the brothers' only luxury was a jar of head-blasting chilli peppers. After often perilous contacts they persuaded tribes to bury ancient feuds and unite against the common threat of approaching settlers. They were nominated for a Nobel peace prize, and awarded the Royal Geographical Society's gold medal for their explorations and humanitarian work. The Villas Boases appreciated the public relations impact of their Indiana Jones-type adventures, and shamelessly courted the media and politicians to further their cause. Their greatest achievement, together with some enlightened anthropologists, was the creation of South America's first enormous indigenous reserve. In 1961, after a decade of political manoeuvring, the 10,000 square mile Xingu Indigenous Park passed into law. It was the prototype for a score of similar huge protected areas in the continent.
Cláudio Villas Boas died in 1998 and Orlando in 2002. The eight tribes whom they had done the most to befriend and save honoured each with a kuarup funerary ceremony - something they do only for their most revered chiefs. I was the only non-Brazilian invited to attend both these deeply moving rituals. Delegations from every tribe trekked through forests to congregate in one village, and several hundred warriors removed their clothes to don body paint and dazzling feather ornaments. A tree trunk was decorated and sanctified to represent the spirit of the dead man. For two days and a moonlit night, elaborate ceremonials revolved around this totem. At the end, it was symbolically cast into the river to float towards the Amazon. The Indians then went back to hunting and fishing, but also to modern education, slightly mechanised farming, bicycles, radios, outboard motors and computers. One group had a solar-powered television; I joined them to watch Brazil in the 1998 World Cup final. All this was thanks to the gradualism orchestrated by the Villas Boases. Their central idea was: "Change, but only if and at the speed the indigenous people want." They excluded all missionaries from the Xingu.
Catholic missionaries did in fact play a part in the revival of Indian fortunes. Inspired by the Vatican II Council, radical priests in the 1970s launched "liberation theology," and this included a reversal of missionary methods. Henceforth, such priests were to be trained anthropologists who did not try to undermine indigenous beliefs and ceased to be aggressive proselytisers.
Missionaries started to organise assemblies of their charges from disparate tribes. Delegates were bussed along the trans-Amazon highway and the other penetration roads that Brazil's military government pushed into the forests in the 1970s. So roads that caused so much damage to isolated tribes in their path (bringing random contacts, disease, and in some areas waves of migrant settlers and profligate deforestation) were also to be the means for indigenous peoples to meet one another and appreciate that they had a common cause. Indians like assemblies, partly because they are eloquent orators, practising at nightly discussions in their villages. There are now over 150 community-based organisations - one for every major tribe, or for groups along a river valley or a defined region. These groups are run entirely by the Indians themselves. They are backed by a coalition of sympathisers within Brazil and abroad - notably Britain's Survival International, of which I was a founder-trustee. During the 21 years of military government in Brazil (1964-85) the generals reluctantly tolerated youthful protest on behalf of the Indians - anything was better than communism, and Indians appealed to these nationalists as descendants of the first, true Brazilians. When the country reverted to democratic civilian government, campaigners fought for every clause of indigenous rights in the 1988 constitution. They opposed powerful business, mining and political interests which coveted Indian territories and their resources. They succeeded in getting legal protection for all land on which Indians depended for sustenance, hunting, migration or tribal heritage. The procurator-general's office was required to maintain indigenous rights, and the often chaotic Indian service - known as Funai - came under the ministry of justice.
A famous campaign for the Yanomami - the largest of the indigenous nations in the Americas which remains almost untouched - began in the 1960s. Some 25,000 Yanomami live in deeply forested hills watered by turbulent rivers, between Brazil and Venezuela. They are scattered in hundreds of yanos, great circular huts housing up to 200 people. Activists proposed one huge protected area and the fight for this swung back and forth under successive governments through the 1970s and 1980s. But the Indians and their friends won in the end. In 1991, President Fernando Collor de Mello decreed a single, contiguous park to accommodate all Yanomami in Brazil, and a similar reserve was later enacted in Venezuela. The Yanomami protected area in Brazil covers over 36,000 sq miles. Its boundaries had to be demarcated and marked - a stupendous task - along over 1,900 miles of some of the toughest terrain on the planet.
During the decades of struggle over land, it was discovered that the Yanomami hills contained gold and other minerals. Rumours spread that this Indian land was an El Dorado so rich that it would liquidate Brazil's foreign debts and make millionaires of the garimpeiro wildcat prospectors. Adventurers poured into the northern state of Roraima. In 1987-88, over a few months, 45,000 garimpeiros came to a region whose entire population had been little more than twice that. I was in Roraima during that gold rush, when the sleepy airfield of the state capital Boa Vista became the busiest in South America, with light planes taking off every few minutes to ferry prospectors to clandestine airstrips inside the Yanomami heartland. The miners were not anti-Indian, but they brought appalling destruction from epidemics, social upheaval, poisoning of rivers with mercury (used to separate gold dust from river mud), deforestation, pollution, alienation of game, and in one case a massacre of the inhabitants of a yano. The miners were gradually evicted by provincial police and many left because the gold was exhausted.
Another success story is that of the Kayapó and Xavante indigenous nations, who speak variants of the Jê language and who live, by Brazilian standards, relatively close to Brasília. The Kayapó also had gold on their land, and they permitted miners to extract it. But they negotiated substantial royalties by using their reputation as fearsome warriors to intimidate the invaders. They used this new wealth partly to police their long boundaries with their own planes and pilots and to campaign for indigenous rights. They learned that television crews could not resist colourful Indians, so they wore lip-discs, feather headdresses and body paint on bare chests when lobbying in Brasília.
Brazil's indigenous people generally enjoy a good press and public approval rating. The São Paulo-based Socio-Environmental Institute, a leading NGO, recently commissioned a polling company to test public attitudes to Indians. 88 per cent of respondents agreed (correctly) that Indians "protect the natural environment and live in harmony with it." And 92 per cent felt that indigenous peoples had "a right to keep on living in the jungle according to their own customs." The most contentious question concerned land. Indigenous reserves now cover an area equal to France, Germany and Benelux combined. (Most of this is, of course, forests, rapid-infested rivers and seasonal floodplains, in which Indians alone can survive.) This prompted the statement: "Indians represent only 0.2 per cent of the Brazilian population [of about 170m], and nevertheless have permanent possession rights over 11 per cent of the national territory." A remarkable 34 per cent felt that this was "too little," a further 34 per cent "the right amount," and only 22 per cent "too much." A cynic would say that these favourable responses, by people who will probably never see an Indian, come from a mixture of romance and guilt. Since alien diseases wiped out most of the indigenous population of lowland South America, the continent is largely peopled by descendants of European immigrants. Their liberal attitudes are at long last making amends for past oppression of the peoples who once owned the place.
Health continues to be a problem, but in some areas young Indian men and women are being trained as paramedics to apply their own preventative medicine. For many tribes, elders and anthropologists are finally devising school curricula in the native language and relevant to local needs. Two universities in Mato Grosso now offer degree courses just for indigenous students, and these are fully subscribed. The legal status of Indians is a difficult issue. They are classed as minors, without the vote. This seems demeaning, but it exempts them from legal liability for actions carried out under tribal custom, frees them from military service or taxation, and allows tribes to hold their land communally and inalienably. One solution would be for tribes to enjoy devolution, as semi-autonomous entities within Brazil. They still need government benefits because, although most Indians are hard-working and skilled at what they do, it is difficult for them to earn much in their remote and unmechanised reserves.
There is still one major indigenous territory that has not received presidential approval. This is Raposa/ Serra do Sol ("Vixen/Sun Hills"), a swathe of savannahs and forests near Mount Roraima in the extreme north of Brazil. It is home to the Makuxi and three other peoples, so is theirs by constitutional right, but it is good cattle country and contains some long-established ranches. The ranchers have been fighting a rearguard action for decades, arguing that the majority of their state - the size of Britain - is already indigenous territory. Brazil's new left-wing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, was last year about to sign this into law but refrained at the last minute, just as the local state governor switched to Lula's Workers' party. It looked like a sordid political bargain. Brazil's three largest indigenous organisations have just issued a manifesto deploring it.
A more subtle problem is whether the Indians can or should maintain their traditions in the midst of an exuberant modern nation. Most seem determined to do so. There are still 30 or 40 groups that remain completely isolated. Amazonia is probably the only place on earth that contains uncontacted peoples. Because many live in protected areas, there is no urgency to contact them or condemn them to the perilous process of change. For the others, I am guardedly optimistic. Having seen how they have overcome past problems, they appear to have the resilience to face the future, with the support of Brazilian sympathisers, public opinion and the law.
