FEATURE - Brazilian Indian chief leads tribe back to life
Date: 31-May-02
Country: BRAZIL
Author: Axel Bugge
There, on the banks of the Tuatuari River chief Aritana of the Yawalapiti leads a tribe of 180 people that half a century ago was threatened with extinction.
Sitting in the middle of his village under the blazing sun, Aritana utters the words death, struggle and sadness over and over again as he tells of his tribe's revival from just 12 living members.
"When I was born, there was just one house in the Yawalapiti village," he says in softly spoken Portuguese.
"That was about 50 years ago, I don't know exactly," he adds, laughing about his age.
The history of Brazil's Indians is a tragic one, with their population falling to about 350,000 now from an estimated 6 million when the first Portuguese arrived in 1500. Still, in the last two decades there has been gradual recovery in the Indian population, largely thanks to medical care.
Aritana's tribe is one of those rare cases. Now, 12 houses form a traditional circle in his village around a central dirt area about the size of two soccer fields, hard and dusty during this dry season.
Built with long boughs of bent wood and straw on the outside and reaching as high as three-story houses, the mound-shaped huts look like stranded whales. The Yawalapiti spend most of their time in or near the huts if they are not fishing or collecting manioc, a potato-like vegetable.
It was the arrival in the 1940s of Brazil's best-known Indian experts, the brothers Villas Boas, to this area in the heart of Latin America's biggest country that started the recovery of the Yawalapiti tribe.
The Villas Boas' main achievement for the Indians - winning them a Nobel Peace Prize nomination - was the creation in the early 1960s of the Xingu Indigenous Park, giving some 17 tribes the rights to their ancestral lands. The park, of about 5.7 million acres (2.3 million hectares), is slightly smaller than Belgium.
In this oasis of tropical forests interspersed with short, stubby savanna trees, grasslands, rivers, lakes and marshes the Yawalapiti live along with the other tribes that today total an estimated 4,000 people. In the park jaguars prowl, abundant fish splash in the rivers and rare Lear's macaws flutter around the huts.
Aritana, his robust build hinting at his past as an unbeaten champion of his people's Huka Huka wrestling jousts, says the Villas Boas arrived by river and found the Kalapalo, another Xingu tribe.
YAWALAPITI KNOWN IN 'WHITE MAN'S BOOK'
"I don't know how Orlando (Villas Boas) knew the Yawalapiti, but I think the name Yawalapiti was in the white man's book," says Aritana.
Word of Villas Boas' arrival spread to another Xingu tribe, the Kuikuru, with whom Aritana's father Kanato was living. Villas Boas eventually found Kanato and set off to rebuild his tribe, which had abandoned its village and dispersed to live with other tribes some years earlier for unknown reasons.
One of the tribes' elders remembered the Yawalapiti village used to be in a forest clearing near the Tuatuari River.
"And then, when the rest of the Yawalapiti knew that my father was here with the white man, one by one they came," says Aritana. "They started to build the village, plant manioc."
Around that time Aritana was born.
In a rare interview, the surviving Villas Boas brother Orlando, now in his late 80s, recalls that Aritana "was born looking like a chief."
"He is a formidable Indian," says Villas Boas, who spent a lot of time with the young Aritana when he lived in the Xingu.
Aritana would need those qualities as his growing tribe faced greater challenges as the white man opened Brazil's central frontier, bringing farms, illegal logging, forest fires and illnesses the Indians had not faced before.
Seen from the air, cattle farms have gouged massive pockets of forest and encroach on the Xingu reserve from all sides.
With that came the inevitable attractions of and clashes with the culture of the white man. That has been Aritana's real struggle since he was name
