Indians of the Amazon - where have they gone?

Travel in the Amazon

“Buy yourselves hammocks before you get on the ship.”

This is the Amazon, more different from the rest of Brazil than the rest of Brazil is from Europe or America. There are no roads here, only rivers, one has to travel by ship. Ships have a few cabins but most of the passengers just hang their hammocks from the ceilings above the decks. This is what one sees most of the time when one travels in Amazon – hammocks dangling everywhere. Everybody brings their own hammocks and we – just arrived from Europe – have to buy them before we go. In Manaus there is a whole street of shops where one can buy hammocks. Various hammocks: expensive and cheap, heavy and light, made of different materials and of all possible colours. They are folded on shelves or hanging from the ceiling, one can check whether they are nice to touch. We have been advised to buy big and comfortable hammocks because we'll be dangling in them for several days.

Finding a ship that goes in the right direction is another problem. Timetables don't exist here, one has to go to the right quay (one has to know which one is the right one) and ask around: which of the ships moored there goes where, on which day, at what time. Tickets are purchased an a table standing at the quay. Having purchased the ticket one gets a band around the wrist and can board the ship. Having entered one has to find a place to hang a hammock. Decks on Amazonian ships are spacious and always have a roof under which there are rails and hooks especially for hammocks. During holidays before the New Year ships are especially crowded and only with difficulty we find room for our hammocks on the uppermost deck. All around us people with copper coloured skin, whole multi-generational families. Amazing how young some of the mums are, they seem to be teenagers, but they look after their babies as they should. They breastfeed in their hammocks taking no notice of the people around.

Almost all the passengers have copper coloured skin and Indian features but officially they are not Indians. Officially there are no Indians living on the shores of the Amazon River. They are not called “Indios” but “caboclos”, or “river people”.

Our journey from Manaus to Tefé lasts three days. This could be shortened if someone is in a hurry and has a lot of money. This applies to the Western tourists who have short holidays and want to visit Mamiraua National Park. This is the park that covers the part of the jungle regularly flooded by rising waters of the river and tree trunks stand in the water. This is the habitat of the famous uakari monkey that has white fur and red face. For those tourists in a hurry a special floating hotel has been built. The tourists fly to Tefé, from the airport they go by taxi directly to the port, from which speedboats take them to the floating hotel and local guides show them the secrets of the jungle. After a couple of days they speed back to the airport without stopping at Tefé.

Inhabitants of Boca de Mamiraua

The local guides are caboclos who lived there for generations. They have copper-coloured skin and Indian features but they arenot Indians. They not daft either. They figured out that if they can work as guides for tourists who pay a lot of money to stay in a floating hotel, they probably can welcome other tourists, who have a little less money but a little more time. They can welcome these tourists in their own casa de caboclo, or “caboclo home”. This is exactly what the inhabitants of a village called Boca de Mamiraua decided to do. And this is where we decided to go.

Boca de Mamiraua lies at the very edge of an inland delta between Japura and Solimoes rivers. This inland delta is a flat area full of canals and islands that are flooded every year but are covered in dense forest. Houses in the village have to stand on high stilts as here nobody can say they didn't expect the flood. Sometimes there is more water than usual and the first floor of the houses are flooded, too. Only some houses have a second floor and in times of exceptionally high water they have to house not just one family but also the neighbours. The church standing in the middle of the village is of course also on stilts. In Boca de Mamiraua it is an evangelical church where music is accompanied by electric guitars. It must be interesting to hear a reading about Noah when the church is up to its neck in water. Kitchen gardens with onions and dill are in boats filled with soil and placed on stilts, high above the ground. There is a little manioc field behind the village but it has to be harvested before the next flood, not as in other Amazonian villages, where manioc is harvested whenever needed, all year round. Fish, on the other hand, are plentiful always. And what fish! A pirarucu can be as big as a grown man. It cannot be eaten at once, it has to be cut into sheets and dried like washing in the sun, which is also plentiful. Later the dried fish-sheets can be sold in Tefé. Fish of this size cannot be angled, it has to be speared and still jumping in anger pulled into a canoe. This is the Indian way of fishing, although the inhabitants of Boca de Mamiraua claim they are caboclos, not Indians.

Fish hung out to dry

Fish and manioc are staple foods in Amazonia. In Tefé on the market square one can eat a freshly fried piranha in an open air kitchen. Whole families work in those kitchens, including teen-age children. In one of them a teen-age helper sat to eat with us. She looked wide-eyed at Justyna and asked: “Where do such beautiful people come from?” I am of course flattered when somebody speaks like that about my daughter but I guess there is deeper meaning here. Justyna with her North-European features and blond hair looks like a model from a fashion mag, whereas the inhabitants of Tefé are of course not Indians at all, but they do look like Indians.

Somebody told me that there is a Polish priest in the cathedral of Tefé so I went to the office there, started talking Polish and somebody answered; this was father Piotr. Poles are not a common sight in Tefé, so we were immediately invited for dinner. It was served by a lady of dark complexion and clearly Indian features. Father Piotr told us that she came from a village of Ticuna Indians but she is ashamed of it and says that she is not an Indian. After all everybody in the town looks like that.

A couple of days later father Piotr took us to the village of Ipapuku on the other side of the Lake Tefé. The village stands on higher ground, houses don't need to be on stilts. The inhabitants say the are caboclos, which means they consider themselves ordinary civilised Brazilians, not Indians. They even have a flush toilet in one of the houses, which is where I am led (quite far) when the need arises. The central building of the village is a little church, neatly maintained even though a priest comes only sometimes, once a few months. “I'll have to come here once to celebrate a mass for them” said father Piotr seeing the neat church. When we arrived the villagers were busy producing granulated and roasted manioc. The procedure is exactly the same as described by travellers who visited Indian villages deep in the jungle, although here some mechanical implements were used to make the work easier. Raw manioc was grated in a mincer and then pressed into characteristic socks weaved from palm fibre. I have seen socks like that in pictures from Indian villages in old travel books. Manioc's poisonous juice is squeezed out in those socks. Afterwards granules are formed inside a cylinder turned by hand. Later, the granules are sieved to sort various sizes and finally roasted on a huge pan.

Clearing the jungle in Ipapuku

We were also shown a manioc field. This is on a spot where forest was burned out a few years earlier. Nearby, another spot is being burned out to make room for another field when the present field becomes less productive. This has been a time honoured economy of Amazonian Indians – a plot of burned out forest was used for some years but when it became less fertile – it was left fallow, then the forest returned while another plot was burned out for agriculture.

Another day father Piotr took me to a town called Alvaraes. He said that in the 18^th century this was a famous slave market and actually this is what the name means. This name is a witness of an important aspect of history of this part of the world.

The Portuguese didn't come to the New World to seek gold, as Spaniards did. The Portuguese wanted to cultivate sugar which could be sold in Europe for gold. They wanted to cultivate it but it does not mean they wanted to do all the physical work themselves. The plantations were to be worked by slaves. Some of the slaves could be brought from Africa, bought from African princes on the coast of Guinea. The earliest Portuguese sugar plantations were started on uninhabited islands like Madeira and Cape Verde and were worked only by slaves bought on African coast. The African slaves were also taken to Brazil but considering costs of transport across the ocean, they weren't cheap. On the other hand there were natives in Brazil, too. They didn't have their own slaves to sell, as the African princes did, but they had war prisoners which were captured in order to be tortured and – if they proved that they were brave enough while tortured – eaten, so some of that bravery would enter those who ate them. This was of course a barbarous custom in the eyes of the Portuguese who thought saving lives of these prisoners was a good deed. It wasn't difficult to persuade the captors to part with their prisoners because all Indians desired certain metal that the Portuguese possessed. To obtain this metal they would not only part with their prisoners but they would gladly go again on the war path to capture some more.

Roasing manioc in Ipapuku

The metal they so badly desired had almost miraculous properties. With an axe made of it one could cut a tree in almost no time at all, or split somebody's head in a second. A knife made of it could easily cut meat or go right into a heart of an enemy. Those who possessed this metal could much easier win a war and bring some more prisoners whose lives could be then saved in exchange of some more axes and knives.

Some of those prisoners sold to white settlers were women. One can guess that quite a lot of them were women as it was more difficult to catch men because men tended to defend themselves. It was much simpler to attack a village, kill men, bind women and children and take them away. One can also guess that the white purchasers used those women not only for hard labour. The result was a population of people of mixed race and rooted in both cultures, who felt in the bush just as much at home as in the white man's town. Soon it was those people who organised expeditions into the interior to catch more prisoners. In the 17^th century those expeditions, called bandeiras, were organised on a regular basis and their participants, called bandeirantes, are today considered discoverers of Brazilian interior. And the Amazon was an open waterway into the interior.

It is of course terrible that people who considered themselves “Christians” behaved so badly. One has to remember, however, that the people who considered “Christianisation” as a pretext of a conquest are only one side of the story. In history of any country there is a tension between gangsters who have power and independent pressure group who tries to restrict the power of those who rule. In the 16^th century Europe this taming pressure group was without doubt the Church, both in Spain and Portugal it was the Roman Catholic Chuech. In those days there was no police who could be called if a husband mistreated his wife, but there was a priest who had no sanction but the penance given at confession. There were no parliaments which could restrict the power of kings but there were priests who who reminded the kings that their power has to respect the message of Gospels. The message of Gospels was that all people are children of God and therefore cannot be enslaved and treated like animals.

A street in Tefe

Priests followed conquerors into colonies. The conquerors wanted to get rich but the priests who followed were often members of of religious orders committed to poverty, like Dominicans, Franciscans and Jesuits. These people did not go to the colonies to get rich. They went there to persuade the natives to stop practices which in Europe were not considered appropriate, like torturing and especially eating prisoners of war, or having more than one wife. They went there also to protect the natives from the excesses of white colonisers. The most famous of those was a Dominican friar, Bartolomeo de las Casas, who wrote a book that was much discussed at the time. The most influential missionaries in Brazil were the Jesuits. They were influential at the highest levels of power, sometimes they even managed to persuade kings to ban or at least restrict slavery. It depended on the period because the sugar-planters were also influential and at times managed to persuade the king to revoke the anti-slavery laws. For most of the colonial period in Brazil it was lawful to enslave prisoners taken in defensive wars or those who were “ransomed” and thus saved from torture and death.

The Jesuits also organised missions far from white settlements. In those settlements they gathered the baptised peaceful Indians. In theory this was to protect those Indians from slavers because the baptised Indians weren't aggressive (so there could not be a “defensive” war against them) nor did they eat any prisoners who could be “ransomed” and saved from death. Unfortunately it did not always work because for the bandeirantes the fact that Indians were God-fearing was of little importance. What was more important was that many of them were gathered in one place and if they weren't aggressive, they wouldn't fight back. At certain periods the Jesuit missions were the main targets of the bandeirantes. To justify their actions the bandeirantes, as well as the planters, spread the word of the supposed abominable behaviour of Jesuits in their missions. They kept repeating their accusations so persistently that somebody in the end believed them and as a result the Jesuits were banned from Brazil after several centuries of work.

Is it surprising then that in this situation the Indians preferred to say that they are not really Indians? Whatever their origin, they preferred to claim that they weren't Indians and should not be enslaved. Especially if they were good Catholics, had a church in the middle of the village and looked after it even though there was no priest enywhere near.

Indians of Nova Esperanza

The Indians who lived by the Solimoes in the old days were called Cambeba by the Portuguese and Omagua by the Spaniards. Early travellers noticed that the unlike other Amazonian tribes the Cambeba did not walk around naked but wore cotton clothes. They are also credited with the discovery that hugely influenced the motor industry – they were the first to find use for the juice of rubber trees. However, when the Portuguese hunted slaves on the Solimoes the Cambeba moved upriver, to the missions of Spanish Jesuits from Peru. So the sources say, anyway. Other tribes found refuge in the upper courses of other rivers, avoiding any contact with white people. They don't want any iron tools and just to drive the point home they shoot poisoned arrows at anyone who turns up in the vicinity of their villages. All Indians vanished from the Solimoes, only a few caboclos stayed, and caboclos, as everyone knows, are not Indians.

There was one more person invited to dinner at father Piotr's when we were there. This was brother Marius, a Polish Franciscan who lived in Tefé. He also showed us around the town. He took us to the part of the town which is regularly flooded and therefore all houses and the paths leading to them are on stilts. He also took us to CIMI, or Conselho Indigenista Missionário, which means Indian Missionary Council. There we were welcomed by a group of young people who do missionary work in this area. They were of dark complexion like all other inhabitants of Tefé but unlike the others the young people at CIMI admitted they were Indians. They said that since the leftist government of Brazil found some funds specifically for Indians, for example for education of their children, some groups suddenly remembered that they were descendants of this or that tribe. Sometimes they don't remember their tribal language, but so what? If they are accepted as Indians, their village is declared an Indian reservation where strangers can only enter with permission from the government agency that is supposed to deal with Indians and make sure they are safe. This is the case even if the village is no different from a neighbouring caboclo village.

One day we went with brother Marius in a Franciscan Land Rover to visit a few villages in the vicinity. One of those villages stood on a high shore over the Solimoes. A village as any in this area. Houses had low floors because the land they were built on was well above the regular floods. There was an impeccably maintained church in the middle of the village. As we came there, some young people were gathering, beautiful dark skinned girls, boys in sunglasses, they were about to practice something. As we came, somebody ran to call the touchan. Brother Maruis said that if they are calling a tuchan, this must be an Indian village, otherwise that person would be called “a president of the village council” or something of the sort. The church is Catholic and the villagers look after it but a priest only comes once a year. Brother Marius asked of what tribe they were. They said they were Cambeba and the village is called Nova Esperanza, which means New Hope.

As we were leaving the village I noticed a board at the entrance which stated that this is an Indian Reservation and to enter one has to apply for a permit from a government agency.

Fishing in Boca de Mamiraua