Close Encounter With The Amazon Tribe
One of the great attraction of the Amazon are the indigenous people. In Manaus, there are some interesting ethno -tours that can be experienced for a reasonable budget.
Manaus, Brazil March 2, 2017
It was the 2nd day of Lent and I can’t tell you how excited I am about the prospect of meeting an indigenous tribe in the Amazon, which in turn, is part of a broader cultural area. I remembered reading about them in the National Geographic Magazines when I was younger. Brazil's Amazon is home to more uncontacted tribes than anywhere in the world.
There are several Indians who live on the banks of the Uaupés River and its tributaries - the Tiquié, Papuri, Querari and other minor rivers - today belong to 17 ethnic groups. Each group has their own origin stories but they also share a body of broadly identical mythology. Against this common backdrop, each group has a distinctive identity and a particular place within the system. Each with rights to a particular territory or stretch of river with different characteristics and potential. Each group has its own language, its own set of personal names, its own dance-songs, and its own genealogies and narratives of origin. Each has a particular Anaconda ancestor that brought the people to their own particular territory. Each group also owns one or more sets of Yuruparí, sacred palm-wood flutes and trumpets that are the bones of their ancestor and which embody his breath and song.
From Manaus it is possible to visit indigenous communities on a day trip.
Our guide met us at the dock, a short walking distance from where our ship was docked. We sailed up the Negro River and passed the big Jornalista Phelippe Dahsou Bridge. It is the fourth longest bridge in Brazil at 3,595-metre (11,795 ft) long with a cable-stayed bridge section of 400-metre (1,132 ft) over the Rio Negro that links the cities of Manaus and Iranduba in the state of Amazonas in Brazil.
The Manaus-Iranduba bridge in numbers. At 3,595m long, it is one of the longest bridges in Brazil.
We sailed in our small river boat for about 45-minutes from the Negro River to a secluded and parched river beach. From our boat, we can see a large maloca, a communal dwelling of some South American Indian peoples and other smaller dwellings built with logs and covered with thatched roof. Just then, it felt like we’ve left any semblance of civilization. A man wearing a large headdress of blue and red feathers that looked like macaws greeted us. He is a native of the small Dessana-Tukana Indigenous community.
He then led us to the interior of the maloca, which they use as a house of wisdom and for medicine. Here, were seven other men who displayed body ornaments, jaguar teeth belts, bark cloth skirts with Desana drawings, acangatara (headdresses with long tails) with parrot feathers, and body paintings. We smiled and sat ourselves in the communal bench. All eyes were on the Dessanas.
Indigenous groups such as the Yanomamo and Kayapo have been living in the Amazon for thousands of years.
They call themselves Umukomasã. They live mainly on the Tiquié River and its tributaries, besides parts of the Uaupés and Negro rivers (including the cities of the region). There are approximately 30 divisions among the Desana, of chiefs, dancers, chanters, and servants. This number may vary according to the source. The Desana are specialists in certain types of woven baskets, such as large apás (trays with internal hoops made of vines) and sieves.
The Desana believe themselves to have a deep-seated relationship with nature and refer to themselves as “Sons of the Wind.” While their language is rooted in Tukano, that also seems to be the foundation of their beliefs, as they believe they themselves were created by Tucano, God the Father.
Most of the uncontacted tribes living deep in the jungle go naked, except for the jewelry they make from bones and teeth.
Dressed in feather headdresses and other ornaments, the dancers dance for several minutes. Their dances are of two kinds, either relatively slow, formal dances with the men in a continuous line and the women tucked in between them, or much faster, less formal dances where each dancer dances on his own, playing a set of panpipes as part of a chorus, and vying with the others to attract the female partner of his choice. Between these sessions of dancing, hosts and guests sit facing one another. Remaining aloof, but as the dance wears on, they mingle more and more with us, dancing and chanting with, breaking down of the barriers that were established, in dramatic form, at the beginning of the proceedings. When the dancing ended, they allowed us to mingle and have our photos taken with them.
The performances were intended to establish the musical identity of the Desana people as well as to show the efforts of musical transmission that have been made in the community. In the Upper Rio Negro region, the musical practice is closely related to the formation of a person’s identity through myths, rites, and arts. The event also promoted an exchange of knowledge between us and the indigenous culture about their daily activities.
The tribes sometimes wear straw-made skirts and even ready-made western garments.
The history of Uaupés peoples" contact with outsiders goes back a long way, back beyond through the great rubber boom at the turn of the 20th century, to the massive Portuguese slave raids in the first half of the 18th century. Although the impact of the slavers, rubber gatherers was traumatic and long lasting, these merchants were more interested in the Indians" bodies than in their souls; in religious terms, and perhaps in social terms as well, it was the missionaries who wrought the greatest transformations.
Effective missionary penetration began towards the end of the 19th century with the arrival of the Franciscans. The Franciscans, and the Salesians who followed them, saw all that has been described above through the lens of their own closed religious categories: the Indians" malocas were "hotbeds of license and sexual promiscuity, their dance-festivals occasions of "drunken debauchery", the payés were charlatans who held the people in their thrall, and the Yuruparí cult was none other than the cult of the Devil himself. Without knowing or caring what these things really meant, the missionaries set about destroying one civilization in the name of another, burning down the Indians" malocas, destroying their feather ornaments, smashing their cashirí containers, persecuting the payés, and exposing the Yuruparí to women and children assembled together in church.
The tribes that have established contact with the modern world wear leather clothes made from the animals they catch.
As the priests attacked the cornerstones of the Indians" culture, so they transformed their society, herding the people into villages of neatly ordered houses, each for a single family, and forcibly removing their children to be educated in boarding schools or internados. Under the internados" strict regime, the children were taught to reject their parents" values and way of life, encouraged to marry within their own groups, and forbidden to speak the languages that gave them their multiple, interlocking identities. For the missionaries, only one identity mattered, a generic Indian identity that stood in the way of "civilisation".
The natives wear distinctive face painting, often a combination of black and red across the face. It is believed to make the wearer appear fierce and intends to frighten outsiders.
As an early reaction to exploitation by merchants, pressures from missionaries, and the waves of epidemics that decimated the Indian population, a sequence of millenarian movements broke out in the Uaupésregion in the second half of the nineteenth century. Dressing as priests and identifying themselves with Christ and the saints, prophet-payés led the people in the "Dance of the Cross", a fusion of traditional cashirís and dabukuris with elements of Catholicism that promised freedom from the White oppression and relief from the 'sins" that were believed to be causing the epidemics.
Traditional musical instruments that they identify as “speaking” ones and that are characterized by a very tight music-lyric relation through similar pitch patterns: a flute (called kotiráp).
If the missionaries were resented for their attack on Indian culture they were also welcomed as a source of manufactured goods, as defenders of the Indians against the worst abuses of the rubber gatherers, and as the providers of the education that the Indians" children would need to make the most of their new circumstances. From the 1920s onwards, the Salesians established a chain of outposts throughout the region on the Brazilian side of the frontier, reaching the upper Tiquié in the early 1940's and destroying the last maloca in the 1960s. Today, the growing body of Evangelicals apart, most Uaupés Indians would consider themselves to be Catholics. As more and more people now leave their villages and head for São Gabriel in search of education and employment, life in the malocas and the rich variety of ritual life that went with it now persists only in the memories of the oldest inhabitants.
On the boat heading to the village.
Heading back to Manaus, I can’t help but think of the fact that we could potentially lose these tribes. They are in constant threat of imminent extinction. Threats to the indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest are often linked with issues of deforestation. Their homes are being destroyed, and the land that they use to sustain themselves is being used for mining, logging, or farming.
Their vast untamed wilderness which they call home, is under increasing threat from huge-scale farming and ranching, infrastructure and urban development, unsustainable logging, mining and climate change.
I really wished that we could stay longer. I wanted to delve deeper into their lives but we need to head back to Manaus. Nevertheless, I was feeling the pride of having met and posed with the natives of the Amazon ! Travelling is really a way of discovering another world and people !
Posing with the native tribal man and woman in Amazonian rainforest.
