Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (21 page)

We already know that the Pirahãs do not need to have a chief or laws or regulations to exercise control over their members. Survival and ostracism are all they need. Túkaaga learned a hard lesson. His two helpers were never punished, so far as I can tell. Both are friends of mine, though I never ask about Túkaaga or the death of Joaquim anymore.

9                  Land to Live Free

T
he most common challenges the Pirahãs face are disease and incursions into their land by people from other parts of the world—especially divers, fishermen, and hunters from a variety of countries, including Brazil. Japanese sport fishermen and Brazilian commercial fishing boats on the Marmelos have been a frequent sight, the visitors paying the Pirahãs in sugarcane rum, cloth, manioc meal, and even relatively expensive trade items, like canoes, to help them locate fish, through a caboclo intermediary. They also suffer ill effects from trade with caboclos, who usually only give them sugarcane rum in exchange for food and jungle products. Rather than cause offense and risk a dangerous encounter with any of these outsiders, the Pirahãs will often give them all the food that they have to placate them.

The solutions that the Pirahãs needed outside help with most were demarcation of their land, to prevent the incursions, and medicines against the diseases. Keren and I helped them with the latter regularly. But I was sensing a stronger responsibility to help them with the former too. The need for a reservation became more obvious as we traveled in by river to their village, learning more about the caboclo culture that enveloped the Pirahãs. Although we flew to the Pirahãs on our first family visit, which was cut short by malaria, on our next trip we went by boat to the Maici.

We intended to stay longer this time, most of the year, and boat travel was cheaper than plane travel for getting in the bulk of our supplies. I had a more personal reason to prefer boat travel—to avoid airsickness. We arrived at the docks in Porto Velho for our first long family visit with our goods packed in fifty-five-gallon metal barrels, fuel containers, wooden crates, suitcases, duffel bags, and cardboard boxes. Dockworkers came running to “help.” But I had learned from others that if they touched just one bag they extorted large sums. So I shooed them all away and carried all the cargo alone, down a very steep mud bank, across a foot-wide, bouncy gangplank, onto the leaking
recreio.
All of these supplies would need to be transported multiple times, across lengthy stretches of muddy, flooded paths and the fresh tracks of big jungle animals (once with the animal, a puma, still visible).

Looking back now, I wonder if we were aware of the possible impact of all those goods on the Pirahãs. I think we must have assumed that this huge quantity of supplies, to meet the needs of a California family for a year, would not bother the Pirahãs. We never considered living any other way at this point in our careers. Luckily for us and for the Pirahãs, I think we turned out to be right, but not because of any insight or carefully reasoned conclusions on our part. The Pirahãs never showed much interest in our things, never tried to steal them (except food), and never asked for them. They always seemed to think of our things as not related to them in any significant way.

In any case, river travel became our preferred way of getting to the village over the next couple of years. We could take more supplies, thus extending our stays, and we also were able to stop at small settlements along the way and get to know the Brazilians who lived near the Pirahãs. Many of these people went regularly to the Pirahãs to trade with them.

As I got to know these people, I learned one thing that disturbed me:many of them were interested in the Pirahãs’ land. Often they asked why the Pirahãs should be given this prime hunting and fishing ground.
“Mas, Seu Daniel, porque aqueles bichinhos têm direito à toda aquela terra bonita e os civilizados não?”
(But, Mr. Daniel, why do those little creatures have rights to all the beautiful land but civilized people do not?) This kind of talk worried me because I could easily imagine some of these folks moving onto the Pirahãs’ land and trying to take bits or even large sections away from them. I knew I should help the Pirahãs get a legally recognized reservation, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it.

B
y now, my family and I had been in Brazil for many years. After I finished my Ph.D. we decided to spend a year in the United States so that I could do postdoctoral work at the center of my linguistic world, the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts—the department of Noam Chomsky, whose theory of grammar had become so influential in my professional life.

After we had been at MIT for five months, however, I received word via Dr. Waud Kracke, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, that the Brazilian National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) wanted me to join them on an expedition to identify the boundaries of an officially recognized reservation for the Pirahãs. I agreed to this enthusiastically.

I would need to travel all night from Boston to Rio de Janeiro and then do another seven hours of puddle-hopping flying to Porto Velho. The FUNAI had invited me to help them determine the extent of land to be reserved for the Pirahãs. The FUNAI representative who invited me was known to me simply as Xará (shaRA). He held a senior position in the FUNAI. Xará had spent a couple of years traveling around the lands of the Pirahãs, the Mundurucus, and the Parintintins, and he wanted to see to it that they all had fully legal reservations to maintain their traditional way of life. He was of medium height and build, handsome, with a full black beard and long hair, traveling with his pretty blond Brazilian companion, Ana. Simultaneously serious and laid-back, always dressed casually, they reminded me of a couple of concerned hippies. But they spent their time trying to help guarantee that the Indians of Brazil could carry on their way of life by at least keeping the land of their ancestors.

Xará and I had become friends during his visits to the Pirahã village of Posto Novo, where I worked from 1977 to 1985. We had talked at length about the Pirahãs’ need for a reservation. Xará had renewed his career within the FUNAI and had risen to a place where he had the authority to organize an expedition to identify a reservation for the Pirahãs and Parintintins (the first step in a three-stage process of demarcating Indian land). He sent an inquiry to Waud, who studied Parintintin culture, and me to see if we could go to Brazil to help as interpreters, since we were then the only outsiders known who spoke these languages. The FUNAI, Xará said, could pay for our expenses within Brazil, but we would have to cover our international travel. Waud then called me and suggested that Cultural Survival, an organization founded by the late Harvard anthropologist David Mayberry-Lewis for the preservation of traditional ways of life for endangered groups, might be willing to pay my way down. Mayberry-Lewis responded to my request immediately and assured me that Cultural Survival would be delighted to purchase my ticket to Brazil for such an important mission.

I had been trying since 1979, to no avail, to get the relevant officials interested in protecting the Pirahãs’ land from the growing threat of incursion from the outside. I had appealed to four separate FUNAI directors in Porto Velho (the brothers Delcio and Amaury Vieira, who served in succession; Apoena Meirelles, who actually visited me in the village to discuss the possibility; and a director I only knew by the name of Benamor), practically begging for the establishment of a reservation. Amaury sent a FUNAI employee in for two weeks in the early eighties to get a feel for the place, but then he was replaced. Benamor simply told me, “No one wants to live out there with those Pirahãs and their language. It sounds like they are crying all the time.”

I was excited to have the opportunity to travel the entire length of the Maici River, something I had never done, and to visit
all
the villages of the Pirahãs. There was so much I wanted to see and learn, including whether all Pirahã villages looked the same as the villages I had already seen and whether all Pirahãs spoke the same dialect and would understand my form of their language. During my first several years among the Pirahãs, I had spent almost all my time at Posto Novo, which lies at the river’s mouth. I had yet to travel to the other Pirahã villages because they were more remote and difficult and expensive to get to.

The FUNAI had invited me to come on this trip to serve as an interpreter. I was to translate their stories and answers for a FUNAI anthropologist who was interested in their traditional patterns and areas of land use. His job in turn was to interview all known Pirahãs along the Maici about the land and to then chart out what lands they used now and what parts they might claim as theirs traditionally.

After hours of travel, I arrived at Humaitá. I had to find a boat to take me to the Maici, so I caught a cab and asked the driver to take me the two miles to the banks of the Madeira. I could have walked there, but by this time the temperature was nearing one hundred degrees and I was hot and tired. Dozens of wooden-hulled, mostly unpainted and rickety-looking boats were at the dock. Not knowing anyone and being uncertain whether the FUNAI would actually reimburse me for the boat rental, I just asked who was available, hoping to get the cheapest ride possible. I approached two brothers who owned a precarious-looking wooden tub about twenty-five feet long. One was under the stern, as boat owners on the Amazon system often are, trying to fix a leak. The other brother was staring lazily from his hammock at me as I approached the banks, clapping my hands in the Brazilian equivalent of knocking where there are no doors.

“Olá”
(Hello), I called out above the noise of boat motors, shouting boat mechanics, and children running around the bank playing and yelling.

“Olá,”
he replied impassively.

“I wonder if you would be able to rent your boat to take me to the Maici River. The FUNAI will pay you when we arrive at the Maici.”

“But if the FUNAI is not there?” the fellow in the hammock quizzed me skeptically.

“Then I will pay you myself,” I promised him.

I didn’t know this man, but he said, “OK, we’ll take you.”

“Great. Let me have lunch and then we’ll leave.”

“Fine,” he responded.

I ran upstream along the bank and stopped at one of the dozen or so eating houses.

“Quero um prato feito, por favor”
(I want a made plate, please), I announced to the heavyset woman behind the wide plank that served as the bar. A made plate is most commonly a large heaping plate of meat, beans, rice, and spaghetti, covered in yellow, Grape Nuts–consistency manioc meal.

“Você quer carne ou peixe ou frango?”
(Do you want meat, fish, or chicken?), the woman asked.

“Todos”
(All of them), I answered hungrily.

In less than ten minutes a steaming hot plate of oily food was put in front of me with a plastic bottle at the side full of
tucupi,
a yellow sauce made from cooked manioc juice with chili peppers. I ate the entire plate in about five minutes, washed it down with a liter of ice-cold Brazilian lager, Brahma, and paid about three U.S. dollars for it all.

“Obrigado,”
I said perfunctorily as I headed out the door to the dock.

“Pronto?”
(Ready?) the boat owner asked.

His brother was now out of the water and fueling the engine.

“Yes, let’s go,” I answered.

I walked up the narrow plank and tossed my two small bags on board. I took out my hammock and hung it in the main (very small) cabin. Then I went onto the prow.

“How long will it take us to get there?” I asked, uselessly—it would take what it would take and there was no other boat.

“If we go all night, we will be there by noon tomorrow.”

It was now about 3 p.m. The engine cranked over and came to life,
putt-putt
ing loudly.

“Embora!”
(Away!) came the shout.

As we began to pick up speed, heading down the mighty Madeira, the still, hot air gave way to a refreshing breeze off the water. The effects of my trip, the meal, the beer, and relief to be under way made me suddenly sleepy again. I went to my hammock. The warmth, the breeze, and the comfort of the hammock had a predictable effect on me—I slept most of the voyage, except for a few minutes of lucidity here and there and a breakfast of hard crackers, sweet black coffee, canned butter, and some milk. During one three-hour period coming up the Marmelos River, I watched the beautiful dark waters go lazily beneath us, thinking again of how fortunate I was to be able to experience this dream world. The high banks of the Marmelos, formed of sandy earth, strongly contrasted with the thick mud banks of the Madeira.

We arrived nearly twenty-four hours later, true to the owner’s prediction. I awoke from a final doze to the sounds of animated talk from some Pirahãs on shore. No mistaking the Pirahãs when they were excited—they were loud and full of laughter and exclamations. My hammock was swinging gently as the boat slowed and pulled up next to another boat near the river path to a Pirahã village at the mouth of the Maici River. The other boat, already moored, was larger. I had expected perhaps two FUNAI employees to be waiting for me, but standing on deck staring at me were representatives of two Brazilian government agencies, an anthropologist and a cartographer from the FUNAI, and a specialist in land claims from INCRA (National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform).