2014 - Present
In Portuguese the name means “Thick Forest” but all I can remember is the sign that pointed the way to the Kalapolo village on the new road they had cut through the forest outside of Querência - a small farming and Gaucho town in the frontier region, and how the sign lay there in the dust of a plowed soybean field. The forest, what remains of it, stands a little way off in the distance, a final barrier separating two worlds. I remember emerging from the tunnel like road with the high canopy overhead and immediately seeing members of the Kalapalo in full traditional dress performing a ceremony in the center of the village and the grass huts all around. It was like crossing into another dimension. We had left one world behind in Querência with it’s Caterpillar and John Deer dealerships and where Brazilians with agricultural degrees from universities in Texas and Kansas wore hats with company logos like JBS, Cargill and ADM emblazoned on the front.
I knew then, as the Kalapalo probably did too, that the road was both a connection to the modern world and a severing of the traditional one, a final dropping of the green curtain that kept the foreign NGO’s and corporate monarchies, here under the guise of environmentalism, at bay. It was only a few years ago that these “enviromentalists” embargoed the region to a breaking point and the hardware store in town was forced to stop selling rope due to all the suicides.
I came under the same misplaced notion, only I called it conservation, but after years of being here and talking to the people I see the truth and I know that we are reliving history, the story of what we did to our own indigenous cultures is playing itself out all over again in the southern Amazon basin of Brazil.
Driving north out of town, we passed a tall stand of forest where a maned wolf skirted the edge and then vanished like an apparition behind a veil of green that was its birthright. We crossed clear streams with tall reed-beds where he said they used to spearfish and he told me of how you could hear the clacking of the anaconda’s teeth under water and how you had to keep an eye out for electric eels, but aside from that the fishing was good.
Later that night, in the Xingu, we dined on smoked peacock bass served on a basket made of reeds and sprinkled salt spiced with small red biquinho peppers and wrapped the fish in pieces of torn manioc while we attended a meeting of the elders in the center of the village where they bury their dead. We listened to conversations about the future of the tribes in the Xingu and how the culture among the young people is changing.
Several nights before our arrival a jaguar had come into the village and had killed a woman, but still we slept outside in our hammocks even though the men told us we were crazy. It would come back they said. Three nights later, in the quiet calm after a large gust front, it did.
Back at the camp on the banks of the Rio das Mortes I watched a fire erupt across the river and saw the forest canopy explode into flames and a few days later as I climbed to the top of a mountain in the Serra do Roncador I watched a flock of Red Macaws take flight and then entered the Cave of Pezinhos where the impressions from both human and animal tracks line the walls, many of them with six fingers. I have tried to understand the meaning of this place ever since, but I doubt that I ever will.
I knew then, as the Kalapalo probably did too, that the road was both a connection to the modern world and a severing of the traditional one, a final dropping of the green curtain that kept the foreign NGO’s and corporate monarchies, here under the guise of environmentalism, at bay. It was only a few years ago that these “enviromentalists” embargoed the region to a breaking point and the hardware store in town was forced to stop selling rope due to all the suicides.
I came under the same misplaced notion, only I called it conservation, but after years of being here and talking to the people I see the truth and I know that we are reliving history, the story of what we did to our own indigenous cultures is playing itself out all over again in the southern Amazon basin of Brazil.
Driving north out of town, we passed a tall stand of forest where a maned wolf skirted the edge and then vanished like an apparition behind a veil of green that was its birthright. We crossed clear streams with tall reed-beds where he said they used to spearfish and he told me of how you could hear the clacking of the anaconda’s teeth under water and how you had to keep an eye out for electric eels, but aside from that the fishing was good.
Later that night, in the Xingu, we dined on smoked peacock bass served on a basket made of reeds and sprinkled salt spiced with small red biquinho peppers and wrapped the fish in pieces of torn manioc while we attended a meeting of the elders in the center of the village where they bury their dead. We listened to conversations about the future of the tribes in the Xingu and how the culture among the young people is changing.
Several nights before our arrival a jaguar had come into the village and had killed a woman, but still we slept outside in our hammocks even though the men told us we were crazy. It would come back they said. Three nights later, in the quiet calm after a large gust front, it did.
Back at the camp on the banks of the Rio das Mortes I watched a fire erupt across the river and saw the forest canopy explode into flames and a few days later as I climbed to the top of a mountain in the Serra do Roncador I watched a flock of Red Macaws take flight and then entered the Cave of Pezinhos where the impressions from both human and animal tracks line the walls, many of them with six fingers. I have tried to understand the meaning of this place ever since, but I doubt that I ever will.