The original Brazilians

Five hundred years after the Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral first set foot in Brazil, small groups of indigenous people still flee from contact with white people deep in the Amazon rainforest. When the Portuguese sailors sighted land on 22 April 1500 and dropped anchor off the coast of Bahia, several million indians were living in what is now Brazil. Hundreds of different nations spoke hundreds of different languages. Today that rich diversity has been reduced by centuries of slaughter, disease, and persecution to a little more than 300,000 indigenous people, who belong to 215 nations and speak 175 languages. Within a few decades of the arrival of the Portuguese, the great nations who inhabited the forested coastal regions with their plentiful game, fruit, and fish had been decimated by sickness and slavery. Some became allies of the colonisers, but many retreated west to escape from the advance of the slave traders. The Guarani in particular took refuge in Jesuit sanctuaries known as reducoes, in the south of Brazil and in Paraguay. But in 1759 the Jesuits were expelled from Brazil by the Portuguese Crown, for standing in the way of the slavers and setting up 'a state within a state'.

Legalised theft in the Amazon

Today sixty per cent of Brazil's indigenous population live in the Amazon region. Officially demarcated indigenous reserves cover just eleven per cent of Brazil's total territory. Since the 1960s, government policy of opening up the Amazon region by building roads and hydro-electric dams and encouraging cattle-ranching and mining has again threatened many indigenous communities with cultural destruction, disease, and death. Those who live in gold-rich areas, like the Yanomami, have seen their land invaded by thousands of wildcat miners. Other groups who lived in the path of proposed roads and dams, like the Waimiri Atroari, the Nambiquara, and the Parakana, were forced to move. The military who took power after a coup in 1964 saw the Amazon as an 'empty' region, which needed to be populated and developed. Indigenous communities, even when they numbered thousands of people, did not count. Instead, hundreds of thousands of small farmers, expelled from their own land in the south by dam-building and large-scale mechanised soya farms, were transferred to the tropical rainforest region with the promise of cheap land. Any sort of company, including banks and airlines, could obtain generous tax-breaks if it bought land in the Amazon and cleared forest to set up giant cattle ranches. The official indian affairs agency, FUNAI, which was run by an army general, issued scores of 'negative certificates', declaring areas to be empty of indigenous people, when in fact they were home to indigenous populations.

The result was disastrous. After ranchers arrived in 1971, an epidemic of measles killed every single Nambiquara child under the age of 15. The Surui population fell from 1200 to 251 in nine years, as small-scale farmers from the south invaded their land. By 1982 there were only 571 Waimiri Atroari left. In 1968 they had numbered 3000, before work began on the Balbina dam, a private cassiterite-mining project, and the road that slashed through their rainforest territory. Disease and malnutrition carried off 15 per cent of the Yanomami population, 1500 men, women and children, when 40,000 gold-miners invaded their lands between 1987 and 1989. Sometimes indians were deliberately murdered. In 1988 14 Tikuna were shot dead by loggers. In 1993 gold-miners killed 18 Yanomami, most of them women and children. In both cases the murderers had invaded indigenous land, and the indigenous people got in their way. Some of the gold-miners were brought to trial and sentenced, while the trial of the loggers drags on.

Many indian communities now face a new threat from legislation. A government decree introduced in 1995 allowed the limits of their reserves to be challenged by third parties, even though the demarcation process had involved lengthy studies by anthropologists and topographers. A Bill to authorise mining in indigenous areas without proper safeguards for the environment or the indigenous communities is being considered by Congress. More than 30,000 claims from Brazilian and overseas corporations have already been filed with the government's minerals-production department, waiting for the new law to be passed.

Indigenous people unite in defence of their lands

When the onslaught on the Amazon began, indian communities had little contact with each other. In 1974 a group of chiefs, tuxauas, met for the first time to talk about what was happening to their communities. They each spoke a different language, but they soon discovered that their problem was the same: how to protect their land from invaders bent on exploiting it for their own profit. By the government, the ranchers, and the settlers, land was perceived in economic terms, as a source of income and profit. But for the indians it was much more. Their land contained the spirits that governed their lives, the bones of their ancestors, and their tribal memories. It was what gave them their collective identity as Surui, Macuxi, or Xavante.

From that first meeting, demarcation – the official establishment of geographical limits which respect the area traditionally inhabited by an indigenous community – emerged as the overwhelming demand of the indians. The 1988 constitution recognised the rights of the indigenous communities to their own ethnic and cultural identity, as well as their land rights. In 1989, indigenous leaders united to form what later became known as COIAB (the Co-ordination of Indigenous Organisations in the Brazilian Amazon), which today represents 163 ethnic groups – a total of more than 200,000 people – and campaigns for demarcation, investment in sustainable agriculture, and health and education services appropriate to the needs of indigenous communities. 'Bio-piracy' is also a major concern, with indians recognising the need to protect indigenous knowledge of herbal medicine and the properties of animal, insect, and plant life from commercial exploitation and expropriation by pharmaceutical companies.

All indigenous areas were supposed to be officially demarcated by 1993, but in spite of the mobilisation of the indigenous population, successive Brazilian governments did little or nothing to carry out demarcation until funds became available under the Pilot Programme to Conserve the Brazilian Rainforest, approved by the G-7 group of industrialised countries at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. In the same year, at a meeting held near Brasilia, 350 leaders from groups all over Brazil set up CAPOIB (Council for Indigenous Peoples and Organisations), to present their own proposals for a new indian statute then under discussion in Congress. They demanded not only the demarcation of all their lands, but bilingual schools with indigenous teachers, their own health service with indigenous health agents, and control over any mining operations on indian land. In spite of this significant mobilisation, voting on the statute has been endlessly delayed while Amazon congressmen representing mining and ranching interests propose the reduction of officially demarcated lands; one has even presented a Bill to grant an amnesty for crimes committed in indigenous areas. There are no indigenous congressmen or women, and decisions affecting Brazil's indigenous communities are still taken without their participation.

The traditional government policy of seeking to 'contact and pacify' and then integrate the indigenous minority into the dominant culture – thus freeing their land for occupation and exploration – changed only in 1988, when the new constitution recognised their right to a separate ethnic identity. Forced integration and drastic reductions in their traditional land area led the Kaiowa, a subgroup of the Guarani who live in Mato Grosso do Sul, to commit mass suicide. Between 1981 and 1998 there were 323 suicides, almost half of them among young people aged between 12 and 18 years. Most of the Kaiowa land has been occupied by cattle ranchers, leaving the indigenous people with an area too small to sustain them, and forcing many of them to go to work on sugar-cane plantations, cutting cane for alcohol distilleries. Treated virtually as slaves, many Kaiowa resorted to alcohol; their cultural identity disintegrated, as pentecostal Christian churches moved into the reserve. Recently they have begun to fight back, occupying cattle ranches and planting crops in defiance of judges' orders and police actions.

Uni-Acre: working for sustainable development

In the Amazon state of Acre, however, the election in 1998 of Jorge Viana, a PT (Workers' Party) governor, has opened up a space for the participation of local communities. In Acre and the neighbouring southern region of the state of Amazonas, there are 13,000 indians in 16 different groups, speaking 12 different languages. They are represented by UNI-Acre. The leaders of UNI-Acre are actively contributing to public policies, such as the state government's plan for sustainable development of the area. They want to organise their own communities and find ways to maintain their own communal values, not in isolation, but in co-existence with the society that surrounds them.

The UNI-Acre office is a shabby, rambling wooden house in a side street in Rio Branco, the capital of Acre. Inside it buzzes with activity, telephones, computers, and ideas. The priorities are demarcation of indigenous land and economic and cultural survival. The staff want to enable indigenous communities to become economically self-sufficient through environmentally sustainable development, not by cutting themselves off from modern technology but by making use of it without losing their own values and culture. They have a host of practical proposals: already radios have been installed in 16 villages, and people trained to operate them. They want to see at least one telephone in each area, a weekly radio programme on local issues, and respect for traditional medicine and community midwives. They recognise the need for alliances with non-indigenous organisations, people like the rubber-tappers who were once their enemies.

For years Brazil's indigenous communities were treated as passive elements of development schemes designed by governments, administered by the often corrupt officials of the government indian agency, FUNAI. (Officially indians are still treated as minors, not adult citizens.) Now FUNAI's funds have been drastically reduced, and responsibility for indigenous health care has been transferred to FUNASA, the public-health department of the Ministry of Health, which is contracting out some of the services to third parties, including non-government organisations (NGOs) and indigenous associations. Responsibility for education has been passed to the Ministry of Education. It is too early to know what this will mean for the communities, many of whom want to take responsibility for their own affairs, but lack economic independence. The Apuriná are such a community.

The Apuriná

From Rio Branco, the capital of Acre state, it is a five-hour bus ride north to the town of Boca do Acre, on the banks of the river Madeira, a tributary of the Amazon. Once, this road was like a tunnel through the trees, but now we pass only one stretch of virgin rainforest. The rest has all been burnt down and cleared for herds of long-horned zebu cattle to roam behind the barbed wire fences that follow the road. At Boca we are met by Francisco, cacique (headman) of the Apuriná village on the other side of the river. He leads us down a steep bank to the water, where we climb into a long canoe with an outboard motor and head across the wide river. The village lies high up on the opposite bank, a line of wooden houses on stilts, interspersed with trees, facing the river. A few years ago, without consulting anyone, FUNAI installed a diesel pump to bring water from a spring half-way down the river bank, but the Apuriná have no money to buy the fuel to run it, so the women still have to climb down the steep bank to wash clothes and babies.

Francisco's mother, Celia, makes us welcome. She is small and wizened, but still amazingly active, climbing nimbly up and down the steep bank to wash her pots and pans, sometimes with a great-grandchild on one hip. She is one of the few people in the village, home to 282 people, who still speak Apuriná. Behind the village there is rainforest and a lake, an area of 48,000 hectares. Loggers and fishermen have tried to invade more than once, but the indians have managed to drive them away, says Francisco.

'Sometimes people say we must sell timber, but that would be destroying ourselves. We are the guardians of the forest. We can take trees for our own use, but not sell them. We've never sold trees, although there are a lot of people who want to. But when indians sell to the loggers, it never works out well. Even with financial problems, we've always resisted, which is good for us, and also for you.' But the community needs income. The Apuriná want to set up workshops to make and sell handcrafts, working with seeds, oils, herbs, and the other renewable resources of the forest. 'With an income we could send some of our children to secondary school', says Francisco. 'With handcrafts we could earn money. It's the only way to survive without destroying the forest.'

The villagers already make necklaces and bracelets using nuts, berries, monkey teeth, and bark. A young man in the village, Moises, has invented his own machine for making the holes in the beads. They have three beehives; if they had more, they could sell honey. They used to survive on the income from rubber and Brazil nuts, but demand has dwindled. No one wants to buy their maize and rice, either. Some of the men leave the village to work on ranches, earning at most US$4 a day. The Apuriná women have their own plans: they want to form a women's group, to get to know women's rights. They want to develop their own work with plants and herbs and make a community garden. Francisco says that FUNAI always brought them ready-made projects which ended up being useless, like the water pump, but UNI-Acre works differently. They train leaders and hold meetings; they show people how to get organised, how to be aware of what is going on. 'Our area has been demarcated, but that doesn't mean everything is all right. The government can change it again', Francisco complains. UNI-Acre also encourages the pajés or shamans, the spiritual leaders and healers of each village, to meet and exchange ideas.

In the middle of the village is the school, a wooden classroom painted blue. About 15 children of various ages sit at desks among broken chairs. This morning Francisco's brother, Evandro, is giving a special lesson on Apuriná culture, history, language, and myths. In a large notebook he has written down everything he can discover about Apuriná traditions from talking to the old people in the village. He describes how they used to make canoes, how they lit fires without matches, how they fished with bows and arrows, how they built without nails. He tells the children how the indians, without an understanding of money, were cheated by white men when they exchanged their rubber for other goods. He explains how the indians who have gone to live in towns or on ranches cannot live like indians any more, because they are ashamed of being indian, of talking their own language, and they are not respected. 'But the indian who lives among his own people is happy, he is free.'