Trad Gang

they are putting a Starbucks behind that hut.

Wow!  That's racier than a Martin Archery ad.  The girl doesn't have a shirt on at all.  Whatever kind of bow they are shooting, I'm getting one.

boy camoflauge of any sort must not be that important to them.  They are the same color as those goofey little whatevers in the chocolate factory.

What is interesting to me is we are here in our homes/work with the comforts of modern life looking at these guys on the internet.  Meanwhile, if they could speak our language they would say "internet, what's a internet?"  

They are probably still telling stories of driving the "flying devil" out of their land.  In all seriousness they have to be wondering what is the world coming to and how to combat it.  

I saw a story yesterday that quoted an official as saying the rain forrest was state property and thus belonged to all Brazilian people and these folks are no better than those that would interlope on their civilization.  So get ready little "trad" brothers, the government is on it's way to save you from your primitive ways.  Neccessary? maybe but debatable.  Sad? yes.

QuoteOriginally posted by Dustin Waters:
boy camoflauge of any sort must not be that important to them.  They are the same color as those goofey little whatevers in the chocolate factory.

Oompa loompas?

Interesting! But let's hope folks will be wise enough to LEAVE THEM ALONE and keep at least any form of missionaries out of their way.
And if these are in fact the very last natives of South America - well - would then not all the land belong to them and only them? Like parts of Oz which were given back to the Aboriginies?
I guess they will be wiped out befor someone can instill this thought in them and call for the  attorneys ...
Thus I have to aggree with Jedimaster, sad it is.

imagine what must have been going thru their minds!!!! I wonder if any of em bounced an arrow off that "big noisy bird from Hades"....Id say they was still cleaning out their britches, if they was wearin any. :D

Boy you guys have it all wrong!!! That's not some primitive tribe deep within the amazon rain forest. That's the WENSELS' memorial day bbq. They was shooting ariels and eatin Barrys' freight train carp   :biglaugh:    :biglaugh:

I once saw bows like that for sale somewhere, maybe Krakow Company, who used to advertise in TBM. They sold bows from around the world, including bows from Africa and Asia. I just did a quick search on it and came up empty. The bows would soon become useless after leaving the rain forest, however, as they are designed for and are made of woods that depend upon the high humidity to retain their flexibility. I have a close friend who was born in Venezuela, and he said he had a bow that was made by the natives there. It was solid black and heavy, he said.

I took a college course, gosh, it must have been 27 years ago, on the history of the Native Americans. The course ended up on the (then) most current, ongoing process of divesting native peoples of their lands and culture. In Brazil, logging and gold (sound familiar?) has been the draw, and missionaries and loggers and miners and the clapboard towns that cater to them and their vices have made great inroads, affecting indigenous peoples along the length of the Amazon. Shorts and sneakers, money and alcohol part them from their history and each other, until they become low-cost labor to feed the economic machine. Languages and cultures are forever forgotten, along with the intimate knowledge of their lands and the creatures on it.

The most devastating tool in the removal of people from the path of progress is not the chain saw and the bulldozer, though. It is the myriad of diseases which we carry, that the natives have no resistance to. Common colds, venereal diseases and other easily transmitted pathogens, they are doing to the Yanomamo what they did to the Narragansett and the Inuit. People who have never seen a motorboat or a white man are ravaged by diseases they cannot fight. Brazil created the Xingu Reserve as a place for many tribes to live. But the land, and the peoples, are changed.

Some day we are going to run out of unexplored, unsettled territory. What will we do then? Cram ourselves cheek to jowl into smaller and smaller quarters, do with less and less food, water, personal space, sanity? Or could we somehow decide that "this" is enough people on the planet, and live relatively uncluttered lives, limiting our demands upon the earth, its resources and the beauty that we have inherited from our ancestors, and will pass on to our children?

But no, our egos, and national pride, and power (there are more of us than there are of you!) and the economy (is the economy a Ponzi scheme or what??) demand more and more people. The whole thing is a conundrum, a Gordian knot that we can't easily find the solution to. So, as humans, we do what we do best. Don't worry about a problem until we have to! So we flirt, and make babies, and let it all take care of itself. Remember the ZPG movement (Zero Population Growth) that those whackos in the seventies were talking about? And see how well we have worked on the energy thing? Alternative energy, Independence from foreign oil, this was all the rage when I was in high school. That was (sigh) thirty-five years ago.

We are humans. We are stupid.

So, we now know that there are some free humans out there. They do not contribute to the labor force, they do not pay taxes, they do not vote nor pay a tithe to the Church nor support the Powers That Be in any way, shape or form.

God help them.
Killdeer

These are the people who Dr. Paul Shepard (among the greatest minds of our time, and THE greatest mind ever, regarding our human origins) called "the pinnacle of humanity." That is, we evolved to live as hunter-gatherers, and we have not had time to de-volve into something else. Pre-agricultural and pre-civilization hunter-gatheres are the purest and best humans who ever lives. I can't express my joy in knowing that a few such still hang on. More power to them, doomed though they surely are. I do wish their poisoned arrows could bring down a helicopter, even as I wish the first Indians greeting the first European invaders, had wiped them out to the man. Oops! here I go again ... adios. d

Making assanine statements about shooting down helicopters and wiping out all Europeans can only be made for shock value.  

The major difference between native peoples and european settlers was firepower and technology.  There were both peaceful and war-like individuals from both parties.  To say that one group was inherently "better" than another is ludicrous.  

The concept that native people lived a peaceful existence prior to the arrival of the European settlers is pure fantasy.  Take the Aztec and Inca empires as prime examples of human power,politics, ambition, corruption, greed, and cultural dominance that is typically attributed to the "bad" Europeans that came years later.  Think genocide is a European novelty?  Think again.  The best and worse that society has to offer is present in all cultures.

Native people divested other native people of their lands, properties, resources, and women/childeren for generations prior to the arrival of the first European on the continent.  

Technology and firepower certainly magnified the experience and accelerated change, but the native examples of the same type of occurance indicate that the tendancy to use an advantage for personal gain has nothing to do with culture.  When the plains tribes gained access to the horses that had escaped from the spanish, they kicked the natural butt of their neighbors and controlled the distribution of their new-found tool to maintain an advantage over their enemies.  Tribes who had firepower used it against tribes who did not.  Were they corrupted?  No, they simply applied a new technology to a game they had been playing for generations.

It is fun to romance about the way it was prior to colonization, during the mountain man days, being a pioneer, or whatever.  That's probably part of our attraction to stick and string.  Taking the fantasy down a path that attributes extreme innocence to one path and extreme guilt to another is taking it too far.

amen to that greg!

Well said Killdeer and Gregg.   :notworthy:

Fact-filled, Gregg.
I found the attempted use of the word "asinine" unnecessarily unkind, though.   :(  

Most of us dream of a life unfettered, where all we need do is furnish food, clothing and simple shelter for ourselves and our family, instead of funding a zillion other things and people.

There being predatory humans afoot, however, it gets more complicated and difficult than the dream started out. Dang humans anyway.  :banghead:

I often hear people say that they were born a hundred years too late. While I like to play the dream game, I realize that if I were born a couple hundred years ago, I would not likely have the freedoms I have now. A female back then filled a narrow definition in most cases, and it would take a fair bit of rebellion, fighting and privation for me to live the life of a free hunter on the Middle Ground. No, I travel and do my stuff with a fair bit of freedom from fear. I can pursue many nontraditional (for females) paths and push myself as far as I want, not just as far as somebody lets me. I pay for it daily in my hours of work and the taxes paid, (thank God for trucks and highways and police and jails!). But then I see a picture of a tiny group of humans, separate unto themselves, and wish.  

Killdeer   :campfire:

i admire the tribe and their ways, the modern world with its greed, power struggles, lies and deception sicken me. my wife is my better half, if it were not for her and my dogs i would come out of the woods in the morning, change from loin cloth to uniform, work, come home, shed the uniform and head for the hills again. i hate modern society something afull. i was born waaaaaay to late. life and death, eat or be eaten, provide or starve. i would trade my modern marvels and ways for simpler things.

Perhaps I should have tempered my opener or inserted a handy gremlin as well as used spell-check.

Your point is not lost on me.  Fantasy is good and it is a good fantasy.

Gregg,

It's nice to see some reality spelled out for the romantics here once in a while.

Can you imagine the bravery?

A chopper in flight, with it`s noise, and violence, and they stand at full draw... prepared to fight, facing something unknown.
Something unbelievable.

I can only hope that I have that kind of bravery in me somewhere.

Gregg,

Harsh opening line my friend bordering on disrespect to Mr Petersen  :(   I think you need to come over to my camp and shoot some pigs or something  :archer:

Gregg makes a good point that we sometimes forget. We want to think of native people as somehow innocent and pure. Call it the dances with wolves syndrome if you will, but it's historically inaccurate. Killie, your writing is incredible. I could read your stuff all day. If you'd right a book I'd learn to read gooder just for you.....

I still like the idea of shooting down a chopper with a bow though.

ass a. nine  :)

Apparently, my general understanding of the word asinine is in error or is not as literal as some people's.  It was not my intent to imply that Mr. Peterson was an ass.  I apologize that it was taken that way.

My great-great uncle Richard lived to be 98 years old.  He never owned a car although he was a man of considerable means.  When he was too old and feable to mount his trusty steed, he trained it to kneel so he could continue to live in an antiquated way.  What does this have to do with native tribes anywhere?  Not a whole lot, but it does highlight two points.

Uncle Richard wasn't good or bad, right or wrong.  He had lived long enough to fit in each category at least once.  Every persons opinion of him was unique.  I suppose he was "right and good" in his own mind, which is the only one that mattered to him.  Same as all antiquated people, natives, primitives, etc.

The "advantage" of technology is not always invited or wanted.  It is cumbersome to some minds.  I don't think that Killdeer, Ken or Dave are fantasizing.  What they represent is individuals that would prefer to live with their minds unencumbered by modern "advantages".  Sorry if this observation is incorrect.  

It applies to these heathen savages (intentional irony in the nomenclature) in this way, they do not have a choice and it is indeed sad.  Having the ability to see their situation from the outside in, I don't think they are going to benefit from modern society.  I don't wish them to see the days of highway traffic, punching a clock, taxes and such ilk.  Are they good or bad? Right or wrong?  It probably doesn't matter what we think based on our perception.  Their reality is different.  Use the advantage? I suppose they will - to their damnation.  Long live the free soul!

Isn't this a wonderfully frank and decent debate? Jedimaster you sum it up well.
All of us dreamers wish for a simple life where we can meet our physical and emotional needs without 'the system' yet we might choose to forget that the system is what keeps us safe from those predatory humans out there. Killy has it spot on about the roles of women 100 years ago, and in 'modern Africa'.I have been a home steader and an urban dweller; you trade the effort of one for the convenience of the other, neither is 'free'. I agree with Gregg that it is perhaps naive to imagine that things were peaceful and nice in the old days, perhaps more honest but history shows that brutality has always been part of our 'human success'. So like Killy I live in my urban home,use the internet, and dream of time out from all this 'modern progress'! We sleep with one ear open and hope that those rough men outside are friends and not murderers. chrisg

Hmmmmmm. I wonder what they pay a gallon for gas?

If they have oil, maybe we should use our technology to overthrow their government.    

Gregg -- A couple of points: Neither Inca nor Aztec were hunter-gatherer tribes; both were highly developed agricultural civilizations.  And I flew helicopters for five years. But yes, what I said would seem shocking, being said out of context without a full explanation of a very complex topic. So we reap what we plant, fair enough.

Thanks Dave.

I love this place!
Killdeer   :archer:

QuoteOriginally posted by Killdeer:
I love this place!
Killdeer    :archer:  

This has been a very interesting topic. I have a simple saying. Half of my  ancestors came and took this land away from the other half of my ancestors. I personally wish I knew more about the first, only know that it was the Cherokee Nation.

Gotta give these guys in the photo great credit for their courage- standing their ground against a bird that big.
Kinda like lobster- crunchy on the outside; white meat inside....

Here in Idaho; the military used to; and might still- do a lot of practicing with helecopters. I knew one pilot and they would take pictures of elk as if they were Al queda army tanks. They had contests to see who could get the most photos.
He said that quite often when they would land; there would be arrows stuck in the bottom of the helecopter.
I never shot at one; but they practiced during elk season; and I can relate to the temptation.

those guys in the photos were standing strong!

i wish the cheif tribesman would run for office, bet that would cut out a lot of the goverment waste and taxes!

Brian, that's a great yarn!

It would take alot of the romance out of living a primitive life once you came to the realization of facing large predators, enemies, and starvation if you were to get hurt.  Which would be a very real possibility.  
That being said, I think it's interesting that alot of people who find themselves in a position of being isolated for a long period of time comment on how little it takes to make a person comfortable and how many important things become unimportant once they'd adjusted to their new circumstanceds.  Stories from Yukon gold rushers, pioneers who went west to settle, etc... usually reflect this.  I think alot of people who are attracted to traditional ways long for those days in one way or another.  But if a fella could find a balance between the two and manage to keep his life simple, I guess he'd be doing o.k.  Just my two cents worth.

Maybe that was modern man's first glimpse of them, but I bet they've known about us and our big birds for awhile!

You guys better be careful, because rather you believe in evolution !  Or God, you're related to those boys on the ground !  Because there had to be a first man and woman, and somewhere along the line your DNA is related to theirs.  But then again evolution is just a theory no facts.  And legally has to be taught in schools.  And rather you want to admit it or not that's a religion in itself.

And if you've never seen truth, your thoughts become a custom to the reality they live in.

I think what one gentleman said here "you have to hand it to them going against that big Bird" they may or may not even know that it's an airplane, probably looks more like a mosquito to them, on steroids.


And as far as technology it's the only jail cell without bars for this society, the closer we get to technology, the farther away we get from each other.  

And I think that's why this web site exist, because most of the guys shoot totally traditional, and that is the opposite of technology.

But some of the bow makers rely on technology rather than the old fashioned know how and craftsmanship.  I don't know how many but I have talked with a couple of them that use computers to size their bows.


Pastor Carl

Darn Dave just when I was ready jump in you shake hands and pull out! This place sure is mighty peaceful. Thanks for giving Shepherd his due. Nothing wrong with giving folks the opportunity to look at things in old ways.

et

heres a pretty accurate rundown of the history of tribes in the amazon basin. i'm sure that tribe had seen helicopters and planes before with disaster being the result.

Draft of an  entry on the decimation  of the Amazon Indians for a forthcoming three-volume encyclopedia on genocide and crimes against humanity, to be published by MacMillan, under the general editorship of Diane l. Shelton
_______________________________________________
    The decimation of the Amazon's native people over the past four centuries illustrates two patterns outlined in Benjamin Whitaker's l985 report on genocide for the United Nations, which is posted on  www.preventgenocide.org (http://www.preventgenocide.org)  :
Paragraph 41 : "a conscious act or acts of advertent omission [or] calculated neglect or negligence may be sufficient to destroy a designated group wholly or partially through, for instance, ... disease [and] maybe be as culpable as an act of commission."
Paragraph 33 : genocide, ethnocide, and ecocide can, and often do,  occur  in concert, as when "the destruction of the rainforest.... threaten the existence of entire populations."
 

     The first Europeans to penetrate the Amazon basin was a Spanish expedition led by Francisco de Orellana in 1542. Hoping to find the fabled lands of El Dorado  and La Canela, Orellana and his men set out from Quito, Ecuador, and descended the Napo River to its confluence with the Solimões, the Amazon's upper section, and continued down the river  for 1500 miles to where it pours into the Atlantic. At that time, several  million people were living in the Amazon Valley.  They belonged to some two hundred tribes and ethnic groups in four  linguistic families— Gê, Tupi, Carib, and Arawak. Starting with the Omagua, an intelligent, orderly people of the Solimões,   who farmed river turtles and wore cotton robes, the expedition passed one  prosperous community after another along the banks of the river. So rich were the resources of the várzea, or floodplain, that some of the close-packed lines of houses went on without interruption for days, and the level of civilization of some of the riverine tribes was on a par with the Incas', although the materials they built and worked with were perishable, and few artifacts, besides their extraordinarily refined ceramics, survive.  

     Organized campaigns to exterminate the Indians, sponsored by the colonial administration and carried out by Portuguese colonists,  had been taking place in northeastern Brazil, to the east, since 1500, and as colonists began settling the lower Amazon in l620,  campaigns were carried out there.   These "ransoming" expeditions  were in fact slaves raids under the pretext of rescuing captives from tribes that were supposedly planning to eat them (and in some cases actually were). In the absence of gold, the colonists went after "red gold"--  the forced labor of Indians. The "ransomed" Indians were "descended" down the river and kept, packed like sardines,  in riverine pens called caiçaras,  sometimes for months, while the colonists were off capturing more slaves. Many died in battle, or in captivity, from simply losing the will to live and wasting way, and from European diseases that they had no genetic defenses against and that nullified their bravery, fighting skills, and superb physical conditioning. "Contagion," or smallpox, was the big killer, but influenza, pneumonia, the common cold virus,  measles, chickenpox,  and dysentery from the unhygienic conditions of their captivity also took a devastating toll. Malaria, syphilis, and tuberculosis reached the valley in the 17th century, and many Indians were addicted to and destroyed by cachaça, or rum.  The populous tribes of the lower Amazon were quickly extinguished,  like the Tapajós, the Tocantins, who are only remembered by the tributaries named after them; later, as the ransomers moved up river,  the Manau followed them into oblivion, leaving their name for the largest city in the middle Amazon. By 1750 the native population had been reduced by two-thirds, and the várzea was almost completely depopulated. Those who had not  been killed by "advertent omission" and "calculated neglect," in Whitaker's terms,  melted into the forest and fled up  north- and- south-flowing tributaries, above the unnavigable  rapids,  to the Guyana and Brazilian shields, where they regressed into hunters and gatherers and lost the civilization they had developed on the várzea.

     The Indians' only champions  were the Jesuits, who gathered them into missions that were organized along military lines to keep them from being dragged off into slavery. David Putnam's film, Mission, portrays the heroic efforts of the Jesuits to protect the Guarani Indians in the Paraná-Paraguay basin, south of the Amazon. The Jesuits in the Amazon were more exploitative, however, and the Indians in their aldeias, or mission villages, on Marajó Island, at the mouth of river, became peons who took care of their vast herds of cattle. Their wards were forcibly baptized and catechized and became detribalized "shirt Indians." With the colonists taking their most beautiful women, there were almost no pure-blooded Indians on the river by the time the Jesuits were expelled from Latin American in l760, only cablocos, or mestizos.   Miscegenation also played a major role in diluting and breaking down the cultural  identity and physical distinctiveness  of the Amazon's natives. The offspring with Portuguese were known as mamelucos, and with African slaves as cafuzos.  

      The Jesuits were replaced by "directorates," and an imperial  proclamation decreed that the enslavement  and forced labor of Indians was  over, and they were now free. But this only freed the pitiful remnants of once-proud peoples for other forms of exploitation, and unpacified and assimilated groups continued to be rounded up and massacred by the bandeirantes, or pioneers, who forged deep into the interior. Only a few tribes, like  Kayapo in upper Xingu valley and Waimiri Atroari in Roraima,  put up such fierce resistance that they managed to withstand encroachment and invasion of their land until the late twentieth century.  

    Starting in 1850 rubber became a hot new commodity  in the industrializing countries of Europe and North America, and the Amazon's monopoly on  "black gold" tapped from Hevea brasiliensis trees scattered in the  rainforest spawned what the contemporary Brazilian writer called "the most criminal organization of labor ever devised." A  Peruvian rubber baron named Julio Arana founded the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company and grew fabulously wealthy by exploiting the Bora, Witoto, Andoke, and Ocaina Indians on the Putumayo River, which forms the border between Peru and Colombia. Reports of  systematic torture, an orgy of sadism, the perverted mutilation of men, women, and children, women being kept as concubines by the Indian and Barbadian muchachos or captains, of the rubber gangs,  reached Roger Casement, who had exposed similar atrocities ten years earlier  in the  Congo. By the time Casement got there, three-quarters of the population on the Putumayo had been wiped out in the previous six years, and there were only 8000-1000 left. Casement was knighted for being main author of the l912 Blue Book on the Putumayo, a precursor of  today's reports on human rights abuses, but later his journals revealed that he was a pedophile and had participated in the muchachos' orgies. Today the culturally degraded descendants of Arana's Bora and Witoto rubber collectors live in villages above Iquitos, Peru, where they dance, usually drunk,  for tourists from cruise ships and jungle-safari outfits.  

      The same year that Casement's shocking report was published, the rubber boom abruptly collapsed, outcompeted by plantations in Malaya started from seeds smuggled out of  the Amazon by Henry Wickam. But the exploitation of Indians for black gold didn't end completely. In l948 the newly contacted Kaxinawa in the state of Acre were forced into a brutal rubber-collection systems. A genocidal massacre exterminated 75% to 80% of the group three years later, and by l968 there were only 400-500 Kaxinawa left.  

    On the Amazon's southern frontier, colonists hired professional Indian killers, or bugreiros, who presented ears instead of scalps for payment, adorned their Winchester carbines with Indians' teeth, and poisoned the drinking pools in Indian villages with strychnine. By l910 the remaining Indians had been reduced to a pathetic minority on the fringes of a burgeoning postcolonial society. Now that they were no longer a threat, they were embraced and romanticized by Brazilian urban intellectuals. An indianist movement was born, and an extraordinary champion of the country's native people arose, Colonel Cândido Rondon, who founded the  Indian Protection Service, or SPI, in 1910. Rondon and the SPI's sertanistas, or field agents, contacted isolated tribes like the Nambikwara in Rondonia (the state named for him) and  tried to protect them from the diseases, culture shock, invasion and massacre their encounter with the national society would expose them to. The SPI's motto was "die, if necessary, but never kill."

       But by now the demographic catastrophe of Brazil's native population was irreversible. It had plummeted from 3.5 million or so in l500 to 2 million by the expulsion of the Jesuits, and was now about a million. By l979 it would be down to 100,000. Of the 230 tribes that existed in l900, the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro could only count 143 in l957, and half of them were  represented by only a few hundred individuals.  
 
     The SPI's career was checkered. While it undoubtedly saved the people, culture, and land of many tribes,  it was dissolved in disgrace in l969 after a 7000- page report to Brazilian congress documented the involvement of  hundreds of SPI officials, ministers, governors and generals, in homicide, machine-gunning, presents of strychnine-laced sugar, prostitution and $60 million of other financial exploitation of the people they were charged with protecting. A new agency, the Brazilian National Indian Foundation, FUNAI, was created, and while many of its anthropologists and other employees were dedicated to the Indians' well-being, atrocities which the government turned a blind eye to or participated in continued to take place in the Amazon.  The Brazilian Air Force bombed uncontacted villages of  uncontacted Waimiri-Atroari; soldiers drove Macuxi out of their villages  on the Brazil-Venezuela border.  
 

      In the early seventies a network of highways was pushed into the Amazon wilderness. A growing awareness of its untapped mineral wealth brought a new siege on the last remaining isolated Indians, and the innermost recesses of the valley where they were living were finally penetrated, with the usual lethal consequences. One of the saddest stories was that of the Kreenakrore, a semi-nomadic group on the Iriri River, a tributary of the Xingu. For ten years during the l960s  the legendary sertanistas Claudio Villas Boas and Francisco Meirelles had made futile attempts to contact them. An expedition had been attacked and several of its members had been killed. Finally, as the new Cuiabá-Santarem Highway approached to within two kilometers of their village, several Kreenakore, reduced by culture shock to eating dirt and the urucu seeds that they painted their faces with, appeared on the highway, begging food from the road crews. Between 1969-72, forty died of pneumonia contracted from them, and by l974, the tribe was down to 79 individuals.  Villas Boas moved  them to the Xingu National Park, which had been set aside for other tribes. By  l976 they were down to 63, and only ten women could have socially acceptable children. But the Kreenakrore slowly recovered, and are now holding their own.  

     The construction of the Perimetral Norte on the Brazil-Venezuela border had similar results for the Yanomami, who were still living in the Neolithic and are the only tribe, except for the Tukuna on the Solimões, with more than 5,000 members. Gold was discovered and garimpeiros, wildcat prospectors from Brazil's huge  marginalized poor population, poured into the Yanomami's homeland and massacred them and raped their women and infected them with diseases. AIDS is the latest on the roster. An epidemic of measles broke out as the Yanomami were made guinea pigs for a vaccine from a virulent strain of the microbe not appropriate for use in a population with no prior exposure to it.  
62% of the tribes tested positive for a new strain of malaria introduced by the garimpeiros. By l993 2000 Yanomami had been killed, but after global outcry over a massacre of 23 of them in the upper Orinoco basin, a measure of protection for the tribe was established.  

     Similar horrors played out in the state of Rondônia (named for Rondon) during the l980s. Some newly-contacted Cintas  Largas were massacred with the alleged complicity of Summer Institute of Linguistics, an American evangelical group that had missionaries in 43 tribes in Brazil and was subsequently expelled because of suspected ties with the CIA and American oil and mineral interests.  

       That decade a monumental, incredibly misguided resettlement program for two million families of landless peasants, sponsored by the Brazilian government and financed by the World Bank,  brought a lethal combination of ecocide, genocide, and ethnocide to Rondônia—massive deforestation and roadbuilding and the construction of agrovilas, and massacres of isolated groups of Cintas Largas and Urueuwauwau. Satellite pictures of thousands of burning fires horrified the European and North American public, which was becoming apprehensive about the rise in world temperatures caused by the relased fo  carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.  Anthropologists and other western sympathizers rallied behind the Indians, secured intellectual property rights for their knowledge of medicinal plants with possible pharmaceutical applications, and pushed for the demarcation and protection of their lands.

      The last ten years have brought a huge, belated victory for the  remaining native people of Amazonia, even though during the l990s Occidental and other companies drilling for oil brought ecocide and ethnocide to 8,000 U'wa on the Colombia-Venzuela border and to the Huaroni in the Ecuadoran Amazon. In general, the demarcation of Indian lands in the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon is proceeding well.  20% of of Brazilian Amazonia is now recognized by the government as indigenous territory. This is the largest area  of protected rainforest in the world; when FUNAI replaced the SPI in l968, only a fraction of their lands were protected. Small remnant groups remain at risk of being driven out their land  or  massacred for individual, political, or racial motives. The Yanomami homeland has been almost completely demarcated, but is still being invaded by garimpeiros. Efforts to complete demarcation for other tribes in  Roraima are meeting with heavy resistance from local politicians.

      But the native population has rebounded to 325,000. A new generation of  young, educated Brazilians realizes that their indigenous cultures and their rainforest represent a  unique and precious heritage. It can be said with some confidence that the tide has finally turned.