“It is very recent, this kind of justice,” he says. “Belém was the site of a federal court, and now, in 1996, it begins in Santarém.” For today the courts are the stage for the operatic clash of different worldviews: on one side, extraction and commerce; on the other, wholeness and holiness. And it is a drama, we learned, played out in the river in which we swim—a drama that continues now, even in our flesh.
That night, we invited Felicio and Braulio to join us for dinner. As we shared the delicious tambaqui com leite de coco that Socorro had prepared, Felicio told us that the Tapajós was a river remade.
“Two years ago, you couldn’t have seen your dolphins here,” he said.
“Why not?” we asked.
“Because,” said Braulio through Felicio, “the Tapajós looked just like the Amazon—all brown and muddy!”
“What!?” Dianne and I were astonished.
“There was no difference!” chimed in Socorro. “Everything was contaminated.”
The river had been the victim of an Amazonia-wide gold boom that during the 1980s had rivaled the California gold rush of the nineteenth century.
And what a boom it was: At its height here along the Tapajós, in a single day more planes would take off and land in Pará’s tiny, regional Tatuba airport than anywhere else in Brazil. People walked around in the streets carrying gold in their T-shirts, stretching out the fabric like baskets, Socorro remembered. “And at that time, you bought things with gold and not money,” said Socorro’s husband. He had bought a certain motor for less than three ounces of gold back then; today that motor costs $3,000. “The price of the machine has gone up, but the price of gold has gone down,” he explained.
In the last decade, Michael Goulding has written, gold has been “the single most valuable resource exported from the Amazon basin,” earning revenues estimated at $1 to $3 billion. The reason for this wide estimate is that as little as a third or even only a fourth of the gold extracted from the Amazon is sold through official channels. Most of the miners—an estimated half a million of them in the eighties—are independent fortune-seekers, called garimpeiros, working in the rivers illegally for so-called “placer” rather than “hard rock” gold.
Back at the Meeting of the Waters, when we had begun our journey, Dianne and I had met one of the men who risked his life for gold. He spoke English and introduced himself as Raymond Des Costa, age thirty. He was wearing a Reebok muscle shirt and a black cap advertising a Pink Floyd album with the phrase “Up Against a Wall.” Raymond and some friends had just come from Colombia to Brazil looking for gold-diving jobs. It is not an easy life, he explained: “For two months I trained, and then for two weeks I suffered.” On one of his first professional dives, he had gotten the bends, the painful bubbling up of nitrogen in the blood, and was hospitalized for two weeks, bleeding from the nose and ears.
The divers first check for gold at the river bottom, eighty to ninety feet down. If you find any, he explained, they send in “the Missile”—a suction pump with hoses operated from a barge or raft. It sucks up the river bottom, then spits everything out. “The Missile, it can throw down big trees, eat all the mud,” Raymond said, his eyes flashing with fear and excitement. “If your hands go in its mouth, it will break them up. If your belly go near, it sucks it out. If you be around, you be dead when the motor starts hauling. Thank God I live.” The money is good, he said. But he lives a dangerous life, as one can see from the tattoo a girlfriend inscribed on his arm eleven years ago: a cloud with his initials circles a heart with a dagger through it.
Thousands of these dredges sucked greedily at the sediments of the Tapajós, clouding its waters with mud. Now we understood why the film crews had all gone to the Arapiuns; for a decade, the waters here were too muddy to film.
But the worst damage was unseen. To extract the gold from the sediment, garimpeiros add metallic mercury to the deposits in their sluices. Much of the mercury falls directly into the river. Some of it adheres to the gold, isolating the precious ore. The two metals are then separated by blowtorch; the mercury evaporates and leaves the gold behind. But the evaporated mercury does not disappear. It falls as toxic rain into the forests and rivers.
A report of a United Nations research project called mercury pollution from gold mining “one of the most serious environmental problems in Amazonia today,” warning that “damage from gold mining in Amazonia may be felt for decades to come.” Predatory fish such as tucunaré, pirarucu, aruana, piranha, and many catfish—the species most people here eat—are most likely to accumulate mercury rapidly. “The long residence time of mercury in river sediments can contribute to health hazards long after the gold mining frontier has moved on,” wrote its four respected authors, Nigel Smith, a professor of geography at the University of Florida who has worked in the Amazon since 1970, and his three Brazilian colleagues. The consequences? As much as 10 percent of the mercury one ingests lodges in the brain. Insidiously as greed, mercury clouds human perception and response to the world: as nerve damage progresses, it eats away at movement, hearing, feeling, speech, and thought.
I would read the U.N. report after my return to the States. To my horror, I would learn that in four communities tested in the Tapajós watershed, over 60 percent of the people had mercury levels in their urine high enough to warrant regular testing as recommended by the World Health Organization. Over half the river sediment samples taken from Tapajós and its affluents exceeded the limit for safety set by the Brazilian regional secretariat.
Gold-mining camps, the report further noted, transmit diseases. Miners introduce new strains of malaria to local populations that have no resistance. Indians are likely to suffer more severe malaria symptoms if gold miners are operating nearby. In Roraima, the new frontier to which more than 50,000 hopeful miners migrated by 1990, hundreds of Yanomami Indians died after the miners arrived. In one two-week period in 1992, 44 Yanomami died from malaria in one village alone.
But as Michael Goulding notes, the early-stage symptoms of mercury poisoning are very similar to those of malaria: fever, chills, nausea. It is possible that the Yanomami literally died of gold fever.
Felicio takes consolation in the Tapajós’s latest transformation. “In two years, we can reverse the situation,” he said. By 1992, most gold miners began to leave the Tapajós for new frontiers. Today, with the price of gold less than half what it once was, the water here is now clear as the diamonds in Dianne’s dream. The river looks as if it has completely recovered. No wonder we consider water an almost infinitely forgiving medium: with it, we try to wash our sins clean.
I felt heartened by Felicio’s optimism. I was grateful that the Indians and their environment had this kind, wise, energetic young man to speak eloquently on their behalf.
But in the sediments of the river, in the sweet flesh of the tambaqui we ate that night for dinner, in the bodies of the dolphins with whom we swam, in the organs of the people we were coming increasingly to love, and now, in tiny amounts, in Dianne’s brain and mine, the mercury lingers still.
Necca was well aware of this when she started her dance troupe in 1993. People were forgetting the old ways, she said. Many even forgot that Alter do Chão was once originally called Aldeia dos Bourari—Village of the Bourari. And when people forget who they are, they forget how to act. Look at the fires, she said: Sometimes they burn for four days! Night and day they burn, and she cannot sleep for the anger. And look at the garbage on the beach: everywhere, as we had seen to our dismay, the white and lavender sand was littered with plastic bags, drinking straws, jugs. “They spit in the plate they eat from,” she said. “The people don’t understand. They forget they depend on the land.”
But once, her people knew. Once, she said, they could talk with the Moon; the Moon was the goddess of growth, protecting pregnancies, manioc gardens, forests. You must never cut wood at night, she said, for the Moon is jealous of her trees. This the Moon remembers, even if the people forget. And then Necca told us this story:
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“One day,” she began, “the fishermen of the village noticed that the most beautiful girl in the village had disappeared. They couldn’t find her anywhere! So they asked the curandeiro to get her back. He performed the rituals to ask the Moon for help. Where had she gone?
“The Moon answered: she had been enchanted into the lake. But the lake, the Moon promised, would give her back. The people would see her again.
“At the next full moon, there was thunder. And in the middle of the lake, there appeared a beautiful tree, glowing brilliantly like the Moon, and with colored fruits. The tree went for a walk out of the lake. The people were surprised and frightened! Then the tree came back and sank back to the bottom of the lake. Its fruits fell—and they changed into the beautiful green frogs who gave their color to the lake.” The lake was once called Lago do Muiraquitã, Necca tells us, in honor of the little green frogs there, who bring luck.
“The beauty of the Indian girl became the beauty of the lake,” she explained. “And on full-moon nights, the tree would rise from the lake and walk about the village.
“But one day, she didn’t come back from her walk,” Necca said. And then she was silent.
“What happened?” I asked.
“We are still waiting,” said Necca, “for her to come back.”
And as they wait, the world is falling apart. “There is a danger,” said Necca, “because our sons and daughters may never see the world as nature intended.” They may never learn how to build a grass house. They may forget the herbal medicines. They may forget how to make pottery, charcoal, natural dyes.
There is trash on the beaches, fire in the sky, mercury in the water. “There was the epoch of rubber,” said Necca’s younger sister, Laurenice, who had joined us at the little table beneath the thatched cabana on the beach, “and then the epoch of gold. Now it is the epoch of wood—and even that leaves speaking English. And what does the villager get? Diseases. Mercury. There will be no dividend for the people.”
The dividend for the people will not come from rubber or gold or timber, Necca said. It will come with remembering. Necca and Keila dance to remember the wholeness of a fractured world.
“I wish that you had come in the summer,” Necca said to us. “You could see the Dance of the Boto.” We wished very much we could see it, I said. We wished we could stay longer. But Christmas was coming, and friends and family expected us back in the States. In a few days, all too soon, we would be leaving.
The morning of our last day in Alter do Chão, we visited the Indian museum.
WE ARE NOT A MUSEUM, a placard informed us in English as we entered the door. WE ARE THE CENTER FOR THE PRESERVATION OF INDIGENOUS ARTS, CULTURE, AND SCIENCES. Its mission: “To document and preserve for the future all that has been forgotten, discarded, and overlooked in the indigenous history of the Amazon.” An ambitious agenda, Dianne and I thought.
The Center, we read, opened in 1992, “the great dream of Maria Antonia Kaxinawa,” David Richardson’s wife. We found her stringing beads for the museum’s gift shop. Similar-looking items—pottery with frog and geometric designs, basketry, beadwork—are available in Santarém, but a sign in the museum decries such merchandise as “airport art.”
As you enter the impressive yellow cement building, you are greeted by a large central mound of vegetation, which reminds me of a waterfall, and in fact there is a pool at the bottom. This display is dominated by a large inscription:
After I had taken a lot of the drink, I started to chant. The ground became red and flattened, beautiful. The sky began to sing We! We! We! The colors of the rainbow began to appear and swirl about like a snake. The spirit allies began to arrive. . . .
My soul began to shine.
One by one, the spirits arrived—the MOKA—the frog spirits with quivers of arrows on their backs. The peccary spirits . . . the spirits of the waterfall and the fish spirits. All game had moved into my chest. . . .
I was deeply moved by the inscription. I asked Maria Antonia where the quote came from. “Oh, it’s something David got out of a book,” she said. She knew nothing more about it. Later, I read the inscription to Mark Plotkin, who has studied Amazonian tribes for more than fifteen years. He said it almost certainly described a Yanomami ceremony in which the people snort a hallucinogenic snuff, the way others take Ayahuasca, to contact their spirit guides.
I was disappointed to discover there was nothing to be learned in the museum about the Bourari. “They are completely acculturated now,” Maria Antonia said, so the museum pays them no tribute. Instead, the center concentrates on displays of art and artifacts of tribes now extinct or nearly so. Among them were the Tapajós. Before the arrival of the Portuguese in 1626, this river basin, we read, was the economic hub for the Amazon. The Indians who gave the river its name had built an impressive civilization here. Eight thousand years ago they created great art, especially ceramics, including large, ornate funeral urns. The craftsmanship of their pottery “surpass[es] the finest Venetian glass,” wrote an explorer. But the Tapajós people went extinct, succumbing to foreign diseases, a mere forty-seven years after first contact.
More than ninety Indian tribes in Brazil alone have become extinct since the turn of the century, a rate of one tribe a year. Murdered and enslaved, victims of foreign diseases, greed, religions, and alcohol, they are disappearing still. Mark has spoken eloquently of this loss: when one of the medicine men of these vanishing tribes dies, he has said, “it is like a library has burned down. Only it’s worse, because the knowledge in a library is recorded elsewhere, and when these men die, their knowledge dies with them.”
The Center is like a library in ashes. For each tribe, there is a display of artifacts: woven basketry, feather headdresses, masks, and sometimes photographs, like items rescued randomly from a burning building. Below the objects, handwritten in Magic Marker on cardboard cards, brief texts in four languages give a fact or two about each lost or dying culture. The words on the cardboard placards are succinct as tombstones:
The Kanamarís: The first explorers to contact them in 1940 found a culture rich in song, dance, and the art of permanent facial tattoos. Now there are 643 of them left in the state of Amazonas. “In 60 years,” we read, “they traded their past for alcohol.”
The Yanomami: Known as the “Fierce People,” 62 percent of them tested positive for new strains of malaria brought by gold miners, we read, and only about 8,000 of these people now survive in Brazil.
The Waimiri-Atroaris: Their territory, in what is now Amazonas state, was once the most feared in the Amazon. Their population decimated to under 3,000, they surrendered to pacification in 1977 to make way for the Pan-Amazonian Highway and a hydroelectric dam.
The Matses: Their facial ornaments include bones through the nose to resemble whiskers and shell earrings to pay mystical homage to the jaguar. Masters of the blowgun, their hunters could kill a hummingbird in flight and a monkey at 130 feet. Since first contact with whites in 1976, their population has dwindled to 123.
The Tukanos: Their legends once told how the first man found a sacred trumpet, and from its music flowed the stars and the wind, the rivers and fish, the forest and game, and all his children, including the tribes of the Desana, the Wayanas, and others. The 2,631 who remain are now dominated by Christian religious groups.
The Asurini: Native to the Rio Xingú, they were known for the fabulous geometric designs they painted on their pottery and bodies. There are only 10 women and 7 children left.
The Tenharim: Players of the sacred flute, they adorn themselves with beautiful feather necklaces and earrings, and crush dried flowers to sprinkle them on the body after the bath. Fewer than 350 are left, many struggling with alcoholism.
The Marumbas: Native to the Vale do Javari, they were decimated by the slaving and murder of the rubber trade. Only 622 survive.
Culture after culture is rendered down to a sentence or two: the Campa, master weavers who brought the pan pipe to Peru; the Desana, who called
themselves “Sons of the Wind”; the Waiwai, who play sacred jaguar-skin drums; the Wayaná/ Apalai, who believe a mystical bird created the world. But today their world is on fire, consuming their songs, their knowledge, their language, their forest, their gods.
Of the people called the Parakanás, we learn only two facts. They once lived along the Xingú River basin and in Pará. There are only 300 of them left. The rest of the text on their card asks a question: “We can wonder what the world would be like without the magic of the mighty elephants to show our children,” we read. “What will the world be like without the Parakaná?”
As we walked down the sloping red dirt street back into town, we met Keila. We had planned to visit Curucu one last time that afternoon and to take Keila with us. She told us to meet her at two, by the boat belonging to her friend Simão, the Sousa. She had a surprise for us.
We waited by the Sousa, a larger boat than Braulio’s Gigante. Then, coming over the gentle slope of the sand dunes, we saw Keila, her blonding, curly hair flowing beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat—and behind her, eight of her friends, carrying bags and baskets. They had come, she explained, to perform for us the Dance of the Boto.
They were beautiful, young, lithe women and men: Edson, Nilson, Carisson, Trenato, and Edany, Elailene, Franides, Diolene, the boys wearing baseball caps and muscle shirts, the girls in little black bikinis and pareos. In their bags, they carried their costumes and unlit torches and props. They had brought a cooler full of snacks and drinks.
The Sousa, gap-toothed like its owner, spewed smoke and fumes and noise as we chugged to Curucu; Simão bailed water with the dried husk of a gourd. The boys sat in front of the boat with Simão and Keila, while the girls giggled in the back.
Keila’s arm shot out as we approached the point. “Boto!” It was Valentino. As the dancers debarked, I swam out to him, and soon I saw they were all there, as if to bid us farewell: David and Gary, Mary and Jesus, Valentino and Pink Lips, Vera and two tucuxis. In the first thirty-five minutes, I counted twenty-six sightings. David and Gary swam very near, pulling their heads from the water to look into my face. Twice I was enveloped in clouds of sizzling bubbles they sent up to embrace my skin. Three of them leapt in a starburst. David leapt high in the air, not ten feet from me; a tucuxi flipped his tail. Valentino came near and rolled over, showing his pink belly.
Journey of the Pink Dolphins Page 26