by Alice Dreger
I wasn’t looking forward to having to confront the scarred and forceful Chagnon with that question, but I knew I had to. So I pulled the 1970 article and went to page 421, as Tierney’s citation indicated I should. Nowhere on the page did it name any vaccinator. Confused, I went through the rest of the article. Nowhere in the article was a single vaccinator named. Tierney’s citation was full of gas.
As I moved through what would become a year of research and about forty interviews for this project, a clear pattern of misrepresentation emerged. Even people who had been relatively aligned with Tierney were now admitting to me that he had played fast and loose with the truth. I called to interview Brian Ferguson, an anthropologist at Rutgers who had written Yanomami Warfare, a book highly critical of Chagnon. In the book, Ferguson argues that the introduction of large amounts of Western trade goods by researchers and missionaries contributed to Yanomamö conflict that Chagnon often blamed on sexual tensions. Ferguson told me that when the New Yorker fact checkers called him,
everything was fine except one passage where Tierney has me saying something to the effect of “missions could be disruptive but according to Ferguson they are less so than Chagnon was,” downplaying the impact of the missions. I said, no I didn’t say that, and I don’t believe that to be true. I think [the missions] were very disruptive in the period I’m talking about. . . . I said that’s not what I said. And I got a call from Patrick Tierney and he got quite angry about it and said that I was backing down and that I was making a political move here and that he had me on tape saying what he said I said. And I said you’d better get that tape ready, because that’s not what I said.
Another strike against Tierney came from a woman with whom he’d apparently had a close friendship in South America, a woman named Lêda Martins, now an anthropologist at Pitzer College in California. Before going into anthropology, Martins had been a journalist and human rights worker, and she had long shared Tierney’s concern for the indigenous peoples in Venezuela and Brazil. In the acknowledgments to Darkness, Tierney said he was “especially indebted” to Martins, adding, “Leda’s dossier on Napoleon Chagnon was an important resource for my research.” I knew this dossier to be very important—Chagnon was practically obsessed with it—because it contained many of the misrepresentations of Darkness yet predated the book by years. Indeed, the copy of the dossier that Chagnon had obtained and given to me read almost like a draft book proposal for Darkness in El Dorado. The dossier had been used in various ways, but mostly to try to get Chagnon’s research permits denied. It was probably largely responsible for forcing an unwanted end to his fieldwork.
So, in his book’s acknowledgment, Tierney basically was saying that Martins had established many of the most damning charges against Chagnon. Martins’s charges against Chagnon would then constitute the basis for what Tierney would have followed up. I pressed Martins for a copy of the dossier as she had it; I wanted to know if it was the same as the one Chagnon had gotten his hands on. Eventually, when I went to meet her in person while I was in Southern California, she handed me a copy. It turned out to match Chagnon’s copy. But at that time, she also confessed something key, something she later, at my request, confirmed in an e-mail. She was not the author of the dossier. In fact, Martins told me:
Patrick Tierney wrote the Chagnon dossier and I translated [it] to Portuguese. . . . I presented the dossier to Brazilian authorities (Funai employees) and human rights advocates who were looking for information on Chagnon who was seeking permission to go inside the Yanomami Territory in Brazil. I was the one who circulated the dossier in Brazil because people knew and trusted me. I trusted Patrick and did not check his references. (I can only hope whatever is left of my friendship with Patrick will survive the truth, but . . . he should not have said that.)
So the truth was that Tierney himself had written the charges he attributed to Martins, and Martins, presuming them to be true, had used them against Chagnon. This meant that Tierney had been working to spoil Chagnon’s reputation and his ability to do fieldwork in the Amazon many years before Darkness in El Dorado.
Chagnon had long suspected that the dossier charges originated with Patrick Tierney and that he had long been near the center of Chagnon’s troubles, even though in Darkness Tierney looked like an objective reporter, not a human rights activist. After I interviewed Chagnon’s longtime collaborator Raymond Hames of the University of Nebraska, Hames dug up for me a remarkable e-mail that he’d received from Chagnon on November 6, 1995, five years before the publication of Darkness in El Dorado. Chagnon had written to Hames:
I finally made, with the help of a Brazilian friend, a translation of the “Dossier” on me that is circulating in Brazil and was used in September to try to have FUNAI rescind my [anthropological research] permit. It is so hysterical and preposterous that it is funny, but there will be lots of people who will believe the[se] claims. . . . Footnote #21 leads me to suspect that the primary author of this is one Patrick Tierney, who actually showed up in my office just after I returned from Brazil. I pointedly asked him if he were aware of this “dossier” and he denied any knowledge of it. I think he is a liar.
It sure seemed that Chagnon was right to be deeply suspicious of Tierney. When I started my research on all this, I thought perhaps Tierney had just been sloppy here and there, that perhaps he had committed wishful thinking in various places and accidentally misordered events. But so much of what he put forth turned out to be inaccurate. I found myself mulling the strong claim made in 2001 by a group of Chagnon’s colleagues at UCSB who had looked into the matter: “The major allegations against Napoleon Chagnon and James Neel presented in Darkness in El Dorado by Patrick Tierney appear to be deliberately fraudulent.”
The Bailey history had impressed on me the importance of understanding the backstory of a controversial book, particularly the relationships behind the text. So I knew I needed to try to understand the prepublication relationships of those involved in the Darkness in El Dorado controversy. Deploying what Aron liked to call the historian’s secret weapon—um, a timeline—I was able to see that right around the time Chagnon had been e-mailing his colleague about his suspicion that Tierney had authored the dossier—right around the time that Chagnon had been guessing Tierney was “a liar”—Patrick Tierney had been introducing Lêda Martins to Terence Turner, Chagnon’s longtime nemesis, at the Pittsburgh airport.
Why were these three—the writer Patrick Tierney, the activist-journalist Lêda Martins, and the anthropologist Terence Turner—meeting at the Pittsburgh airport? In the mid-1990s, back in the pre-9/11 days when people without tickets could hang out with you at the gate, Turner was regularly making flight connections there, commuting from where he worked (Chicago) to where his wife worked (Ithaca, New York). Martins had found herself in Pittsburgh on a Fulbright to learn English. And Tierney’s family was based in Pittsburgh; his father was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Turner acknowledged to me that the three of them had met at the Pittsburgh airport several times. And around the time of these meetings came the fieldwork-ending dossier, after them came Darkness, and then Martins decided to go on to get a PhD in anthropology . . . and earned it under Terence Turner. She used that PhD in part to go after Chagnon.
The trio of Turner, Tierney, and Martins had been quite effective in clouding Chagnon’s reputation. In 2001, for example, when she was supporting the AAA-centered prosecution of Chagnon, Martins had publicly taken Chagnon to task for what he had said to a popular Brazilian magazine regarding the Yanomamö. To the magazine reporter, Chagnon had observed, “Real Indians sweat, they smell bad, they take hallucinogenic drugs, they belch after they eat, they covet and at times steal their neighbor’s wife, they fornicate, and they make war.” Martins used this quotation to try to show that Chagnon dehumanized the Yanomamö and so allegedly threatened their well-being. However, when she reproduced this passage, she didn’t mention how Chagnon concluded his statement to the magazi
ne: “They are normal human beings. This is reason enough for them to deserve care and attention.”
Among these three—Martins, Tierney, and Turner—Turner certainly could boast the oldest and most persistent pursuit of Chagnon in the name of ethics. Why, Chagnon kept asking me, why had Turner had this unrelenting obsession with him that lasted for so many years and that seemed to sweep others in? Why did he seem to sic every dog on Chagnon? I didn’t know and couldn’t know. Besides, the most interesting question to me was not that one but rather how Turner had managed to push the AAA to do what it did to Chagnon and Neel, against the example of every other scholarly organization involved. The more I dug, the more the answer to my question seemed to be Tierney’s objective-looking book, Darkness in El Dorado. Most outsiders would know nothing of the complicated, sometimes (as in the case of the dossier authorship) actively obscured relationships among Tierney, Turner, and Martins. Outsiders wouldn’t know that Tierney’s source use looked much more real than it actually was. Darkness looked to most readers like an objective, scholarly confirmation of apparent strangers’ long-running suspicions that Chagnon and Neel had committed deeply unethical acts.
Of course, the AAA might have done what the other groups did and scrutinize Tierney first, discovering the inaccuracies and maybe also the complicated relationships. But goaded by Turner and Sponsel and their concerns about egregious human rights violations, they instead trundled on, “giving voice” to what turned out to be baseless accusations allegedly made on behalf of oppressed indigenous peoples. And so the AAA bolstered Tierney’s work, helping it grow legs it never could have otherwise.
Chagnon understood Turner’s hands to have been stained in this, but he was also convinced that the Catholic Church had a lot to do with it all, specifically the Salesian missionaries, with whom he had come to blows. Chagnon had published work arguing that the Salesian missions could be damaging to the Yanomamö, and so they’d been fighting for years. During our interviews, Chagnon told me repeatedly that, in the early 1990s, someone had started distributing anonymous packets condemning him for various alleged offenses against the Yanomamö. These had been mailed to Chagnon’s colleagues around the country and even mysteriously showed up in stacks on handout tables at an AAA conference. In my digging, I came upon an article providing evidence that Chagnon’s suspicion was right: These had been distributed by the Salesians.
Even after finding that evidence, I thought a story prominently featuring a kind of Catholic persecution of Chagnon couldn’t be true—it seemed to match too conveniently the story of Galileo. But the more I looked into Tierney, the more it seemed Chagnon might be on to something. Tierney certainly didn’t come across to me as a fervent Catholic in Darkness in El Dorado. But then on a tip from an anthropologist and with the help of good librarians, I got my hands on a copy of an unpublished book by Tierney that showed him in a completely different light. This was meant to be Tierney’s second book. It was supposed to have been published by Viking sometime around 1994 under the title “Last Tribes of El Dorado: The Gold Wars in the Amazon Rain Forest.” For some reason, it never appeared, and Tierney’s second published book turned out to be Darkness in El Dorado.
I tried and tried to get someone at Viking to tell me why “Last Tribes” reached such a late stage—the copy I obtained from a library in Wisconsin was printed and bound, complete with a professionally designed cover and advance reviews—but was never actually published. Viking wouldn’t give. All I could learn came from the book itself. I realized, as I read its four hundred pages, that I was probably one of only a handful of people who had ever bothered to find and read this book. But I wasn’t reading it for information on rain forest gold mining. I was reading it as the AAA should have read it—to learn about Patrick Tierney, the man they chose to follow into a full investigation of Chagnon. And boy, did I learn.
Like Tierney’s first book (Highest Altar), “Last Tribes” tells a first-person story of the author’s explorations in South America, in this case following Tierney’s earnest attempts to gather dirt on the illegal gold-mining operations that are harming the rain forest and the native peoples, including the Yanomamö. In “Last Tribes,” Tierney—who, mind you, in Darkness in El Dorado, moralizes on every possible point about Neel and Chagnon’s supposedly unethical behaviors in the field—admits to having repeatedly lied about his own identity, even to indigenous people, ostensibly to further his activist journalism. He reveals that he faked identity documents to pass himself off as a Chilean gold miner and that, as part of his disguise, he carried mercury into the rain forest, even though he knew perfectly well the devastating effects of mercury on the habitat. “Last Tribes” also shows that Tierney illegally purchased a shotgun and carried it into the indigenous territories; wandered into remote villages without first undergoing appropriate quarantine; and trekked into Yanomamö lands without first obtaining the required legal permission from FUNAI (Fundação Nacional do Índio, the National Indian Foundation), the agency charged with this travel regulation. (FUNAI was the agency to which Tierney delivered his dossier in an attempt to stop Chagnon from doing further research with the Yanomamö.) Heck, in “Last Tribes,” Tierney even brags about having met up with self-confessed murderers—men he knew were wanted by the police—with apparently no thought of reporting their whereabouts to the police. Perhaps to prove how important he has managed to make himself in his muckraking, he also reports that he seemed to have gotten another man killed because the other guy was mistaken for the troublemaking Tierney.
Even more telling, “Last Tribes” reveals that, during this “work,” Tierney was housed, fed, protected, and encouraged by local Roman Catholic priests. When going into remote regions disguised as a gold miner, Tierney left his money and real identity papers with the priests. When he got arrested, it was Bishop Aldo Mangiano who sprung Tierney from jail. All this was pretty much confirmed for me in a later interview in Cleveland with Father Giovanni Saffirio, a Consolata missionary priest and anthropologist who had known both Chagnon and Tierney through their various interests in Venezuela. Chagnon had for a time been an advisor to Saffirio when Saffirio was earning his degree in anthropology. When I asked him to tell me about Tierney, Father Saffirio responded in his heavily Italian accented English that Patrick Tierney was “a good Catholic” and said that Bishop Mangiano “was pleased to help him.”
When I made the arrangement to travel to Cleveland to see Father Saffirio, I wasn’t sure that the trip would be worth it. But it was. As we talked in the rectory of Saint John Nepomucene, a church where he was staying for a time, Saffirio told me long and interesting stories about the missions in the area of the Yanomamö, about how they sometimes really hurt people as they intended to help them. The old priest clearly appreciated the complexity of human beings and yet he knew how to balance judgment with forgiveness. I got the sense from him that Tierney had started off doing activism and advocacy that might have really been helping.
“Bishop Aldo Mangiano found Tierney helpful because he was telling American and European people what was really happening in the forest,” Saffirio told me. He meant that Tierney was working to expose the horrific effects of mining—destruction of habitats, of indigenous homelands, and so of entire cultures. But Tierney had obviously used some problematic techniques; Saffirio told me that Tierney had “traveled through the area [where the Yanomamö live] with a fake ID card saying he owned a mining company in Chile where he was born. He cheated gold buyers saying he was eager to open a garimpo (a mine) in Roraima.” Whatever Saffirio thought of this particular charade, he clearly felt that Darkness in El Dorado amounted to a great injustice to Chagnon and Neel.
“Chagnon is a great scholar,” Saffirio said to me, adding, “He didn’t make up stuff. The data he gathered were done properly.” He went on:
Whatever his personality is, he did a great scholar[ly] job among the Yanomami. For one, it was Chagnon that made the Yanomami known worldwide with books, hu
ndreds of articles and dozens of documentaries, inspiring many anthropologists and scientists to do research among them. When Tierney writes negatively about Chagnon, it hurts me because Chagnon helped the Yanomami in his own way. Sure, by doing research among the Yanomami he earned a lot of money and fame, he drinks beer, at times his temper can be short, but what that matters [sic] in the big picture of a fine scholar?
From Cleveland I drove to Pittsburgh to interview the anthropologist John Frechione. I was under the impression that Frechione had helped to provide a visiting scholar appointment for Tierney at the University of Pittsburgh, one that appeared to still be active, and I wanted to know about that and whatever else Frechione wanted to tell me. This university appointment was surely one of the accouterments that had allowed Tierney to look like a real scholar. Frechione informed me as we started talking that since Darkness in El Dorado, he and Tierney had been collaborating on a project aimed at showing the supposed remaining ethical problems with Neel’s behaviors during the 1968 epidemic. I listened tensely and said I’d be happy to look at the evidence they claimed to have, but mostly I was stunned that these people were still at it so many years after the AAA debacle. Was Pittsburgh some kind of anthropological zombieland, where the deadest of claims kept rising?
I knew that, after Tierney’s work had emerged in 2000 and was being shot full of holes, Frechione had given Tierney a hand by doing an important interview with a physician named Brandon Centerwall. Brandon was the son of the late physician Willard “Bill” Centerwall, another American who had been on the ill-fated 1968 expedition. When he’d returned, Bill had told his teenage son Brandon about the epidemic. Bill made the claim to Brandon that Neel had wanted to let the epidemic run unchecked in the village of Patanowa-teri to see what would happen to the vulnerable Yanomamö populace. By doing so, Neel would have been unethically testing quasi-eugenic theories of fitness. Bill claimed to his son that he had stood up to Neel, calling him to a higher moral standard, and that Neel had given in and treated the ill. This story—recorded in a 2001 interview with Brandon Centerwall by Frechione to help Tierney defend his book—seemed proof positive that Tierney, Turner, and Sponsel were right: Neel had been a heartless eugenicist who had let infected Yanomamö die during the 1968 measles epidemic.