by David Suzuki
We alternated between pushing and putt-putting along until we finally ran out of fuel and had to paddle. Paiakan kept unnerving us by gazing intently ahead and saying in Portuguese, “What happened to the village?” There were no bright lights or search parties to greet us when we finally turned a bend and recognized our swimming hole. It had been a wonderful adventure, but I sure was glad to be back in our hut, which had become home.
On one trip, we traveled far down the river to a place where sand-bars arose in the water. We beached the canoe and Paiakan showed us how to recognize places where turtles had laid their eggs. For my girls it was like an Easter egg hunt, and they scrambled along the sand looking for the telltale signs and digging deep down to find the buried treasure. “Don't take them all,” we were told. “Always leave some to hatch.”
Suddenly, Paiakan looked up and saw that the girls had wandered far away. He tugged my arm, clearly alarmed, and told me to call the girls to come back right away: “Tem onça!” We were in jaguar country. It was the first time I saw him express fear. Without alarming the children, we called them back. We found the boiled eggs to be chalky and unappetizing, but of course it's a matter of personal taste and experience; the Kaiapo love turtle eggs.
On another river trip, Paiakan and one of the young men stood on the bow of the canoe as we paddled along and with great expertise they cast a circular net. The net had weights along the edge; when it was cast properly, centrifugal force on the lead sinkers splayed the net into a perfect circle that trapped fish beneath it as it sank. A rope tied to the center of the net caused the weights to move toward each other as the net was drawn up; fish were entangled in the mesh. I tried several times but failed miserably to duplicate the cast. All of the schooling I had spent so long to acquire was useless here.
One day, we asked to walk through the forest. Irekran's brother, Diego, and a friend of his were assigned to accompany us. As we followed a path, we were struck by the number of trees bearing fruit or nuts. Diego pointed out other edible plants everywhere. As we walked, the painted bodies of our guides blended into the pattern of shadows and light and rendered them virtually invisible to our unpracticed eyes.
We were enjoying ourselves, eating bananas and mangoes, swinging on vines over creeks, or slicing pieces of certain vines to drink the water that gushed out of the cut end. But we were incredibly vulnerable. Our guides would appear and vanish, and if they had taken off for any reason, there was absolutely no way we could have found our way back to the village. There were moments when I wondered if Tara and I had been foolish to put our children in such precarious situations. But we weren't abandoned, and soon we were back in familiar territory, walking through the small clearings where plants were cultivated and farinha was roasted.
Before we had decided in which month to go to Aucre, we had asked Darrell Posey when there might be a festival or celebration. “Oh, go on down anytime,” he advised. “They have celebrations all the time.” Sure enough, we had been there for about six days when the women appeared with their bodies painted very dark and wearing only a sash of the kind they carry their babies with. For perhaps an hour, they danced around in rows on the grounds the huts were facing. We learned it was the start of a three-day celebration to honor women.
Next day, the women appeared in far more elaborate regalia, beads, and feather headdresses, and sang and danced for a longer period. On the third day, their adornments were spectacular, with feathers woven into wooden frames that towered over the women's heads. Elaborately painted, the women began to dance just before sundown and continued into the pitch-dark night. Then we were told in not-so-subtle gestures that it was time for us to bugger off, which we did. We felt privileged to have witnessed this amazing ritual.
After we had been in Aucre for about a week, Sarika asked Tara to take a sliver out of the bottom of her foot. Tara looked at it and called me over; a small volcano was erupting from Sarika's skin. Tara disinfected a needle and the area around the “sliver” and began to pick an opening to remove the object. She got it out and put some more disinfectant and a bandage on as Sarika went off happily. Tara held up what she had pried out—a small, fat worm. It was a parasite that apparently infects mammals during a certain time of the year. It sheds its eggs in the ground, and as animals pass by, the parasite attaches to the skin and burrows in. I later heard of a German cameraman who had picked over seventy of them from his legs.
Oe and Tania with their aunt before a festa in Aucre
Sarika showing where the parasitic worm was in her foot
Earlier, I had stubbed my toe on a sharp stick projecting out of a wall. One of our biggest worries was getting an infection in a cut, so I sloshed on disinfectant and bound my toe tightly with tape. That night, the toe began to hurt, and by the second night, it was throbbing each time my heart beat. “Dammit,” I thought, “it must be infected.” Next morning, I tore off the bandage. The throbbing stopped; I had bandaged it too tightly. When I looked at the cut, it was healing well. But beside the cut under my toenail were three worms. Tara dug them out for me and I stopped wearing sandals.
Two days after we had arrived in Aucre, a woman had fallen from a roof and gashed herself very badly on a machete. We learned then that there was a radio phone in the village for emergencies, and frantic calls were made to send the plane in to take her out. After a day, the plane arrived and she was taken to Redenção, where she developed an infection and died. In a community of two hundred, an accident of this severity was upsetting to everyone.
About five days after our arrival, I woke early to wailing all around us. I woke Tara and suggested something bad had happened; perhaps someone had died. We got up and watched people streaming toward one of the huts, where a woman was screaming and trying to flagellate herself with pots and machetes—anything within reach. Other women restrained her and wailed with her. It turned out that an old man had died unexpectedly of tuberculosis. Next day we tried to be as inconspicuous as possible as the body was taken into the forest, where, we gathered, in the customary way it was left on a platform to be consumed by wildlife. I don't know the details of how his wife was dealt with, but somehow she was calmed, and the grounds were “cleansed” by a single male who walked back and forth for hours with a broom, sweeping away the spirits.
Two tragedies in a week were a lot for a small community to bear. After we had been in the village for some time longer, I woke in the night to shooting and yelling outside. It sounded as if people had been drinking and were now shooting wildly, though we had not seen alcohol or guns during our stay. Tara and I got up, and as we went to the door of the hut, there was Paiakan as if standing guard. “What's wrong?” we asked. He looked very grave and pointed to the full moon. “The moon is sick,” he said, “and my people are frightened. They blame it on brancos [white people].”
I had no idea whether he meant that the conjunction of the two tragedies earlier in the week, and now the moon, meant we were being blamed, or whether it was Brazilians in general who were being held responsible for the disasters. We looked at the moon, and it was a strange orange-brown color with blotches on it. “Is it an eclipse?” wondered Paiakan. We couldn't tell; the moon looked distinctly odd.
“The people are chanting the moon back to health,” explained Paiakan.
“Are we in danger?” Tara asked.
I expected him to reassure us, but his answer was, “Não sei [I don't know].” Now that worried us.
“Do you think people will calm down?” Tara persisted.
Again the chilling answer came back, “Não sei.” Patricia, Miles, Severn, Sarika, and I could claim “we're not brancos!”, but Tara says she felt her white skin shining out of that hut.
What were the odds of going to the heart of the Amazon at the same time a lunar eclipse would occur? An hour later, Tara looked out and saw a clean white moon, a telltale bite out of one side. To the Kaiapo, such an extraordinary occurrence is filled with significance, indicating the order within their world has
been disrupted and somehow has to be set right. Could these “signs”—the deaths and the eclipse—be punishment for something they had failed to do, or a portent of something extraordinary to come? In a worldview in which everything is connected to everything else, these occurrences cannot be dismissed as meaningless.
Thoughts surged through my head. The Kaiapo are famous for their ferocity. In 1990 two Kaiapo parties of warriors attacked illegal settlements in their territory and claimed to have killed thirty peasants; Raoni, Sting's friend with the plate-sized labret, had led one of the parties in Xingu National Park. In Gorotire, I had met a Brazilian nurse who loved the Kaiapo. She had been living in one of the villages for twenty years when a rumor spread there that white people had attacked a Kaiapo in Redenção. The villagers were so infuriated that they went after the nurse, who had locked herself in her hut. She laughed as she recounted the incident, but she had warned me: when there is a crisis, it doesn't matter how well received you've been; you are not Kaiapo.
Now, I have a curious trait. When confronted with an emotionally charged situation, I become sleepy. It seems to be some kind of defense mechanism, perhaps a way of avoiding further anxiety. In any case, I felt there wasn't much we could do but wait it out and hope things would be calm by morning. Normally I'm the worrywart, but I climbed into my hammock and went back to sleep. Tara lay there listening to bullets whiz past our thin mud walls. Boy, was she mad at me. But we survived.
Morning came. The girls woke up unaware of what had gone on. We ventured out cautiously, wondering what would happen. Superficially, life seemed to be normal as people went about cooking, fishing, swimming. We couldn't decide whether it was our imagination or whether the people were cooler toward us. Our idyllic stay in Aucre had come to a crashing end. We had planned to stay for a few more days, but some of the joy had gone out of it, displaced by our ignorance and fear.
When Paiakan announced that the plane was coming in to take him and Irekran and their children out of Aucre, we decided to leave too. This had been an experience of a lifetime, a step back thousands of years in time to the way humans have lived for most of our existence. We had reached across that huge chasm in friendship and had been accepted in return, yet the eclipse had brought each side back to the reality of how differently we perceive the world.
We had to lighten our packs for the plane and gave away T-shirts, flashlights, fishing gear, knives, whatever we felt would be useful. A young man who had hung around me on our fishing trips shyly gave me a feather necklace he had made. As we left, I didn't know whether the ritual weeping was just for Paiakan and Irekran or whether the Kaiapo also liked us and were wishing us the best.
Severn and Sarika didn't want to leave. It had been an enchanted experience for them, and they wanted to stay the full shot. But once again we were airborne, leaving Aucre and passing over that immense expanse of green.
After forty minutes, we passed a brilliant slash of red through the forest—it was a placer gold mine, and the destruction of the river was unbelievable. The water looked a foamy cream color. Soon we began to see smoke, at first small wisps here and there and then large plumes that blocked the sun—this part of the forest, home to the Kaiapo, was on fire. Sev, especially, became very agitated to realize her friends' habitat was being destroyed.
We stayed overnight in a motel in Redenção. In Aucre, money meant nothing. There, life depended on the skills and knowledge of the people, and the forest and rivers were abundant and generous. Suddenly we were thrown into a world where money was everything. After the mud hut and the Kaiapo children underfoot and the swimming and fishing, even this small town seemed noisy, polluted, and inhospitable. After a sad farewell to Paiakan and his family—who knew when we would see each other again?—we caught a plane to Cuiaba for a short visit to the Pantanal, a wetland fabled for its birds and crocodiles.
As we flew out of Redenção, Sarika complained that her eye was sore. It was red and bloodshot, and within minutes, a thick, milky mucus began to pour out of it. It was terrifying to watch the speed with which this infection developed. By the time we arrived in São Paulo, en route to Cuiaba, her eyelid was swollen shut. We rushed to a drugstore in the airport, where the pharmacist looked at her. I had expected him to jump back and shout, “Oh, my god!” or something equally dramatic, but he indicated it was a common problem and calmly handed us a tube of medicine. I was dubious, but we squeezed the medication into her eye, and within minutes the swelling began to decrease. In a few hours, her eye was free of infection.
While we were waiting for Sarika's eye to subside, Miles began to mock me about the parasites I had pulled out of my feet. How many had I had? Why had I worn sandals? He heaped scorn on me because I should have taken better care of myself. “Do you mean you didn't get any?” I asked. “You don't have any sore spots?”
“Of course not . . . ” he responded, then stopped in midsentence. He plunked himself down on a sofa, tore off his shoe and sock, then saw the volcano between his toes. “Take it out, take it out!” he wailed. I could only laugh at this brave Haida warrior.
PAIAKAN BECAME A GLOBAL hero for his battle to protect his home. He was honored and feted in Europe and the United States. In 1990 he was elected to the United Nations Environment Program's Global 500 list of world environmentalists and, along with former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, received a prize from the Society for a Better World. I flew to New York to celebrate the award with him.
In 1992, an Earth Summit drawing participants from around the world was to be held in Rio de Janeiro in June, and as the date approached, we prepared to return to Brazil. Paiakan's renown had grown, and despite being a thorn in the side of those who would develop the Amazon, he was expected to play a central role at the summit. I heard the Tibetan religious leader the Dalai Lama had asked to share the stage with him.
We arrived in Rio and settled into an apartment on the Condado, just north of Ipanema. The night before the summit, Tara went out for groceries, only to see Paiakan's face on the cover of a national magazine with the words “O Savagem”—“the Savage!”—printed across his image. Paiakan was accused of picking up seventeen-year-old Letiçia Ferreira in a car on the way to a picnic near Redenção and of attacking and raping her with Irekran's assistance and in the presence of their children. The sensational charges, described as “facts” in the most lurid language in the Brazilian news magazine, were announced by the young woman's uncle, the mayor of Redenção, who had campaigned on a virulent anti-Indian platform. Paiakan and his family had retreated to the safety of Aucre.
The whole thing stank to high heaven, but as a tactic to keep Paiakan out of the limelight, it worked brilliantly. At meetings of non-government organizations (NGO) at the Hotel Gloria during the summit, Paul Watson and I shook our heads as one by one the spokespeople for environmental organizations distanced themselves from Paiakan.
In 1994, Paiakan was acquitted in absentia for lack of evidence. But years later, the charges were reinstated. I have pressed Brazilian lawyer Frank Melli, who is a staunch supporter of Paiakan's, to see whether Paiakan can be granted a pardon now that more than thirteen years have passed. He has been silenced far more effectively than if, like Chico Mendes, he had been martyred by assassination. In the meantime, we have set up a trust that will enable Paiakan's children, as is his wish, to go on to university so that they can be educated and work for their people if that is their goal.
When we had visited Paiakan in 1989, he mused that in Canada we pay our scholars and experts to teach at universities and pass on their knowledge to young people. “Our elders are our professors,” he said, and told me he would like to have a Kaiapo university where elders could teach young people how to live in the forest. He wanted to show the forest could be valuable left standing. He wanted, for example, to establish a research station in a pristine area to which scientists would pay to come from the outside world; they would hire Kaiapo cooks and assistants, and they would both teach and learn from the Kaiapo.
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Tara and I thought it was a great idea, and with the help of Barbara Zimmerman, the Toronto-born herpetologist who had worked in the Amazon for years and invited us to the Manaus research station, we began to set it up. To pay for it, we organized small, exclusive tours to Aucre and its fledgling station fifteen miles upriver, starting in 1990. People could experience a traditional Indian community and a tropical rain forest. Barb is a remarkable woman and scientist, the only person we could imagine who could pull off this research station project in so remote a place. She handled the Brazilian end of the visits, and Tara looked after the complex arrangements at home.
Severn with Iremaõ, Paiakan's son, at the Pinkaiti research station
Using the money brought in by these tours, the first scientific research station in the eastern lower half of the Amazon watershed was successfully established. After the David Suzuki Foundation was born, we transferred the project to the foundation. But it was a huge drain on Tara's time and energy, and when Conservation International, a well-funded American environmental organization that works to protect wilderness, offered to take charge of the project, we were happy to hand it over.
IN 2001, SEVERN RECEIVED a research grant from Yale University, where she was a junior, to study a species of tree in the Amazon rain forest in that same research station her mom and I had helped get going, now called Projeto Pinkaiti. With the funding of Conservation International and under the supervision of Barbara Zimmerman, the station was flourishing, with a steady stream of scientists and students from Europe and North America.