Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
to pass out from time to time before continuing his journey. That was the
kind of man Aasi was.
He and I spent much time together in the twilight of his life. I like to
think we were close. In our conversations, he always framed contact in
a series of implicit and enigmatic contrasts. “We were happy when they
captured us, because we no longer were happy in the forest, there were
not many of us left.” Or, “Life in the forest was very difficult. It was hard
to hunt in the rain. We suffered from hunger and thirst.” Or, “Before we
were always scared.” Or, “Now, I am happy, I live in peace.” Or, “I am
not a child who fears death.” I could not share the logic but I became
convinced such statements were sincere. However, what I could never
understand was the unsettling fact that Totobiegosode seemed willing or
even eager to participate in the pursuit of forest bands so soon after their
own traumatic captures.
Jochade had helped to hunt down his brother, Aasi, and the others.
And Aasi stated on the cassette returned to the
indigenista
commission in
1987 that “if they organize a trip to search for the other Totobiegosode,
I am going to participate as well because I have relatives in the forest: a
brother, a daughter and others.”
8
During my fieldwork, this was a typical
attitude rather than an exceptional one. More than one of the former
Areguede'urasade said they too were in favor of tracking down and cap-
turing the band of their relatives who remained in the forest.
Were they lying to appease the missionaries? Was life in the forest ac-
tually so hard? Was this ethnocide speaking? None of these explanations
seemed entirely plausible. Yet I could not come up with anything better.
The only way I could even begin to imagine how this desire to track down
and capture relatives springs so quickly from starvation and sickness and
ridicule and death was if the pursuit of the forest bands was never a hunt
for the human at all but a reaction to the breakdown of knowledge and
being through colonial violence, a doomed effort to transgress savagery
by creating it and conquering it anew, to terrify terror into going away,
to domesticate the wildness of death. Yet this formulation raised more
questions than it answered. How did the murderous hunt for the uncon-
tacted appear as the profane dissolution of human society and the script
for its salvation at the same time? If human hunts created ethnocide and
a fetishized image of it, where did the ongoing pursuit of the wild man
lead us all?
The images of Ayoreo alterity cocreated on evangelical missions were
the logical starting point for backtracking this peculiar and nonsensical
drive to hunt forest Indians and by their violent subjection to care for
