Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
predictability but its instability. Wild man hunts promised to restore a
functional and redemptive order even as they invariably amplified a dys-
functional and profane disorder, left as they were in the feeble hands of
mortal men. The appeal of the Indian hunt derived from contradictory
meanings, half-truths, interrupted images, the constant play of opposites
from which new images of difference rushed out in all directions.
What are we to make, then, of the fact that Indian hunts were also a
central ritual of the civilizing project more generally? By the time that
Aasi and the others were captured, Indian hunting was a long-standing
tradition. Paraguay only outlawed “hunting and selling Indian children”
in 1957 as a response to the whole-scale traffic in Indians, especially of
the small pale-skinned Aché, commonly known as Guayaki. German an-
thropologist Mark Munzel lived at the “National Guayaki Colony” in
1971-72. He described the official overseeing the colony, Manuel De Je-
sus Pereira, as a former Indian hunter who ruled the national reserve like
a slave colony, selling Indians or giving them away, raping the girls and
young women at whim or offering them to visitors, beating Indians to
death, shooting them for sport, punishing them by placing them in crude
stocks or the
tronco
, starving them to death.
54
There were five girls between the ages of six and twelve in the group.
De Jesus Pereira kept four of them in his house at night. He continued to
hunt down, capture, and sell groups of forest Aché well into the 1960s.
These hunts usually involved fatalities, the female children were sold or
given away, and the captured women were customarily taken from their
husbands and turned over as rewards to the small group of Aché “hunt-
ers” who had carried out the slave raids with Jesus Pereira. “The Aches
are being convinced that it is a shame to be an Ache,” wrote Munzel in
1973. “The only way to escape from this shame is to become a hunter of
Indians like Jesus Pereira.”
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In 1972, “Papa Pereira” was arrested due to
international pressure. His replacement? New Tribes missionaries.
Slave trading and soul collecting were fused through the institution
of the Indian hunt. Moreover, at times the Indian hunt also blurred into
the ethnographic search for blood and tradition. Jehan Albert Vellard, a
prominent French ethnologist and founder of the French Institute for
Andean Studies, wanted to collect physical samples of supposedly archaic
Indians like the Aché and Ayoreo. To collect such samples, however, he
had to literally collect Indians. “True manhunting,” he wrote, “was the
only way of meeting them.” In the name of science, he sponsored a 1933
Indian hunt. Dr. Vellard and his group of local Indian hunters tracked
down a band of forest Aché and charged into their camp. In the chaos,
his men shot one Indian and captured a child, later taken by his men.
