Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The forest bands also spent long hours observing the
Cojñone
. They en-
tered unoccupied ranch houses in search of clothing and metal:
We hid for a long time behind a cukoi tree, watching. I said to Jutaine, there is no one
there, it is an empty house. There were only sheep there. We went into the houses.
I picked up something there. I picked up some things but it was very dark inside. I
touched something there and it felt like the intestines of an anteater. chicoi picked
up another. It was big but there was nothing inside. Around the house we found
glass bottles. Very big . . . one of the sheep came into the house. I did not want to kill
it because I wanted to kill a
Cojñoi
. I said to chicoi, “let's go, there is nothing here.”
I shot a sheep with an arrow and it cried a lot. Jutaine shot another. We climbed on
top of some vehicles. chicoi found black clothes in one and gave it to us. We took the
thing we know is a bucket and some wire. We tore some of the clothing. We found a
tarp and we took it. We called it parojnai. It was very dark but we walked back to our
camp. When we arrived to the women we told them of our trip and divided every-
thing up.
Such stories mock the conceits of the “uncontacted” and “isolation.” Be-
lying the stereotypical primitive aped in earlier descriptions, the percep-
tions of the forest bands were not determined by a cyclical time of myth
but by their relationship with global political economies.
Siquei told me his people began to imagine that new kinds of evil
spirits were persecuting them. Among the most fearsome were those he
called the
Cojñoque chaguide
, or ravenous Strangers. These giant blue-eyed
beings consumed nature and society. They were said to be responsible for
the neatly cut stumps of
quebracho colorado
trees often encountered in the
forest and they had an insatiable hunger for Totobiegosode flesh.6
6
Often, the Areguede'urasade were forced to camp in the ten- or twenty-
meter-wide margins of brush and shade left around vast empty pastures.
They told me of their sadness when they returned to find favored places
flattened, burned, bared to the sun. Such places, they said, were dead.
More than anything else, they remembered running from the people and
machines they thought were trying to kill them. As Siquei put it,
We were afraid of the Guidaigosode [an enemy Ayoreo group], we were afraid of the
Cojñone
. They had killed many of our people before. We were afraid that they would
do the same thing again. We were afraid of the noise of the vehicles, of the bulldozers
that moved us out of our land. . . . We didn't know if the war with the Guidaigosode
was over. We didn't know that any Ayoreo were left; we didn't know if the
Cojñone
had killed them all.
