Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
at daybreak, Poaji disappeared. As far as anyone knows, he is still hiding
alone in the forest.
The terror was so pervasive that the
uitaque
seers began to have vi-
sions of group death, a prophecy with historical precedents among
Ayoreo-speaking people. Ethnographers who visited the Guidaigosode
and Garaigosode-Ayoreo groups shortly after first contact in the 1960s
noted “a collective delirium of the end of a world by a group massacre”
7
and “a great fear of the civilized . . . they expected at any moment to be
attacked by some fantastic machine.”
8
Such fears only intensified among
those Totobiegosode groups who remained in the forest, as the death
of their world was evoked in images of endless night without fires, chil-
dren who could not speak, a warrior's club that could not be lifted, and
crushed and dead lands.
“There were shamans who knew our land would be destroyed,” I was
told by Jochade, a leader of the Totobiegosode band captured in 1979.
“One shaman had a dream. He only saw darkness in the forest, because
there was not a single fire. He knew that the land would disappear. It
is like today, the lands of Uejnai and Manenaquide, they are gone, fin-
ished.” His brother Aasi added, “The spirit
Pujopie
spoke to him and told
him to wake up and sing his vision. Eotedaquide woke up and told his
wife Gapuome'dacode what he had seen when he was sleeping. He said,
“Do not believe that we are still Humans. The day will come when we will
all disappear and the world will disappear too.” That is what Eotedaquide
said to his wife long ago, that we will all die.” Jochade agreed. “Many
places have died. When there are no Ayoreo living there, the land dies.
The
Daijnai
said one day we will all disappear. The world will be dark
without any children to light a fire.”
Totobiegosode living in concealment in the rapidly dwindling forest
of northern Paraguay concluded that there was little hope for survival.
“Before we said to one another, it appears that we will all be killed,” my
adopted father Yoteuoi recounted. “We thought that other Ayoreo or
the
Cojñone
would kill us all. That is what we thought would happen.”
Genocidal violence and ecological devastation reverberated in bodies and
psyches. These dynamics inverted the existential conditions of precon-
tact concealment and transformed the forest into a space of imminent
death.
