Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
in a great arc across the Bolivia-Paraguay borderlands around Echoi. The
second is a Totobiegosode band led by Jotaine of the Picanerai clan, Jotai's
father. In many ways, this band of eighteen people is a mirror image of the
Areguede'urasade. They lived together as a single group until 2001. They
are closely related. Among this small band are the Areguede'urasade's sib-
lings and parents. The Jotaine'urasade also include children once imag-
ined as future spouses of the children of the Areguede'urasade, to whom
they were carefully matched by age, gender, and clan. As Siquei and the oth-
ers once had, they pursue a life of nomadic concealment. They have struc-
tured their lives around the daily logistics of eluding starvation and death
from the beings they think are pursuing them. Like the Areguede'urasade,
they are keenly aware of the invaders pressing in from all directions.
This begs the question: how do we make sense of these concealed people
and their remarkable way of life? And how have our interpretations of
their lives become inseparable from the fate that awaits them?
The Expedition
In November 2010, international attention was briefly focused on their
plight. This attention took the form of a controversy over a scientific
expedition to the northern Gran Chaco proposed by the London Natural
History Museum. The expedition was to be comprised of sixty ecologists,
biologists, and other experts on nature, and its aim was to document the
biodiversity of the Chaco forest, a region described in a British newspaper
article as “one of the most inhospitable, impenetrable and mysterious
places on Earth.”
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The expedition would have been the first to quantify
the biodiversity of this understudied area.
The British expedition was harshly denounced by Iniciativa Amotoc-
odie, an NGO self-described as the “Isolated Peoples Protection Group”
that claimed to be the legal representative of all the concealed Ayoreo-
speaking groups in the area. The Cambridge-educated director of this
NGO declared that the expedition was equivalent to an act of genocide
against the so-called isolated Ayoreo. As he put it during a November 9,
2010, interview on BBC Radio 4, “It would be tantamount to genocide if
an involuntary contact actually occurred, which would mean that there
could be fatal consequences on both sides and the life-model of these
people would break down, would collapse, and also the territory they be-
long to. This is tantamount to a genocide-like situation.” Shaken by such
accusations, government and museum officials suspended the expedition
less than a week later.
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