Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
isolation and the profoundly ambiguous Ayoreo sensibilities about the
concealed groups.
To be sure, they were a matter of daily concern. Rumors about the
forest people blew through the Ayoreo settlements like dust. They were
cornered on this ranch or seen over there or shot at near here. “How
much money,” the leader of a Guidaigosode settlement once asked me,
“do you think the NGO would pay if we captured them? Enough for a
pickup?” Someone found their tracks and tried to follow. A man heard
them whispering at dawn, invisible in the brush near his garden. They
must have taken that lost bag of seeds or that one red shirt. They must be
close, they must be coming back. People waited for them, but each time
they slipped away.
The first time Ayoreo asked me to organize and lead an Indian hunt,
I thought it was a joke. It was the summer of 2005 and I had stopped
by for a short visit to my old Direquednejnaigosode friends in the ur-
ban camp on the outskirts of Santa Cruz, Bolivia. We sat in front of my
adopted family's mud hut near the entrance, and anyone interested
came over to talk. Two dozen people soon formed an irregular circle of
makeshift chairs. Everyone knew I had spent time in Paraguay with the
Areguede'urasade, and they were full of questions: how did they hunt?
How did they look? Did they speak an archaic form of Ayoreo? Were they
truly wild and mean? Were there others still in the forest?
Night fell too soon, music blared, and my hosts urged me to leave be-
fore several young men grew drunk and dangerous. As I made the round
of handshaking, a strong-boned man in his early fifties named Beruide
gripped my hand hard and stood up.
“Lucas,” he began in a formal mode of address. “Take this.” He reached
up and hung a small wooden
potá
whistle around my neck.
“It is good that you are working with those Totobiegosode in Para-
guay. They are bad and ignorant. They fear
Asojná
and they worship
Satan.” The group murmured assent.
“I am going to tell you my
ayipie
. I do not know what you think but
I will say what I think anyways. Here it goes. I remember when we con-
tacted Ichajnui in 1977 and it was good. I want you to get a project. I will
help you and we will hunt down and capture those mean Totobiegosode
in the forest. You will be the leader and I will be paid.”
The gathered people looked at me expectantly. I did not know what
to say. I tried to avoid a direct answer in the Ayoreo manner, but it came
out poorly. When I departed, no one looked me in the eye.
Similar scenes were repeated on three other occasions, like the time
when Bill Pencille's former slave boy, then a sixty-year-old man, sought
