Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Totobiegosode and not
Cojñone
living in Arocojnadi. “They should not
be bothered,” said Jochade. And that was that.
For those who had profited so much from the 2004 subjection of the
Areguede'urasade, however, another contact was a more enticing pros-
pect. It meant another opportunity to consolidate authority by manag-
ing the flashflood of resources into the village. Once every couple of days
in Chaidi, someone sitting around the evening fire would mention that
he or she was thinking about the Jotaine'urasade. Others would chime
in. Surely they are in such and such a place. Surely they are doing this or
that. Surely they are scared. Surely they are close. Then someone would
say, I really want them to arrive. They could stop running away. They
could learn the Word of God. We should go find them and bring them
back. Where did you say they were? We could be there soon
.
In my stubbornness, I often tried to argue in favor of leaving them
alone. Such tentative statements were usually ignored. Finally, Dejai had
enough and one evening he turned to me with a steady stare. “Lucas,
don't you want to see them too?” I did not respond. With a mocking
laugh, he asked, “Wouldn't you like to come and take their pictures?” The
others began to taunt me about my prior filmmaking and my concern for
the Areguede'urasade. “When the Jotaine'urasade come out, won't you
travel from your country to film them too?”
It seemed the concealed people elicited a sense of urgency in us all,
but in profoundly ambiguous and different ways that I could never quite
comprehend. Why indeed
was
I so concerned about their fate and why in
that particular way? Alternately, what did they mean to their Totobiegos-
ode relatives? Surely they were not only an avenue for status and power.
Did they interrupt the new moral self, did they keep
Erami
and its spirits
alive, did they reopen and salt the wounds of contact? Or did they make
us all revisit past decisions and force us to acknowledge they were not as
inexorable and as innocent as they once seemed?
In many ways, the forest bands had already become spirits. Once every
two or three months, a story would arrive over the two-way radio that
they had been murdered by a rancher. Their bodies buried in a pit, their
camp dynamited by an airplane, their water source poisoned. An oil pros-
pector found the corpses of six naked savages lined up head to toe under
a tree in Bolivia. A Paraguayan peon confessed that his boss drove him
to a massacre site and made him stack the bodies of ten savages in a pile
and burn them and he could not forget the smell.
Totobiegosode in both communities took these rumors hard. Three
times, I heard women sing the sobbing song of death for their relatives
after hearing such news. Another time we made a trip to a place where
