Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The Haunted Forest
Precisely one year after the controversy around the expedition, I heard
that the concealed people had been contacted. Through messages pieced
together over radios and cell-phones and Facebook, the Totobiegosode
leaders told me to pack my bags. They wanted me to come. I wasn't sure
why.
I pressed for details but there were no clear answers. Something had
happened and no one seemed to know what. As when I first heard about
the Areguede'urasade coming out, I stumbled around in a daze with
ghostly visions of the Chaco always in my sight. I could barely sleep.
When I did, I had terrible dreams of blood and dust and flies, and I woke
covered in sweat. Was I really willing to return to a scene I had barely
survived the first time? What could motivate such a trip? Given this ter-
rible knowledge, could my presence be justified at all? As I began to sort
through such questions, the story itself dissolved.
One person said that twelve naked Indians had been caught on a ranch
near Chovoreca. Another said that a group had run away from the bull-
dozers working by Cerro León and laid down their spears, despondent, at
the feet of a rancher. Someone surmised the NGO director had captured
the Totobiegosode band. I heard the government sent a delegation. They
returned two days late, having found nothing but the strange rectangular
tracks of
parode
sandals and stories of naked brown bodies glimpsed at
dusk. Within a week, everyone had dropped it completely.
The image never entirely dissipated, of course, not ever, not for any
of us. In that land of linear pastures and bulldozers that never stop,
concealed life presses against the senses. It carries the force of crisis and
spirit wronged, its contents never safely subsumed within its sign. It is
no coincidence that the increasingly fervent investment in the reality
of isolated life coincides with the amplified dehumanization of actual
Ayoreo-speaking people; the subhuman
Puye
and the
uruso
madmen find
their mirror images in the flash of brown skin glimpsed at dusk. And so
the Savages return to the forests from whence they emerged, where they
wait and watch and will not forgive.
Yet the forest bands cannot be entirely subsumed into these images of
them, at least not yet. One century after Ishi—the Yahi tribesman who
gained notoriety as the “last wild Indian in North America”—stumbled
into a California corral, the concealed Totobiegosode are facing a similar
dilemma. This crisis is only intensified by the sedimented weight and
