Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
numbing familiarity of the stories we think we know, the sense of an
inevitable end foreclosing their futures as surely as the bulldozers.
Like the last Yahi, the forest people have retreated into a life of strenu-
ously maintained concealment. The words once written about the Yahi
in the 1870s can easily be applied to these Ayoreo today:
no human eye ever beholds them, except now and then some lonely hunter, perhaps,
prowling and crouching for days over the . . . scraggy forests which they inhabit. Just
at nightfall he may catch a glimpse of a faint camp-fire, with figures flitting about it;
but before he can creep within rifle range of it the figures have disappeared, the flame
wastes slowly out, and he arrives only to find that the objects of his search have indeed
been there before him, but are gone. . . . for days and weeks together they never touch
the earth. . . . They never leave a broken twig or a disturbed leaf behind them.
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We know this concealment is unprecedented in Ayoreo history. And
we know that this concealment is due to their keen awareness of the be-
ings that they carefully observe and that surround them more completely
every passing season. Years have gone by with only the slightest traces
of their presence: a glimpse of bare skin by a park ranger, a twig snap-
ping at dusk, a half-hidden track of their
parode
sandals, a scrap of ash or
bone.
We know they go to great lengths to conceal their existence from out-
siders, waiting hours to cross a road, wiping out their tracks, hiding their
fires. We know that they have developed a way to speak with whistles,
that even their children are trained to silence. They read the tracks of
bicycles and trucks and puzzle over the incredible speed and energy of
their
Cojñone
enemies. They run far and fast if they see a bootprint out
of place or unexpectedly hear a chainsaw or a tractor. Encounters with
bulldozers are catastrophic events, putting the entire group at risk of
death from starvation or thirst, each more devastating than the last. They
often do not know where they can go or what they can do to escape. We
know these people are often enraged and saddened at what they con-
sider an invasion of their ancestral territory, but they rarely wish to risk
a confrontation.
Still, they collect the aromatic wild honey and stalk the sharp-tusked
peccaries and gather the ancient land tortoises. They bake the starchy
roots of the
doidie
in ashes and eat the sweet fruits of
tokode
cacti and the
esode
trees. They make all of their clothing and bags from the leaf fibers of
the
dajudie
plant. They meticulously craft bows and spears from
kaunange
and
aidie
hardwoods. They scavenge the roadsides or empty ranch houses
