Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
for scraps of metal and plastic. They carry a piece of granite from Cerro
León to sharpen the metal.
We know they tell
adode
myths and heal one another by sucking out
or blowing away sickness with
ujñarone
curing chants. They smoke
sidi
tobacco and
canirojnai
roots to conjure visions of the future before their
eyes. When necessary, they ask the spirits for help with
chugu'iji
perfor-
mances of rage and with the wordless rhythms of the
perane
. They beat
on hollow trunks of the
Cukoi
tree to call rain. They carve
tunucujnane
poles with magical designs and leave them as protection in their wake.
They sing the same songs as their relatives in Chaidi and Arocojnadi.
They are also convinced that death is coming for them, that their world
is nearing its end.
Although there is much we do not know, it is clear that this long
concealment is no primitive idyll. It is a way of life finely attuned to the
daily logistics of concealment from the beings they believe are hunting
them down. Their cosmology is partially a response to global political
economies; it is a worldview already indistinguishable from the prag-
matics of eluding starvation, capture, and death in the face of industrial
agribusiness. This is the only kind of primitive society, the only kind of
primitive life, that we have permitted to survive anywhere on the face of
this earth and even so probably not for much longer. That these small
groups of holdouts have been able to endure this long is a testament to
their extreme resourcefulness and resolve.
They have managed to achieve a tenuous coexistence despite a perma-
nent state of alarm. Faced with tragic and deteriorating prospects, they
still properly care for their children, their sick, their dying, their elderly.
When Areguede could no longer walk fast enough to keep up the group,
Siquei carried him in a large bag on his back. Those in the forest, we can
presume, do the same. They do not violate the
puyaque
restrictions, and
each year they ritually create the world anew. Although they know they
cannot escape invasion, war, famine, and intolerance, this has not been
enough to make them surrender their compassion, their protagonism,
their piety. The end of their world has not forced them to violate the es-
sence of what makes them Ayoreode, Human Beings.
As for the rest of us? It is much less certain what the unfolding tragedy in
the Chaco implies about our humanity. What have we surrendered to the
feeble magic of isolation and to the allure of the vanishing? What price
are we willing to pay for our cheap and unwitting denials, for brightly
colored photographs?
