That land is their land
Andro Linkiater
DIE IF YOU MUST by John Hemming Macmillan, ,f30, pp. 855, ISBN 1405000953 In1961 the anthropologist Richard Mason was exploring a river in southern Amazonia when he was ambushed by a hitherto unknown tribe of Indians, later identified as the Panard. His body was found transfixed by eight arrows, with the skull and thigh smashed by heavy clubs. More than 30 years later, his friend John Hemming, the author of this extraordinary, encyclopaedic chronicle of encoun
ters between Brazilian Indians and the outside world, went back to meet elderly members of the tribe, and learned that the Parma, alerted to Mason's presence by the 'swish-swish' of his jeans as he walked down the jungle path, killed him because he was a stranger.
The most remarkable aspect of this story comes when Hemming's Panard informant explains apologetically that at that time their word for 'stranger' was the same as that for 'enemy'. 'We did not know that there were good white men and bad white men.' Following Mason's death, the tribe had been uprooted from their traditional dwelling-place, lost half their number to disease, seen the jungle destroyed to make soya fields, experienced their culture being battered by radio and television — all by white men good and bad alike. By rights, the Parma, like the roughly 200 other Indian groups so far discovered in Brazil, and the estimated 40 as yet undiscovered, had every reason for continuing to identify strangers as enemies. The best-intentioned carried germs — of disease, culture and modernity — as cataclysmic in effect as the ruthless greed of miners, ranchers and timber companies.
That the Indians have learned to make a distinction, and with good reason, is testimony to their astonishing resilience, and to the heroic dedication of some anthropologists and field-workers. Thus from the dense detail of Hemming's history emerges, quite unexpectedly to those accustomed to headlines of near-genocidal destruction, a strangely optimistic lesson, not just for the Indians but for the global juggernaut of Western civilisation.
The book's title comes from the instruction given in 1910 by Candid° RondOn, first head of the Indian Protection Service (SF!), the department set up by the Brazilian government to deal with the country's indigenous peoples. 'Die if you must,' he instructed those going to meet the Indians, 'but never kill.' The SPI was created because the three great R's of Brazilian modernisation — rubber, roads and railways — were penetrating deeper into Indian land. Motivated by Auguste Comte's Positivist philosophy, its workers were to lead the Indians from hunting to farming, to trading and the modern world — and not so incidentally to enable roadbuilders and rubber-tappers to operate peacefully.
When SPI workers came across the hostile Xokleng in 1914, they won their trust with gifts of knives and clothes, persuaded them to lay down their arms, learned their language and soon were living among them. Within 20 years, the 400 strong tribe had lost two-thirds of its population to disease, and all but a pocket of their traditional lands to an agricultural consortium with whom they were persuaded to sign a pact. And this was the most benevolent approach. Throw in Brazil's military dictators, keen to reward cronies with cheap land, ranchers anxious to supply burger bars with beef, miners digging for gold, missionaries searching for souls, and it is easy to see why in 1967 the travel writer, Norman Lewis, forecast that not a single Indian tribe would be left by 1980.
The response to his and others' protests included the foundation of non-governmental organisations like Survival International, and the involvement of celebrities like Sting in the campaign of the Yanomami to retain their land. But Hemming makes clear that the chief contribution to the Indians' cause has come from within Brazil, from anthropologists emphasising the need for non-intervention, from the more tolerant approach of a church influenced by liberationist theology, and most of all from the Indians themselves who have learned to use the weapons of the modern world to defend their way of life.
Hemming makes much of Xingu warriors in war-paint demonstrating for the television cameras against landgrabbing ranchers, and of leaders like the congressman Mario Juruna using his vote-gathering power to pass laws protecting Indian land-rights, but perhaps the most potent weapons of all were the surveyors' GPS systems and laser theodolites, which enabled Indian tribes to delineate the boundaries of their lands with an authority that Brazilian law-courts had to recognise.
It is the incomers' hunger for their land that has led to the near-extermination not only of Brazilian Indians, but of native peoples around the world. Consequently the key to their survival is the guarantee that they own the land they occupy. And in the final pages of this magnificent book is the proof: from nothing the Indians now possess an area greater than France and Germany combined, and from near extinction the population has returned to the level before Rondon issued his famous order.
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